Adding 3D objects WITH SHADOWS in Davinci Resolve / Fusion

so in this video i'm going to show you how to do this we're going to place a 3d object in this case it's text into our scene and have that object cast shadows within that scene putting 3d objects into davinci resolve fusion with shadows and implementing that in your scene may seem pretty straightforward but there's actually a couple steps to it and that's exactly what i'm going to show you now this is the footage that i decided to use for this tutorial the reason i chose it is because there is some movement some depth to the scene and of course there are the shadows this is from art grid i will link to them in the description below so we have our footage we placed it in our timeline here what i'm going to do is right click and choose new fusion clip because a lot of the work that we're going to do is going to be within fusion so let's go to the bottom which choose the fusion tab we have our media in and media out basically our starting and ending point let me just make some adjustments here from here i'm going to choose control space and that will bring up our list of tools and the first thing that we're going to do is type in tracker we'll bring in our camera tracker which is our 3d camera tracker so what i'll do is select that node hold down shift so it links we can just make sure it links there by moving it around a little bit now obviously we don't see anything right now i'll come up to the top so we just have the one window because that's all we need at the moment come over to the inspector on the right hand side leave everything the way it is and click auto track and it will go through our footage find good tracking points and put little track dots onto our footage from there we'll choose the third option over we can leave everything the way it is and we'll click on solve and this basically will tell us how good our track is and on the right hand side you can see the result was 2.2 so on and so forth that's not that great we actually want it to be below one so i'll adjust this option right here the minimum track error once we make that adjustment we hit delete to get rid of those tracking points and now we can go back up to solve and hopefully we'll get a better result so now if you look at the average solve error now it's 0.2 which is extremely good especially for this kind of footage our footage has tracking points all over it but it may be a little bit difficult to see because the colors of the trackers may blend in so we'll go to the fifth option over we don't have to make any adjustments and just choose darken image and now they're more visible now we're going to place our 3d object on the ground so we're going to select a few points that will be good indicators of where the ground is i can left click and box select a few and if i want to add any more to that i can hold down shift and do the same exact thing and those points there should be sufficient now we'll go back to the fourth option over choose unaligned in the orientation section we want to make sure it's set to xz ground plane which is exactly what we're doing and then we can click on set from selection once we do that without making any more adjustments we can choose the one up top and choose set from selection there too for the origin we'll click on export it will create a bunch of notes for us now that we have those nodes i'm going to choose the merge node in the middle there drag it up so that we can see it in our viewer and you'll see our ground plane which is the purple and all our points within the scene now if you don't see this view you can right click and might be in this perspective what i did was right click and choose camera and then chose that camera if i play through the footage you can see how that purple ground plane sticks to the ground it looks as if it's part of that road i do want to make an adjustment so i'll choose that ground plane node right at the bottom and then come over to the inspector on the right and rotate the y axis a little bit so it more lines up with the road and if we scrub through the footage as mentioned it looks as if it's even more part of the scene now in fact i'll come over to the inspector on the right unclick wireframe so that's just one solid piece and then script to the footage again our next step is to come up to the fusion toolbar and drag down a shape on the right hand side you can see where it says plane and that's perfectly fine because it's exactly what we want drag the node up into the viewer and you can see our plane now if i connect this to the ground plane if you look on the right hand side within our scene it's actually laying flat again which is exactly what we want i'll adjust the size so that's more visible and it is in place for what we need it for and as the ground plane itself if i script with the footage you'll notice that it moves along with the scene and it looks as if it's part of the road next step is to come up to the toolbar choose a text node i'll grab the output from the text layer connect it to our shape layer and that will create a merge node with the text node selected on the right hand side we have the inspector and i'll go ahead and type something in if we take that merge node and we'll drag it up i'm going to hit control and scroll my mouse wheel because right now we're too close to see anything now i'll try to rotate my view once again we also don't see that text and that's because both the text and the plane are on the same plane so let's go ahead and rotate the text 90 degrees and you may notice it on the left hand side