5 Underrated Fusion Nodes in DaVinci Resolve - MotionVFX

hey everyone my name is Matt McCool with motion VFX and did you know there are 235 nodes built into Fusion 317 if you count the resolve effects that's a lot of nodes I can understand why it can be overwhelming to know kind of where to start inside Fusion so today I want to put five nodes on your radar that I find to be extremely useful in a wide range of situations both for visual effects compositing as well as some Motion Graphics techniques so kicking off this list let's talk about the erode dilate [Music] this is a fairly simple filter that just expands or contracts your image in this case I got a guy standing in front of a green screen and he's wearing a green tie for some reason I don't know why they didn't do a blue screen or a different color tie but this kind of happens often maybe you have a label on a product or something reflecting and when you try to key out the background using the Delta gear for example here you can see it's also keying out the tie because they're the same color there's nothing we can really do to bring it back we could add a polygon to the mask input and draw a mask around like this and invert the mask and this will work but if he's moving around a lot or if it's like an hour long take you know that's a lot of work to have to track a mask like this so instead of that in this case what we could do is hit shift spacebar again and I'm going to add an erode dilate and over here in the inspector you can see we have an amount slider if we go this way it will dilate if we go this way it will erode we also have four different different filters the Box will kind of give you this blocky a road effect and then you have linear and gaussian which are pretty similar both of them are a little bit softer and then you have Circle and in this case I think I am actually going to pick Circle because our subject has sort of some round edges but if you're doing this on a product you might have better luck with the box so what I want to do is dilate this until this Gap is completely filled up and you can see here it stops at .01 but you can always type in a larger amount like .02 and we're just going to fill this in if we hit a we can look at the alpha Channel and we can see it a little bit better so yeah I'm just going to make sure that is completely filled and then what I'm going to do is copy that erode and then paste another one right after it but this time in the amount I'm just going to add a minus sign to go in the opposite direction by that same value so if we look at this compared to the Delta gear by itself the overall shape should be exactly the same except we have filled in this hole where the tie is of course we don't want this to look like this but we can use this shape as a mat to apply over our original footage so I'm just going to select all three of these nodes and move them up a little and let's grab the matte control node right here and connect our media into the background and then using the right click I can drag my output from that lasted Road into the garbage mat let's view that matte control and it's doing the opposite of what we want but over here we can go down to the mat control and hit invert and now you can see we brought back the tie and still keyed away the background we didn't have to mask anything track anything do any sort of manual rotoscoping nothing like that so let me push this a little bit further and show you another use of the road tool so I'm going to grab a background node and let's actually pipe in the final output into our background right here now this will just create a background that has the same shape as our character here and if we actually merge our footage after the background we won't really see the background because they're the exact same shape but we could also add the arrow dilate right after the background node and we can just dilate this a little bit and now we've got a outline around our subject here and maybe we'll try Circle for this one and we can always go to the background you know make it whatever color we want and that's a super easy way to simply just add kind of an outline around a character using the arrow dilate and actually a lot of nodes like the Delta gear the ultra care The Clean Plate node a lot of the keying nodes will have in a row dilate slider inside of them but it's also nice knowing that you can use the erode dilate tool just by itself when you need to do something simple with a mask or some text so speaking of masking our next node that I want to look at is the bitmap node foreign useful node and it kind of works in companion to other nodes it doesn't really do much on its own but essentially what it does is it derives a mask from various parts of your image so let's say for example I have some text like this it's two different colors and I want to add a glow to it so I can add a soft glow for example and of course this will just glow everywhere in the image and there is this threshold slider I can kind of try to limit the image it wants to Glow but it doesn't offer that much control and so we can you know limit this with a mask and if we try to plug in our text into the mask input like that we can limit where the glow happens and let's say for example I just want the blue areas to Glow I could even go over here to the settings tab and change this channel right here to Blue and this is sort of doing what I'm asking it to do it is creating that glow only where there are blue pixels but as you can see if I try to increase the glow size it won't extend beyond where there are blue pixels because the blue effect mask really just limits where the node affects the image and anywhere outside of that zone it will just do absolutely nothing so to do that we need to actually use this glow mask but if you look you can't actually input a normal 2D image into the glow mask you only have the effect mask so this is where the bitmap comes in so this will actually let you go into either the glow mask or the effect mask in this case I want to input something into the glow mask and then let's pipe our render node into the bitmap and let's just view the bitmap by itself now you can