5 Super Useful Art & Animation Secrets in DaVinci Resolve - Fusion Motion Graphics Tutorial

today we're going to be learning a ton of little secrets little tips for animating and making art in Fusion while we make this super wholesome Log Cabin animation a this is chalk full of good stuff I know you're going to love it let's jump in all right we're starting out in the fusion page of Da Vinci resolve I'm going to go up to workspace and close our show page navigation to give us a little more room I'm also going to start with a background node just drag that in take the output and plug that into our media out that's going to give us a black screen and we're going to kind of mock this up a little bit the background is going to be like a sky so let's make it kind of a sky blue and then in front of that we're going to have some Green Hills and let's make that just by dragging another background and let's make it kind of this nice green take the output of this background and merge it over that background here let's rename things just so things aren't crazy green BG this will be blue BG and I'm going to add a mask to this green background plug that in and we'll just kind of do a Hilltop thing like this let's change this green to be a little nicer something like that and we're going to put put a house on top of this hill so I'll move our nodes over and go into my media pool and I have a cabin take this cabin and just drag this in here like this take the output and merge it over our merge one move this up and let's grab a transform node and put that here in between the media and the merge let's rename this media in one we'll call this cabin Mi for media in and on this transform we're going to resize this cabin and put it where we want so I don't know something like that looks nice there's our little cabin now we're going to want some clouds in the sky so I'm going to take this blue background to the left just because I want to put stuff in between the blue background and the green background cuz I want stuff to go behind this hill so it's in between the blue in the hill and we'll start with a white background just make this almost white call this whitecore BG merge that over like this and we're going to make a cloud with just a polygon mask so let's just I don't know make a little cloud like this happy little Cloud the happy little Cloud yeah here we go there's a nice Cloud we'll just put this like here and then we'll add a sun too this is just like back in the day like doing some fun pictures in school right kind of the same thing let's call this yellow background and we're going to mask this with an ellipse and now we have a sunshine look at this this is so easy you just make a background for the color you want and then put a mask on it and look at that we're drawing it's beautiful maybe we want this sun to be a little bit softer so we can take this ellipse and in the inspector just push up the soft Edge a little bit there's our Sunshine oh baby it looks great thanks so much for watching I hope you learned no I'm just kidding we'll do some more stuff so this has all been pretty basic stuff so far we're just drawing things placing things let's get uh let's get a little bit crazy first little secret let's say we want to make more of these clouds well there's a couple ways that we can do this and I don't know this may be two secrets in one this might be a bonus secret okay let's move this to the left a little bit one thing we can do if we want to duplicate something is we can just take a transform node and merge that over later in the line and take this same thing and just run that into the transform now I can take this transform and move this and we have a copy of the thing that we just drew and I can size this and position it and everything and that's a nice quick way to make a duplicate of something and I use this all the time just have the same kind of source this white background with the mask on it and then you can run it into 10 different Transformer nodes and just put those wherever you want that's really great here's another pretty cool trick I'll just get rid of this real quick there is a node called duplicate if you hit shift space bar and type dup that'll bring up the duplicate node and this is really cool this kind of does all of that all in one one little node by default there's two copies and if we just push this Center look at this we're essentially doing the same thing just all within one node we can resize it and do all that kind of stuff and that's just a quick way to duplicate something without having to make a bunch more nodes you just run it through the duplicate node so sweet right another thing that's cool is I could just reset this duplicate node and check this out this is cool if I want to duplicate things in a line or if I want to make like more than one copy of something you know I'll take the center like this and then I can just boost up the copies I could have four cop copies of this if I want to and I can change their Center and everything and I can kind of offset these in a line I can change the angle I can do all kinds of stuff with this I change the size and make each one smaller right so they kind of go back into the background just a super powerful tool but you can also kind of distribute things randomly so I'll just reset this again and maybe make like 10 copies okay but I'm going to leave the center and the pivot