Grass Color Grading

As a fan of Gleb Alexandrov and Creative Shrimp, I stumbled upon this amazing thing a while back.

A good challenge to rewatch this course and color grade a loop of grass. There were some plugins sitting in my collection that begged for more.

My landing page was rather motionless. A visual upgrade could be interesting. Animation tends to do really well as a background.

Grass

It had been a while. At first, lots of clicks went to reducing viewport lags. Some time was spent on looping the Ocean Modifier.

True-Sky 2. I used this one to create a simple atmosphere. Anything better than the default. Apparently, version 3 is in early access now. The future is looking good.

After refreshing the basics of scattering combined with this amazing sky generator, results came naturally. A feeling of bigness was inspired by increasing the field of view. Surprisingly, a slight bend seemed to appear in the horizon.

A basic wind system was added. Geo-Scatter does animation like a breeze.

One frame took 2.5 minutes to render. The total sequence counted 210 frames—enough to rewatch the freemium. Files were set to be exported as OpenEXR.

Color

Color in DaVinci Resolve is a completely different beast. Very technical, almost scientific. Luckily, Gleb's teaching is just spot-on.

The EXR data was turned into the first grass loop with the help of the Color Space Transform node. Color Curves were added to reduce exposure and improve the greens. The first loop was ready.

The animation was a bit too slow for my taste, the wind a bit too uniform. Hyperrealism wasn't the goal, but there was still room to make things look more interesting.

The camera and sky settings were looked at. Also, wind speed and size were changed.

The final sequence looked satisfactory. I enjoyed the contrast between the slowly moving grass and the quickly moving flowers.

This sets the foundation for further experimentation and color grading.

Stay tuned.