see it just creates a black and white mask and under the channel right here we do have a few different options so if we try red for example we can try to clamp out some of those pixels and just kind of select the bevel like this and now if we look at the soft glow you can see we're only creating this glow where there are kind of this yellow orangish color we can even invert the bitmap to just glow along the blue channel right there now you can see if we increase the glow mask we are allowed to extend beyond the area that we're masking without affecting these red or yellow orange pixels see if we compare this we aren't affecting any of this because again we're using this bitmap node to select what area we want the glow mask to originate the glow from so the bitmap node is super handy for all kinds of masking techniques you can even serialize multiple bitmaps together and kind of choose how they interact with each other and get some really Advanced masking it's probably going to make another appearance later in this video but for now let's go ahead and move on to the next node on the list which is the very blur I'm sure you're probably familiar with the blur node which is right here on the toolbar if we add this it does basically what it sounds like it will just blur your image like this but let's say you only wanted to blur a certain part of your image so you could take a rectangle mask for example and feed this into the mask input we could adjust the location of this rectangle and that will adjust what gets blurred but if we increase the soft Edge this will basically feather the edges of the rectangle then you're going to get this kind of effect where you're blending the sharp version of the image with the Blurred image and in between you're just getting kind of like an opacity blend it's not very clean it doesn't look very professional I don't think it looks as nice as using the Vari blur so the very blur actually has three inputs instead of just the two and this third one right here is the blur image input so what this does is if you feed something like a mask into it this will take those in between values and actually blur her to a lesser amount now with this example you can see we're getting this harsh Edge this happens with images that have an abnormal Alpha Channel like text so a quick fix for this if you're working with text what you can do is go over here to the shading Tab and just enable any of these elements it doesn't really matter which one and just switch this to border fill and then make it completely transparent now I'm still seeing a little bit of a harsh Edge right over here so I'll just increase the horizontal in the vertical as well now this just gives the very blur an idea of how big this picture is so it'll continue to blur even though there's no pixel here so it doesn't change the look of the text itself if we toggle that last element on and off it doesn't look any different but it does give the very blur a bigger image to blur so if we look at this we can kind of see the difference between the normal blur these in between values remember because I have the soft Edge cranked up like that it's actually blurring with a a gradual shift so it looks a lot more realistic a lot more professional now this is a very simple example but if we come down here you can see I've got some footage with this graphic right here and it's really hard to read so what I've done here is I've added a brightness contrast to take down the gain a little bit and then also blurred the image but this time I'm using just a gradient like this and we are using that to mask out the brightness contrast in the blur we can kind of adjust that fall off with these on-screen controls but just like the text example it doesn't look very realistic if we kind of zoom in here these in between values we're kind of seeing a sharp and a blurred version of the picture being overlaid on top of each other and it looks kind of like an 80s sitcom you know doesn't look great so let's see how the variabler Compares so I'm just going to add a very blur and let's just turn off the blur node and I'm going to feed this background into the blur input like that and then let's just increase blur size and now you can see a much better result and we can adjust this fall off and notice how this has a lot more realistic shift and these in-between values if we compare that with a normal blur you can see what I mean this regular blur again looks very cheesy this one looks realistic and another thing about the very blur is you have three different methods defocus will kind of emulate sort of like a lens blur a little bit more like a lens blur and so if you're after kind of realism the variabler is going to give you those kinds of options now one more example here you can see I've got a shot and I've fed this into a depth map this is only available in the studio version of DaVinci Resolve and basically what this does is it will kind of emulate a depth map this is just a black and white image which again we can feed into a variabler and notice when I adjust the target depth it looks like we're kind of adjusting the lens after the fact and again these in-between values like look at these shelves how they gradually become blurrier and blurrier as they get further from the camera right if we compare that to the regular blur we don't get that at all we just kind of get almost like a like a filter was on the lens or something like that so again the very blur node is very nice for things like this I will say it's a little bit more resource intense than the normal blur so if you don't absolutely need this perfect realistic natural fall off then sometimes you can get away with a regular blur but if you're ever like man I really hate how this looks try the berry blur it will probably look a lot better alright so the next node I want to take a look at is called the planar tracker which is one of four kinds of trackers inside of fusion but the planer tracker is specifically good for replacing screens or replacing the sky or even object removals things like that [Music] foreign okay so let's say I want to replace the iPad screen here and put this picture of a fish now because