and everything all the same and I'm just going to go over to Jitter Jitter is like Randomness and so if I push this Center over it's going to add a random offset to these clouds let's just say like I don't know8 or something and then for y let's do8 also and now it's just going to kind of scatter clouds wherever it wants I could change some size Jitter like this and it's going to make them different sizes I could do angle Jitter kind of change their angles a little bit now we probably wouldn't want to do that for clouds but you could do that and then you can hit recede and it will just put clouds randomly wherever you want and that's a really nice way to just quickly add a bunch of something like that that looks pretty cool like there's all these clouds and all I did was just do this duplicate add a little bit of Jitter and hit receed a few times until I liked it such a quick trick to distribute a bunch of stuff all around and you can do a similar thing with particles and it's pretty much the same idea this is kind of just a little bit simpler way to do it and we'll come back to this here in a minute but yeah so now we have all of our clouds and that's put in our sky so cool let's say we want to animate this to where the sun goes down and this becomes nighttime there are a lot of ways to do that but I was thinking in my mind that's where I usually think I was thinking in my mind that we would have the sky kind of turn like the Earth you know and so let's try something like that and this kind of brings us to our next trick so instead of this Sky background being the exact same size as our composition I think what we're going to do is let's replace this with a clear background so let's just make a new background here and we'll turn the alpha all the way down if I hit one on the keyboard this is just a clear background that's set at 1920 x 1080 okay we'll rename this clear BG and I'm going to plug this into the background of this merge 4 and so everything we've done so far other than the clouds in the sky is over a clear background we're actually going to move the sun too but we can do that in a minute all of this we're going to actually put on a different size background so let's take this blue background and instead of making it 1920 x 1080 we're going to go in over to image and let's take this Auto resolution off and let's make this bigger let's make it like 3840 by 3840 okay just a lot bigger so it's a big Square now all right and now we're going to take this whole thing and we're going to merge it over that clear background the reason we're doing it this way instead of just plugging this into the background is because the very background of our composition that sets the frame size so 1920 x 1080 and so taking this and emerging over this clear background is going to put our Sky back in but it's not going to change the resolution if we were to just plug this into the background instead of our clear like this look what happens oh it goes crazy it's lost its dang mind so we don't really want to do that things get all confusing when you you do that so it's just easier just to connect this clear background as the background to kind of set our canvas size I guess at this point we don't really need to make this clear we could make it whatever color we want because we're going to cover it up with our sky so it doesn't really matter the reason I made this clear though is because we can turn this Alpha down like this and then we could take all of this you know and merge it over stuff later if we want to but we're going to kind of run into the same problem actually but that's kind of a quick tip is just how to make a clear background which you will need from time to time anyways doesn't really matter if this is clear we'll leave it clear won't hurt anything so now we have kind of like what we already had but check this out I can take this big Square remember this is what it looks like and I can use a transform node I'll just put this transform node in between our Square composition and this merge and if I rotate this with angle what happens I can rotate it and it's going to rotate those clouds what it's really doing is rotating this huge square and everything in it now this is a little secret that's just easy to not appreciate but what we're we're really doing here is we're grouping everything together for our sky and we're transforming all at once so if you have any experience with After Effects this is sort of like parenting things anything that you run through a transform is going to be transformed together just like you were to parent it to a null object or put it together as a pre-m or something like that you can move everything at once with a transform that is later in the flow so let's actually take our white background and let's resize this one too instead of Auto resolution let's do 3840 by 3840 that's going to mess with our sizing of our mask but that's okay we can either leave it like that which I think it looks okay or we can select this mask and we can just make a quick adjustment using the shape box just clicking right here or you can hit shift B to have this kind of transform box around your mask and then you can scale it and that kind of thing that's a nice quick way to fix that I can also redraw it it would be probably better to draw this just with the right size to begin with but you know what we're iterating and that's okay I also