Collaborate in Real-Time with DaVinci Resolve Studio

Unreal Engine 5: Real-Time Technical Direction & Virtual Production Technical Artist | Environment Designer | Virtual Production Specialist This showreel showcases my expertise in Unreal Engine 5, focusing on high-fidelity environment design and real-time cinematic workflows. Even with hardware constraints, I specialize in optimizing complex scenes for high-performance output—demonstrated here by running these advanced pipelines on a 2017 MacBook Pro. What I Bring to the Pipeline: Virtual Production: Expertise in real-time environment assembly, cinematic lighting, and camera sequencing. Optimization & Performance: Proven ability to achieve photorealistic results on portable hardware through refined technical workflows. Award-Winning Storytelling: Featuring my short film Eagle, an Official Selection at the Miami Art Tech Summit, developed in an intensive 24-hour production cycle. Technical Versatility: Skilled in integrating Niagara VFX, Blueprints, and advanced asset management for both narrative and commercial projects.

VFX studios charge thousands of dollars to erase a person from footage. I built the same thing locally, on a MacBook, for free. Professional background removal in video has always been locked behind expensive software, cloud subscriptions, or a render farm. Independent filmmakers, content creators, and small studios just don't have access to it. So I built EdgeFlow, a fully local clean plate video inpainting pipeline. It's not perfect rotoscoping. Complex edges like hair or motion blur still trip it up. But for clean, well-lit footage, it holds up surprisingly well. You give it a raw .mp4 with a person in frame. It gives you back a reconstructed background, as if they were never there. Three models run in sequence under the hood: SAM 2 (Meta) tracks the subject across every frame using a bounding box prompt. A bounding box works much better than a single point click here because SAM 2 tends to latch onto the smallest confident object at a click location, which is usually a shirt, not a full body. RAFT estimates optical flow between frames to understand how the scene is actually moving. ProPainter synthesises the missing background by warping real pixels from other frames and generating texture for regions that were never visible in any frame at all. The whole thing runs on Apple Silicon (M4 Pro, MPS backend). No cloud. No CUDA. No subscription. What made this hard was not the models. It was getting them to work together: - RAFT's normalisation bug inflated flow magnitudes by 127x. - SAM 2's mask decoder uses bicubic upsampling with no MPS kernel. One environment variable fixes it, but only if it is set before torch is imported. - ProPainter uses package-relative imports that only resolve from a specific working directory. The fix was running it as a subprocess. Honestly, research models running in isolation is the easy part. Getting them to work inside a single pipeline, with mismatched coordinate spaces, dtype expectations, and tight memory budgets, is where the real work is. This is what it looks like when CV research actually meets a creative workflow. And it runs on the laptop already on your desk. GitHub: https://lnkd.in/eae2uqcG #ComputerVision #MachineLearning #VFX #FilmTech #OpenSource #DeepLearning #AppleSilicon #VideoEditing #CleanPlate #VideoProduction

SparkFXPreviewer keeps getting better. I just shipped SparkFXPreviewer v1.8.1 for Unreal Engine 5 🎆 Here's a quick sizzle showing what's new — 3D transform  gizmo for placing VFX directly in the viewport, live  Niagara parameter editing, camera shake track, and  duplicate/reorder tracks for faster iteration. Built for VFX artists, designers, and technical artists who want to  preview, time, and author effects without ever entering  Play (Game Mode) Available on Fab for UE 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7. #UnrealEngine #VFX #GameDev #TechArt #UE5 #Fab

Heads-up to my fellow VFX artists and studios: I was recently approached by a company asking for full multi-pass VFX scene data, including RGB, mattes, depth, camera info, and tracking. Many of these assets are client-owned or under NDA, meaning sharing them would be illegal. While the request was framed as ‘research,’ it’s essentially asking for proprietary production data that studios and artists are contractually prohibited from giving. Always protect your work, your pipelines, and client IP. If a company asks for raw production data, verify ownership, NDAs, and legal implications before sharing anything.

The Great Debate: Real-Time vs. Traditional VFX Pipelines. The visual effects industry is undergoing one of its most significant shifts in decades. As real-time rendering engines continue to mature, the question isn't just about speed—it's about the evolution of the creative process itself. Traditional Rendering: Provides unparalleled control, sub-pixel accuracy, and the ability to handle massive data sets for complex simulations. It remains the gold standard for high-end cinematic photorealism. Real-Time Rendering: Is revolutionizing Virtual Production (LED volumes), previsualization, and iterative design. The ability to make creative decisions in-camera is a game-changer for directors and artists alike. Are we heading toward a future where 'offline' rendering is reserved for only the most niche tasks, or will a hybrid approach remain the industry standard for the foreseeable future? I’d love to hear from my fellow artists and supervisors—how has real-time tech changed your specific workflow this year? #VFX #VisualEffects #RealTime Rendering #VirtualProduction #TechTrends #FilmMaking #Innovation

Heads-up to my fellow VFX artists and studios: I was recently approached by a company asking for full multi-pass VFX scene data, including RGB, mattes, depth, camera info, and tracking. Many of these assets are client-owned or under NDA, meaning sharing them would be illegal. While the request was framed as ‘research,’ it’s essentially asking for proprietary production data that studios and artists are contractually prohibited from giving. Always protect your work, your pipelines, and client IP. If a company asks for raw production data, verify ownership, NDAs, and legal implications before sharing anything

Day 8 of learning DaVinci Resolve with Wabbithire 🚀 Green Screen Removal Using Fusion in DaVinci Resolve Recently worked on a compositing task using Fusion — and honestly, the experience was super smooth. I imported my clip into the Fusion page and used a simple node-based workflow. By pressing Shift + Spacebar, I added the Delta Keyer, selected the green background, and within seconds — the green screen was completely removed. Then I placed a background video behind it to complete the composition. ✨ What I learned: • Fusion makes compositing fast and precise • Node-based workflow gives better control than layer-based editing • Green screen editing is widely used in ads, films, and content creation This task helped me understand how powerful visual effects can be created with just a few nodes. #DaVinciResolve #Fusion #VideoEditing #Compositing #GreenScreen #VFX #LearningJourney

The coverage on DLSS5 is insane. You don’t have to turn it on, it is not enabled by default for studios, and it is an SDK that tech artists have full control using masking and post-processing options. Because the base matters so much more for the interpolation to dlss5 now you could make the argument that 3D artists will actually need *more* artistry than before not less.

DaVinci Resolve 21.0 is out in public beta. It's a huge update to the free color grading and video editing software, from the new Photo page for editing still images to this AI facial de-ageing system. Read CG Channel's pick of the key changes for VFX artists: https://lnkd.in/e3VbRWpM

“I actually never touched 3D software before starting at CGS… so I guess everything was a gap.” Zach Wall sat down with our Head of VFX, Daniel Hourigan, to talk about studying at CG Spectrum and what changed over time.    He talks about that shift happening in the details - when something technically works but still feels off, and learning how to diagnose why, then push it further.