the screen here is solid green what we could do is add a Delta here after the iPad shot I'm going to use the eyedropper here just to sample a little bit of that green color and maybe we could even go into the Mac control settings here and maybe erode that a little bit something like that now you can see the reflection still shows through and that's actually okay because when we merge this over the shot with our fish and connect this out to Media out you can see the reflection actually looks pretty realistic and the only thing that doesn't look realistic is the motion of course because we pretty much just have a hole punched through our iPad shot revealing the fish beneath so here's where I would use the planer tracker to stick our picture of the fish onto the screen so I'm going to click on the empty space up here and bring in a planar tracker and I'm just going to connect the iPad shot into our planer tracker let's throw this over here in this viewer now the planer tracker works by basically drawing a box around an area that you want to track in this case because this is solid green I want to be really careful and not put these points you know directly inside the green portion here because there's probably not going to be enough contrast for these points to detect the motion so I typically like to go right outside of a screen like this and I'm just going to draw a box here kind of make sure that it looks like it is lined up with that screen okay and then you want to come over here and hit set and this will just set the reference time to the frame number that you use to draw the plane here and there are two different trackers you have the regular point and then you have hybrid Point area I typically try the regular Point first because it is a little bit quicker it works by analyzing the individual points here so it's not always the most accurate so let's go ahead and try this first so I'm going to click the track to end button right here and right away I can see it's already slipping so let's go ahead and stop that and this time I'm going to try the hybrid Point area and let's hit track to end and I can already tell this is doing a much better job and then let's hit go again and then go in the reverse cool so that looks like a pretty solid track there and now at this point we can go ahead and click the create planner transform button this will give us a planar transform which is just a regular transform node that has the tracking data from this tracker so what I can do now is hold shift and drop this planar tracker right after the shot with our iPad on the way over to the merge and now you can see our fish is actually stuck to the screen and we could even add a transform node right before the planar transform and fit this a little bit better into that screen and there you go there's a pretty simple screen replacement using the planer tracker and we even have some realistic Reflections happening on our iPad screen there so yeah that was just a really brief overview of the planar tracker node it can be used for a lot more than just replacing screens like this you can also use it to remove objects or composite new ones into a scene where there's like some 3D camera perspective so super useful node it was hard to exclude it on a list like this now moving on to the last node on this list this one's probably even more popular but I would argue it's the most useful versatile and fun to use node in all of fusion this is the fast noise node so I'm sure you've heard about the fast noise node this is the only node on this list that is available right here on the default Fusion toolbar but just in case you're unfamiliar the fast noise node is just a generator that creates this cloud like texture so it's useful for fog and smoke you know various kinds of textures like that let me just quickly kind of run through some of these settings so if you increase the sieve rate you can start to see how it's a little bit animated you can increase that rate if you want a really fast animation you can also increase the scale as well as the detail you can even unlock the scale and type in really large amounts like 100 now we have like this really cool silky kind of vertical streak pattern and this is just what's available here on the noise panel things get really interesting when you hop into the color panel so from here you can adjust the two different colors so for example I could go from like this black to maybe like a red and so you can kind of see the potential with creating backgrounds you know Motion Graphics things like that but things get even more interesting when you switch to the gradient type now with the gradient you actually have more than just the two colors so the way this works is you have this little gradient bar right here and you can click on each individual triangle here and adjust their colors so from here this is pretty much identical to the two color option but what's cool is you can also click in the middle and add additional colors and you can even switch the gradient type by default it's set to unidirectional this will just create the same texture across the whole canvas but if you switch this to linear then this will give you this little control bar right here where you can adjust the start point and the end point so you can really kind of see how you can get a lot of different types of textures just using the gradient so I find myself reaching for fast noise anytime I need to introduce some chaos or some Randomness it's also really great for kind of revealing or creating like a interesting mask so let me show you something I have going on down here so I just have some really simple text it's just some white text scaling down like that and I've got a drop shadow applied to it and then right over here I just have a red background with a little gradient background and I am merging those two together using the atop operator and what I could do is go into my text into the shading tab right here and I can switch the type to image and this will give me this little white input and then if I connect my background into that white input then our text Will kind of get that same color like this and now let me try to merge