might not like the sizing and position and everything of these so let's just I can hold s and drag to scale these down let's just make those a little bit smaller now I can take this duplicate and maybe we'll add a few more let's make like 30 and we'll Reed this a few times until we get some good clouds in the background just kind of bring these all together again there we go there's some clouds and that looks nice so now we've sort of redone our background here but the point of that is to have this transform to where we can rotate this and on this side it's going to be daytime and then if we flip this 180 it's going to be nighttime so to mess with this a little bit let's actually just take this down touch move our clouds around a bit okay and now with our transform our axis is kind of down here so it's rotating from this axis being down and so we get a little bit more movement from side to side here when we rotate this so now if I want this to start in the daytime I can just key frame this angle on this transform we'll just call this uh day night XF for transform we'll key frame this angle we'll start at zero and then here at frame 60 or so we'll switch this to 180 so now we're rotating this over time and I think let's take our yellow sun I'll just hold shift and drag this out and we'll merge this over like that let's just go ahead and reset our size for our sun mask to add our lips like this drag it in and there's our sun I think I like it actually not soft like that I think that's kind of nice and because we're running this through the transform it already moves with the sky like this if you're enjoying all these little tidbits make sure you don't miss the fusion Survival Guide it's a free video course that goes over my Essential tips for working infusion that will make your life so much easier if you're into making Motion Graphics or ual effects there's a link to sign up right there there's also a link in the description totally free my gift to you let's keep going one thing I'll do to make things run a little bit quicker is for this polygon here this Cloud shape I'm going to right click here where it says right click for shape animation and just remove polygon to polyline what that's going to do is just get rid of the animation for our mask which is going to let resolve kind of think about this a little bit easier when you're animating a mask it has to think about it each frame and so if you remove any animation that you don't need things will run way faster okay so this flip lips all the way around and now let's design a nighttime part here and we can do that a lot of different ways but I think what we'll do is we'll just have this one part be day I'll hit shift spacebar and type UND D for underlay double click off of it hold down alt and select underlay and hit F2 to rename we'll call this a day and we'll make it like a yellow for sunshiny right let move it over here and then let's get a new color like a dark night sky kind of color let's do sort of like a dark purplish dark bluish thing we'll make sure this background is 3840 by 3840 and we'll merge that over okay I'll hit one on the keyboard just so we can see this composition by itself let's take a mask and we'll just mask this background with a rectangle mask so it's just on the bottom here we'll make it a little bit wider and soften the edge so we have a nice kind of fade there oh that looks so good and now as this turns look at that it turns from day to night oh it's so cool so running everything through this transform just makes everything easy and I can switch this over here's what's cool is I can go all the way to 60 like this and then I can kind of place stuff here in this composition and it'll place it at the right place here so lots of places let's do a trick with some Stars if we hit shift space bar and type star we can make a shape that's a star let's take this make this Five Points like that and the only thing with shapes is that you can't composite just a shape over stuff you have to have a shape render so I can hit shift spacebar Type S render and that just converts it into a 2D image instead of just kind of a pretend math shape so that'll make a star for us and we can merge this over and we'll use a transform node to position this we can move this around and position it right here in our right viewer which is actually going to be if we bring this up in the left viewer the opposite of where we're moving it but it's putting it in the right place on our composition which is kind of crazy so there's a little secret right there you can position stuff that's transformed by looking at a node that's down the flow like we're looking at media out here and you can position it and see the effect of it and it'll put it where it's supposed to supposed to be here earlier in the comp which is just I don't know it's like some Inception junk I don't even know how to deal with that but let's just put this star somewhere over here yay we could also do the same duplicate thing that we were doing earlier this s render let's make this s render here this is making 1920 x 1082 let's make this 3840 by 3840 that's the cause and fix for a lot of problems in Fusion is this image sizing stuff but now with our duplicate node here let's take this transform off let's actually just size this with a s transform we'll just take the size down a lot make it much smaller so like 05 05 and we have this little