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Quick Summary
A streamlined walkthrough of building a cinematic logo reveal in Blender using procedural curves, particle physics, and emission shaders. Learn how to wire physics-based emitters to custom paths, apply metallic and emission shading, and render to ACES-compliant EXR ready for Resolve.
Free, capable, and worth a few hours of your time
Blender keeps turning up in editor and colorist conversations for good reason. Blender is free, it runs on whatever machine you already own, and once you get past the initial learning curve, it holds its own against the more familiar paid tools for motion design and 3D work. For those of us who occasionally get asked to spin up a quick logo reveal or a piece of motion graphics on top of our regular post work, having a Blender toolkit ready can be the difference between saying yes to a project and turning it down.
In this Insight, I walk you through a follow-the-bouncing-ball overview of building a cinematic logo reveal from scratch. We will create reflective metal rings, wire particle systems to spiral paths, set up emission shaders that act as actual light sources, and render the whole thing out as an ACES-compliant EXR file ready for the final polish in Resolve. I am not going to explain every tool in depth. The goal is to demonstrate what is possible so you can adapt the workflow to your own client work.
Before you start: locating Blender’s built-in HDRIs
Blender ships with a set of high dynamic range image (HDRI) Studio Lights that show up in the Viewport Shading menu, but using them in a final render means knowing where they live on disk. Here are the paths for each operating system:
I keep a duplicate of the HDRI folder in my own Documents directory so I can grab the files quickly without digging through the application bundle every time.
“This isn’t meant to explain how to use Blender in depth. This is more of just a demonstration that you can follow along…and create your own cool logo reveal.”
Billy Causey, Colorist, Cinematographer
Key Takeaways
By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:
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