my shadow over my background and here's what we have now and then maybe we can add a little bit of a vignette so I'm just going to add a brightness contrast and take the gain down a little bit like this and then add an ellipse mask and let's invert that and like maybe stretch it out like this and increase our soft Edge okay so that looks pretty good now let's say I wanted to kind of reveal this text in an interesting way so an easy way to do that again is to use this fast noise so I'm going to grab one of these and connect it into the mask input just like that and right away we can kind of see this cool Smoky pattern that masks our text here now what I want to do is actually go into the color Tab and switch this to a linear gradient and I want the starting color to be completely White and the end is going to be completely transparent like that and let's just bring these pretty close together kind of like this maybe even at an angle and let me actually bring in a second viewer just so you can see how our fast noise looks so that you can understand how it's being affected on our text so if I roll back this offset dial you can see that we can sort of reveal our text in this really kind of randomized way now I'm going to go back to the noise for a second and let's just increase that contrast like maybe 10 and maybe add a little bit more detail I think the scale looks pretty good like that and so what I'm going to do here is go to the very beginning of the timeline and I'm just going to roll back this offset until our text is completely gone and I'm just going to add a keyframe and let's go to frame maybe like frame 100 and I'm just going to crank up the offset dial until our text is completely filled in like that and here's what this looks like so far and maybe I'll switch back to the single viewer for this so that's already looking pretty good now one node that works really well in combination with the fast noise is the displace node so I'm going to add the displace after our text and we can feed the fast noise into the green input of that displace and with the displace node we can switch to the X and Y and look what happens when I adjust the X refraction there we can kind of use that fast noise pattern to displace our text so it kind of shifts into place as it's being revealed by that fast noise texture maybe we can also add a little bit of Y so it kind of floats down from the top so that's looking pretty good already now let's go a little bit further with this so I'm going to bring back our old friend the bitmap and I'm going to connect the displace into the yellow input of the bitmap and let's just copy and paste that one again and we're also going to feed this into this second bitmap so we've got two bitmaps masking each other now whenever you add a second bitmap in sequence then it adds this new paint mode option right here similar to whenever you have a sequence of polygons or any other kind of mask so what I'm going to do here is switch this to multiply and let's actually view this so we can see what it's doing let's look at our first bitmap here and invert it and then using the center controls I can just slightly you know kind of offset this a little bit to create this really cool highlight Edge now remember the bitmap is just creating this black and white mask right so what I'm going to do now is add another fast noise and use this bitmap to mask the fast noise now I'm going to unlock the X and the Y and let's increase the X maybe to like 50 and crank up the contrast like 10 and then we can even add a little bit of an angle some something like this and this time I'm going to add some seed rate so now we have kind of this glistening Edge effect like that and let's move down here a bit and I'm just going to add a few different soft glows so in this first one we're going to create a really tight glow so I'm going to reduce the size and the gain I'm going to crank it up a little bit and then we can even change the color to maybe like a kind of a goldish color like that and I copy that soft glow paste a new one and in the second one I'm just going to crank up the glow size a bit and then crank down the gain and you can see there's a little problem here we get this kind of dark Edge right here this is because our fast noise has some values that are above 1.0 and our soft glows are going to take that and do some nasty unwanted things with it so to mitigate this what we can do is add a brightness contrast after the fast noise and I'm just going to clip the blacks and the whites that way everything is contained within the normal values there and let's just add one last soft glow just to be safe and we're going to crank up that size even more and lower the gain so now we kind of have this exponential glow and then we can take this and merge it after everything we had before and if we play that back we get this really cool reveal and this is just using these two different fast noises the first one let's bring in a second viewer to show you again the first one just again reveals that mask and then the second one creates this little glistening effect around the edges which we are then adding a whole bunch of glows and then re-merging it back over to create our final effect there and maybe even we could take this and start to blend the glows down a bit so I'm going to keyframe the blend and just reduce it a little bit like that pretty cool and honestly the fast noise node probably deserves its own video I mean it's just so useful you can do so many different things with it if you go and watch the Ant-Man and the WASP title tutorial that we put out a while ago that tutorial utilized the fast noise node quite a bit to create the abstract background as well as some kind of light streaks and things like that so that pretty much wraps it up for me today I hope you gained some value from this video if you have any questions or suggestions for future videos definitely leave a comment down below and thank you guys so much for watching we'll see you in the next video

Channel: motionvfx

Views: 52,597

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Id: awoH2XQ6Xk0

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023