but it might still be a little bit hard to see so with the text node layer selected i'm going to change the color from white to red and you'll notice on the right hand side now we actually can see our footage within the scene and it's visible to our camera it may be a little bit confusing to see the scene the way it is on the left-hand side so you right-click choose 3d options and we can get rid of the grid now using the alt key and my mouse i'm going to make some adjustments so that we can actually see this straight on our next step is to add a light and this is so that we can cast a shadow on the toolbar at the top there we're going to choose spotlight and that's actually the only light with infusion that will cast the shadow so we'll go ahead and connect that into our merge layer we can see our light in the display window up there but you'll notice that it doesn't appear to be doing anything what we have to do is right click choose 3d options and then select lighting and shadows and now we can make our adjustments you can do that within the window by grabbing let's say the z-axis and pulling it back or you can use that over in the inspector window and use the translation and make your adjustments there we're actually going to use a combination of both the translation where it is in space and rotation so we can point the light directly at our text if you look in the left hand viewer you can see how that light is actually casting the shadows onto that plane now over in the inspector if i wanted to make that spread a little bit wider we can adjust the cone angle so let's do a quick evaluation of our scene on the right hand side all you're seeing is that merge node that we put up there before you're not actually seeing the end result which is over here on the right hand side so i'll disconnect the media out from the camera tracker and then i will connect it from our 3d scene down at the bottom and connect that to our media out immediately you'll notice that there are a few issues obviously we don't want to see that plane and there's no shadows that we can see in order to see that i'm going to choose the camera tracker renderer which changes it from a 3d environment to a 2d environment and i will change it from the opengl renderer to the software renderer i'll click on lighting and now we can see what we see on the left hand side and then click on shadows which gives us the shadows and then we can unclick lighting because we don't want it to look like that and we're eventually going to get rid of that plane altogether now your first thought may be come over to the shape 3d node which is our plane come over to the inspector on the right hand side go into the visibility option and uncheck visible the problem that you run into is that it will get rid of the shadow also as mentioned i'll come over to the second tab in the shape id get rid of lighting because we don't need the lighting there and the way that we're actually going to get around this is actually chroma keying the plane so in other words we can just choose any color potentially we could choose yellow and then eventually we're going to choose a chroma key we're going to key out that yellow you do have to be a little bit cautious however because if it matches anything within your scene obviously you're going to chroma key that also so we can take the tracker and the renderer what i'll do is drag them in it creates a merge as it did before with the other nodes and then now we can drag that merge over to the media out if you don't see anything which you should if you have the last node in the viewer you right click on the merge choose swap inputs and then now we can see everything in the scene together just so there's no confusion on the left hand side that's everything that we're looking at as far as the text in the plane so that's part of the 3d environment what i'm selecting here is part of the 3d environment and then we're merging that up to the top which is our 2d environment which in this case is the background i'll hit ctrl space we're going to choose ultra keyer i'll grab the node hold down shift make sure the line changes to colors we'll put it in between the renderer and the merge i have the plane in the left-hand viewer we have to be careful with that if you right-click and you notice if i put lighting on it turns a different color we're going to use this for reference for keying so just make sure you have lighting off so it doesn't distort the actual color now as mentioned before if i analyze the scene we'll see a lot of green in the grass maybe a little bit of the magenta on the wall over there and blue in the sky but more of maybe a cyan or a light blue what i think i'm going to choose for this particular screen is a saturated relatively dark blue we want to make sure that the ultra clear node is selected then we can come up and grab the eyedropper in the inspector window drag it over to our window on the left which is why it's there and it's keyed out the ground plane but you may also notice that it affected the sky the way that we fixed that is we want to make sure we still have that same node selected click on the rectangle mask and that will create a mask on the right hand side we can make adjustments here so that it's not affecting the whole scene but you also may notice that part of the plane is sticking outside of that mask so we'll have to make an adjustment on any frame that we see that so i'll scrub through the footage and as i just mentioned anytime that we see the plane sticking outside of that mask we can just extend the width if we need to we can