tiny star in the middle okay we'll use duplicate and do like I don't know 20 stars and let's have our Jitter be. 5.5 and that's going to scatter some stars all over this thing we receed this a few times we should be able to see some of those Stars change the size let's actually change this Jitter to be a little bit smaller let's do like. 1.1 just so the stars are kind of clumped together a little bit we can move this star around to be right about where it needs to be just change the Jitter on the x axis to kind of put those stars out and just kind of play with these until you get a bunch of stars in the background or you can place some yourself whatever you want to do yeah that's kind of nice you have some stars and again all of those are going to move with our rotation so cool now I don't want to see any stars here in the sky which I happen to not see which is actually convenient but something we might want to do is just use a rectangle mask and plug that into the mask input of our merge and just limit it here to the bottom half of this kind of Day toight background that'll fix any problems like that and one thing we got to do is have a moon so let's grab from the media pool I just have a PNG this is just a cartoon Moon and we'll merge that over take a transform and we'll size this and position it where it's supposed to be in the sky a beautiful there's our moon look at this day to night oh baby that looks so good H and it's really just a matter of placing stuff here on this background and then rotating the background okay really cool so we have our moon and Our Stars we have our sun and our clouds but but this animation is maybe not the most interesting let's make it a little bit more interesting here's our next secret if we go up to the spline panel and we select our day to night transform by the way under these three dots I like to make sure I have show only selected tool selected here so that things aren't overwhelming sometimes there can be a lot of animated stuff I just usually have show selected tool on and I'll click angle and this is going to show us a graph of our animation starting at zero at zero frames and then at 60 frames going to 180 so let's pick this first key frame and I'm going to hold shift and drag it over to about 20 frames or so so it's going to weigh about 20 frames and then it's going to flip to nighttime okay now we don't want this to start at full speed and then go full speed until it stops immediately on frame 60 we want it to kind of start slow and then speed up in the middle and then slow down before it stops so one thing we can do is Select both of these key frames and hit F on the keyboard it's going to flatten out this graph so it kind of starts out slow and then it speeds up and then it slows down before it stops that's going to give us a much better animation looks really cool we can even take these handles and I can hold alt and drag them to the left and make this S curve a little bit more intense and so we're spending a lot more time kind of ramping up and then it goes quickly and then it slows down ah that looks so nice whoosh yes other thing that I like to do and this is kind of where the secret comes in is if we zoom in here you can grab this part of the curve that's just a little bit down the hill grab this and just bring this up a touch and then hit F same thing down here grab this and bring this down to touch and hit F and now look what happens it has a little bit of anticipation when it animates so it starts out and it moves one way and kind of gets ready and then it whooshes the other way then it overshoots it a little bit and then it brings it back and that just gives a lot more character to the animation that overshoot yes that's really cool so let's refine this a little bit I'll just take this out like this hold down alt and kind of change these handles a little bit make them a little bit more smooth yeah very nice looks like somebody's taking it like with their hands and just kind of cranking it over which is just a cool stylistic way to do it so this is looking pretty cool but one issue is during the day everything looks nice but then at night time this looks too bright it looks like it's still being lit in the daytime so let's adjust this to kind of match that lighting so one thing this green background this hill let's animate this color we'll start right as it's kind of starting to turn and here where it says color I'll just click on this key frame Diamond like this and let's go over to where it's mostly dark frame 46 or so and now I'm just going to change this a little bit to look like a nighttime Hill that looks better so now we kind of fade from bright green green into dark green so that looks great looks way better all right now this cabin needs a similar treatment so let's just isolate the cabin by hitting one on the keyboard take a look at this here and I'm just going to run this through a color corrector let's grab this color corrector and just drag this in between the cabin and the transform and I'm going to do a color correction on this to make it look good at night so I'm not going to worry about what it should look like in the day I'm just going to pretend like this is the nighttime cabin and one thing I'll do is go over to options and make sure I have privide post multiply checked this is very important or you'll get some weird stuff happening but we can go to correction and