Need a quick screenshot of what your timeline is showing in DaVinci Resolve? The option is hiding in the File menu: here’s how to export the current frame as a still image, plus the classic Colour page Gallery method.
Resolve gives you three tools for smoother playback: timeline proxy resolution, optimized media, and proxy media. Here’s how they differ, where the files live, how relinking works — and the default settings that turned my 8 GB stream recording into a 500 GB proxy.
DaVinci Resolve’s Edit page can either move the playhead across a static timeline, or keep the playhead fixed while the timeline scrolls underneath it. Here’s where that toggle lives, and why your machines might disagree about it.
My ACES EXR renders from Unreal Engine looked correct in Resolve on Windows, but way too dark on the Mac – with identical project settings. The culprit turned out to be a macOS-only preference, and here’s how to fix it (plus a bonus gotcha about the D60 simulation Output Transform).
Decals let you project a flat image onto existing geometry without touching the underlying material. Here’s the full setup in UE5, why older UE4 tutorials mention options that no longer exist, and how to stop a decal bleeding onto neighbouring geometry.
A creative use of mip maps: blend your texture with a blurred mip of itself to soften pattern detail directly in the material graph – no Substance Painter round-trip, no colour matching, and it costs next to nothing.
Some static meshes render fine in the viewport but vanish in Movie Render Queue, thanks to a LOD0 Screen Size of zero. The Property Matrix can’t fix them in bulk, but a short Python script can. Here’s the one I use, with a dry-run mode.
A ten-minute Sequencer trick to make static crowd characters look alive: an additive FK Control Rig loop with asymmetric breathing timing, desynchronised per character — plus an accidental discovery about copy-pasting whole Control Rig tracks.
After reopening a large exterior project in UE 5.6, white blotches had appeared on the landscape and even on static meshes. The culprit: EasyRain’s world puddle overlay, driven by a Material Parameter Collection that nothing in the scene was initialising.
Coming from Premiere Pro, I wanted my familiar “apply default transition to everything” workflow in DaVinci Resolve. Here’s how it works — per edit on the Cut page (including the Speed Editor’s dedicated keys), and in bulk on the Edit page.
Setting a pivot offset is easy — until Unreal keeps selecting the object behind your new pivot position when you right-click. Here are three ways around it: clicking the actor’s viewport icon, temporarily hiding objects, and parenting to an empty actor.
How to add a Normal Strength parameter to a master material in Unreal Engine, so you can tone down, boost, or even invert a normal map per instance – no Substance Painter round-trip required.
From empty laptop to a synced, compiling, playtestable UEFN project in a morning — disk space, the 90% login stall, VS Code integration, Lore, the Verse build server, and keeping the machine cool while playtesting.
Narrative Pro has an Interactable_ItemPickup component that can be added to any object to turn it into a pickup. When the player interacts this way, we can add the object (or a representation thereof) into the player’s inventory and do all kinds of other stuff. Let me show you how to create one. We need …
Narrative Pro has an interaction system built-in, which is easy to use with base classes and can be extended to include conditional queries too. In this article I’ll show you how to set one up. For this example, let’s use an old TV set and start with a regular interaction: the player walks in range, …
A really quick and dirty fix to change the effect of roughness maps in Unreal Engine is to use a Multiply node in between the texture and the shader. Add to that a scalar parameter and we can make changes conveniently on the Material Instance. I’ve been using it for years, and while this works …
Unreal Engine’s material graph has an interesting node called Flatten Normal that lets us change how normal maps are interpreted. It can go directly between your normal texture map and the shader input. Add a scalar parameter to it and you can control it from a Material Instance. One slight snag is that 0 means …
When I render an EXR sequence in Unreal Engine using ACES, it looks OK in Premiere but way too dark in Resolve. That’s because Premiere sort of brute-forces an OKish look so we can work with the footage, although it’s not properly converted by default. Resolve handles this differently and doesn’t convert the footage at …
I’ve been using Unreal Engine since 2019, and since version 4.22 if memory serves me right. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact start date as it involved a lot of testing, but I hung in there and prevailed, and today it’s one of my favourite 3D apps of all time. I couldn’t do my job …
Sane animation apps typically have a layer system that lets us make non-destructive changes on top of a base motion. Unreal Engine 5 introduced this relatively late in its lifecycle with version 5.5, but it works well if you know how to use it. Let’s take a look at where to find it and how …
We can use sound clips for effects and music for our iClone projects, although it’s far from intuitive how to do this. You’d think we can import a WAV file, it would appear on the timeline and we’d move it where it needs to go, but that’s of course not how it works. That would …
Material Presets for complex objects like characters and clothing are called Material Plus files in iClone and Character Creator. They can describe several surfaces across several objects in your scene. Imagine the skin shader of a character and attached accessories at the same time, like glasses or hair. They’re not exactly intuitive to do though, …
Have you ever wondered how most 3D apps have an option to export FBX files with embedded textures, except for Blender? There’s usually a very obvious tick box that says something like “embed textures”. Granted the feature isn’t fantastic, because it can only reference the base colour and not a full set of PBR maps …
Matcaps are quick and easy visual previews that let us judge 3D objects without having to setup lights or materials. They’re essentially different ways to make your objects appear while you work on them. This can be helpful if you’re working on something that’s naturally more dull or shiny, darker or lighter, or reflective in …
I’ve discovered an interesting little add-on for Premiere that lets us change people’s facial expressions! Much like a 3D character in CC or Daz Studio, it offers sliders that can adjust the mouth shape, where the eyes look, where the face points and all kinds of other stuff. There’s a free trial version available here. …
I don’t deal with paths all that much in Blender, so I tend to forget the simple things. Case in point: how do we turn two loose ends of a bezier path into a continuos curve? Merge doesn’t work by default as it does with vertex objects (although I hear there’s an add-on for that, …
I ran into a small puzzle while importing Daz clothing into Character Creator using Transformer. The garment in question was a multi-part suit that consisted of a shirt, a vest, pants and a jacket. Although all were named correctly, Transformer displayed random names during import, and as such it was impossible for me to specify …
I remember changing my active highlight colour in Blender a while ago, and naturally can’t remember in which abyss of the menu madness this setting was buried. I did this because by default the highlighted and active object have a very similar shade of orange, making it nearly impossible for my dyslexic brain to see …
Cascadeur can create animation loops, but it’s far from intuitive. It’s also a destructive process, so save your projects before applying them. Here’s how to loop an animation using Interval Edit Mode. Select the first keyframe on the timeline, let’s assume this needs to become the seamless last frame of our animation. Switch into Point …
When exporting files from Blender for use in Unreal Engine via OBJ, we have to apply some settings for objects to behave correctly. These can be made either on export from Blender, or on Import to UE. Of course I forget how it works when I need it next, and despite the handsome presets I’ve …