Field guide · 05

Software & settings

A small stack built around Blender and DaVinci Resolve, with the colour pipeline pinned down so nothing breaks moving between programs.

The core stack

• Blender 5+ is the main tool. We render with Cycles (its path-tracing renderer) for realism. It costs render time and computing power, but it is how you get photoreal results.
• DaVinci Resolve (Studio) for the edit, the grade, Fusion compositing and finishing.
• Compify, a compositing helper we used heavily for putting CG into plates.
• EmberGen for fast smoke and fire simulation.
• Topaz for upscaling, including bringing AI footage up to 4K.
• Photoshop and Affinity Photo for EXR post-processing and merging HDRIs.
• Cubase for scoring and audio.

Work procedurally where you can

We drove a lot of the look development with procedural geometry and textures, using organic algorithms such as slime-mould and fungal growth. It avoids slow UV-unwrapping and texturing, speeds up iteration, and lets you re-skin or re-roll an asset by changing a few settings rather than re-modelling it.

The colour pipeline

Get this sorted before anything else.

• Move frames between Blender and DaVinci as EXR, DWAA compression, half float. It is the best balance of file size and quality.
• Set the colour transforms explicitly: sRGB and linear on export, mapped to your timeline's colour space.
• ACES: Blender 5 added native ACES support in November 2025, but we found it fiddly. Test your round trip thoroughly before relying on it.
• Keeping colour data consistent across Blender, Compify and DaVinci was the hardest part of the round trip. Sort it out with tests before production, not during it.

Using Claude to debug Blender

You can export a geometry-nodes or shader node tree as JSON and give it to Claude (through the MCP add-on) as a second pair of eyes on an awkward setup. We found it a quick, useful way to debug node-based work.