let's make this a little bit blue let's maybe take the gain down take the saturation down a little bit just so it looks like it's nighttime I think something like that might look pretty good somewhere in there maybe even a little more blue okay so now we have our nighttime cabin but in the daytime it looks weird now so how do we animate this color on and off well here's another secret you can animate the strength of any node by going over to settings and animating this blend slider so this is kind of the strength of whatever that node is doing and this is available in most nodes and so let's just animate this blend slider for the color correction and let's start right about here turn this to zero and we'll go all the way here to where it's supposed to be pretty much dark we'll turn up to one now we have this just fading out oh and it looks so good look at that it's like not even a problem whoosh so good man that looks great I'll go to my key frames and we'll flatten out those tangents for the blend for that color correction and now whoosh looks good but now I mean it looks okay but we want some life here we want these windows to pop on so how do we do that well we could go in and draw some lights for each of these windows and kind of put some yellow on top of it but here's another little secret you can take an image and run it through a color corrector like this so I'll just run this through a second color corrector like this hit one on the keyboard and we can see what is happening when I color correct this okay if you take this Hue and you rotate the Hue you can kind of change all of the colors of something in a very pleasing way and so if we want these to be bright yellow windows I can just kind of play with this until the windows look bright yellow I can change this Hu around until we get kind of a nice yellowish look on our Windows maybe something around those lines but now the rest of the cabin looks crazy sauce but we're going to fix that here in a minute first of all let's take this color corrected kind of purpley cabin and merge it over our original cabin that has the color correction adjustment okay so let's just call this a day night CC for color corrector and this one's going to be called Windows CC let's grab a merge we'll put the day night in the background and the windows in the foreground like this and we'll take that and plug that into the transform so now we're just putting the color corrected strange looking cabin over everything we can limit where that is by adding a mask to this merge so I can add a mask here to the merge and here on the left masking on the cabin itself the 1024 x 1024 not my big composition but this one right here I can put in a mask to just limit those windows to show up right there in the windows and if I want to add multiple masks here's a secret you can take another polygon and just plug it into that polygon mask like this and we you can just keep adding them by default all it does is just stack those masks it makes one big mask so now we can have all those masks together and look what we're doing we're turning on lights in our cabin oh it's so freaking wholesome look at that oh so good let's take this Windows color correction and just boost the gain up a touch just to have those windows glowing a little bit that looks a lot nicer beautiful let's get a little bit more organized here let's have the cabin cabin's going through the color correction or also doing the windows color correction here and we have our masks helping that out okay just stack those so now we can take this merge and if we adjust the blend of this merge that's going to turn those lights on or off so check this out I take the blend look at that it's going to turn them off or on see it could be like a crackling fire in there maybe so but I think what we'll do is after this turns nighttime let's just have this off for a little bit and then we'll just fade this up over a couple frames like this to turn on the lights see how this looks swoosh click it's just so good making this stuff is so fun so easy to make it look nice but I think we're going to call this beautiful right here what else would you add to this composition maybe some smoke coming out of the chimney maybe some fog maybe a little bit more interactive lighting maybe some Shadows moving around what would you add let me know in the comments this is so much fun hey if you don't know me my name is Casey and I teach Fusion so if you're into learning about how Fusion works and making visual effects and Motion Graphics in D Vinci resolve this is the best place to be and again make sure that you don't miss our free video course the fusion Survival Guide that teaches you so many good essential things for working in Fusion it'll make your life so much easier and also check out this video for more goodness on YouTube okay hey thanks for hanging with me this has been this has been so wholesome hey this is skew me and a cup of tea it's not tea it's coffee same principle

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 28,015

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, casey faris fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, animation tutorial, animation tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve fusion animation tutorial, how to make animations, how to make an animated video

Id: LVMZF3pa9Lg

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024