also keyframe it that way if we don't want to adjust the size we can adjust the position and that all depends on your footage but in this case we are able to make those adjustments without physically moving that mask now if you're following along if you select the merge tab you do want to make sure that the lighting portion is not selected we do want the shadows for obvious reasons but if you select lighting and you look at the viewer on the right hand side that's what happens so you want to have shadow selected but not lighting if you go to the first tab you want everything selected if you deselect it you get the scene there with the black plane there's no lighting on there so you want everything on that first tab selected on the merge let's head over to the spotlight node and here we're going to work on our shadows so we can leave that first tab in the inspector open and then move all the way to the bottom and at last option for softness we're going to change it from none to variable and what this is essentially doing is making those shadows a little more realistic what i'll do here is scroll in on that footage right now it's set to variable if you change it back to none you'll notice how the shadows look artificial and there's a lot of hard lines if you notice the h shadow on the left hand side there as one example but if we adjust that to variable it softens up really nicely and again this is just to make the shadows fit better into the scene and look more realistic there are more adjustments in that section so if it's not looking realistic in your footage you can tweak some of the settings over there the next thing i'm going to do is adjust the color of the text just to make it fit more into the scene so i'll use something maybe similar to the color of the building on the right hand side obviously we're on the text node we can either use the eyedropper or we can just dial in the settings ourselves as with the shadows we're just doing this so that it seems that it fits more into the scene i like to have these two windows up when making adjustments this way i have the 3d environment on the left hand side where i can make the adjustments and then i can see the results on the right hand side the right hand side being the media out which is the end of our node tree what i'm doing here is adjusting the light so that i cast a shadow that's similar to the other shadows in the scene i know we just discussed this but what i'll do is select the spotlight note again and let's look at the shadows now that they're a little bit larger so right now the softness is set to variable we can adjust it to none you'll notice in the viewer how the lines start become more rigid and as i've said a few times we change it to variable and it becomes more realistic so we have our footage here and you may notice an obvious problem it does look relatively realistic in that the text is on the ground and it's casting a shadow in the scene but the obvious problem being that our subject it appears to be behind it but obviously in space that doesn't make sense i've already addressed this in another video and actually i'll link that in the description below but essentially what you have to do on the left hand side we have the footage that we've been working on that's our fusion clip as in the other video that i mentioned if we drag another clip on top of it that's going to be the one that we work on clearly if we drag it right on top all we're going to see is that footage so what we're going to have to end up doing is going to the color tab and make our adjustments there just to show you what the end result is going to be i've already finished it so on the right hand side i'll drag this over our clip on the left i'll re-enable the layer so that you can see it and i know that the words are different but you can see a final product that i've worked on before and the subject is actually in front of the words as they would be in real life i won't go into great detail because i did address it in that other video but let me show you essentially what i did so here we are in the color tab and you notice that basically all i did was create a mask around her torso area i did have to manually rotoscope that and you'll notice the keyframes on the right hand side in order to create that mask i used a window which you can see in the middle on the bottom there in the node tree i did have to right click and add an alpha output and then drag the blue line from the node over to that alpha output if i select highlight mode you'll see that this is the only thing that's on this layer again the only reason i did that is because that's the only part of our subject that intersects with our 3d object the logic there being we don't need to give ourselves extra work if her whole body doesn't cross over those words there's no sense of us rotoscoping her entire body and as i showed you before here is a final product and of course there's multiple ways that you can implement this you can set up a scene where the camera flies through the text and it doesn't have to be text it could be a 3d object maybe a spaceship or some other object so you're not just limited to what i've shown you here thanks for watching if you haven't already i'd love for you to subscribe to the channel and check out some of my other videos i'll link some right up here thanks for watching and i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Post. Color. Gear.

Views: 11,389

Keywords: 3d, shadows, fusion, fusion 17, resolve 17, post production

Id: IdcbhrkDnaI

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020