Animate ARROWS like a pro in Fusion!

in this video I'm going to break down the two methods anwarf to point to stuff let's get into it this first one is by far the simplest method to create an animated arrow and in fact it's the method I use on this channel all the time just because it's really simple to set up and it looks great off the bat so first I'm going to right click my footage here and go to new Fusion clip which is going to change this video clip here to a fusion clip and then once I've done that I'll hop over to the fusion tab okay so here's our footage infusion running into the media out and what we want to do is we want to add our arrow in between here somewhere so how do we create one well you could do this fully infusion using tools like the polygon nodes you could roughly Mark out the shape of an arrow and then feed that into a background node or alternatively you could use an image of an arrow that you've already got downloaded but what I like to do is to create my arrows first in Affinity designer and bring them over to Fusion if you followed the channel for a while you'll know that I'm a big fan of the Affinity suite and if you're trying to do Motion Graphics in Fusion then creating things in Affinity first can be really helpful so I've got an model that I created inside of designer which is quite simple to do I just created a line using the pen tool and then converted this to a brush stroke using the brush panel then I added an arrowhead onto the end of it and the stroke controls here honestly I just add some curves to the line and change the color to white after that I'm going to jump into the export Persona and Export that as a transparent PNG now if you don't have Affinity designer but you want to use this little arrow that I've made here feel free to download it I've left a link in the description for you once that's been set up and fusion I'm going to hit shift in spacebar that will bring up our tools window and from here I'm going to search for the loader node the loader node is a really simple node that lets you bring an image into your Fusion called position I can select the arrow that we just created and yeah you could just simply drag this image into the composition as well but this way is going to make it much easier if you want to save your composition to use later on so I'll merge this over our footage Now by dragging the output to the footage output which is a really quick way to make a merge and once that's done we're going to add a transform node in between the image and the merge which is going to let us animate in our Arrow so from the transform node I'm going to be doing two things I'm going to be changing the size and the rotation but before I do that I'm going to use the pivot controls to change the pivot point of the arrow pivot is essentially the point on the image where the parameters are going to be affected from so you'll see now that if I change the size parameter it's going to change the size from the Pivot Point and the same goes for the angle controls and that's going to help us sell the effect when we animate this in so I'll set a keyframe on the size and angle parameters at about frame 20 move the playhead back to the start and then bring the size down to zero and it'll offset the angle slightly by a few degrees now if I play that back you'll see that our Arrow animation is taking shape but it's a bit rigid and linear so next I'm going to jump into the spline Tab and from here I can highlight the points right click and go to ease out cubic that just adds a nice little ease into the animation which as you can see looks a lot better another thing I could do is from the transform node I can also add a little bit of motion blur in the settings tab just to polish It Off and there you've got an animated arrow in this example I've actually gone ahead and reversed the keyframes at the end so that the arrow animates back out again as well but what if we wanted to change the size of this or the position of it after we've done that changing it in the transform node is going to mess with the animation we've set up so how do we do that really simple solution all you need to do is add another transform node after the first one and then that'll let you move the arrow around flip it change the size do whatever you want and the animation is going to stay the exact same no matter what and there you go you've got an animated Arrow now naturally you don't want to have to do that every single time you need an arrow in one of your videos so I've left a link up here to another one of my videos that shows you how to save effects like this as a macro and if you take the time to learn how to do that then it's going to let you pull this in from the edit page whenever you need it for your videos which is really handy okay so maybe you want to do something a bit more advanced than that what about an arrow where an arrowhead follows the path like this how would you do that so this is totally possible in Fusion but the workflow I'm going to show you here is admittedly a little bit weird so first we're going to start by creating a background node and connecting this up to our media out I'm going to drop the alpha down to zero and that just gives us a nice transparent background to build this on top of alternatively you could put this over some footage if you wanted to do that next I'll add another background node and merge this over the original one and this is going to be used to define what the color of the arrow is then we're going to feed a node called mask paint into this now it's not that dissimilar to how the polygon node might work but the paint nodes get a few extra controls are going to really help us here so first things first I'm going to come into the stroke controls and I'm going to drop the space into zero because we don't need any spacing on this path and I'm also going to select the circular brush here then with the node selected I'm going to come up to the viewer and select the polyline stroke tool and that's going to let you draw in your out of path once you get it to the point that you're happy with it you can then use the right on parameter and the stroke controls the keyframe and the stroke animation which is going to look like this once it's done now if you wanted again you could create your own Arrowhead and fusion and then animate it to follow the same path but it's a little bit cumbersome and personally I haven't found an easy way to adjust the angle of the arrowhead automatically so that it looks like it's following the stroke properly I can't seem to do that without using some sort of complicated expression so it usually ends up looking like this which isn't good but fear not there is a way around this and it involves using the text plus node the text plus node has this inbuilt ability to be able to warp the layout of text across a path and the cool thing about the way it does it is that it automatically rotates the text as well when it moves along so yes it's a little bit of a hack but if you've got a font with an arrowhead already in it you could use that to add an arrowhead to your path here and before you go hunting down for an arrowhead and your winding spawn I've left a link in the description to a font called esri Arrowhead and this phone doesn't use letters or numbers instead it's built up entirely of Arrowhead heads so there's bound to be something in there that you'll find useful regardless though here's how this works to set it up I'll add in a text plus node to an existing composition and I'll merge it after the paint path that we've set up next I'm going to go into the text node and we'll select our Arrowhead font again there's a ton of different ones to choose from here but I really like this one here obviously you could just adjust the color and size from here too if you want to but I'm going to jump into the layout tab and I'm going to change the type from point to path at this stage the viewer is going to let you draw a path in but instead of drawing it in what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the mask paint node right click in the viewer and come down to polyline stroke 1 polyline and hit copy and then we can paste that if we click on the text node again right click in the viewer and go down to text one path and hit paste at this point the arrowhead should be stuck to the same path as a stroke so you'll see as I move the position on path parameter here you see it move along the same path so now there's only a couple extra steps left if you right click position on path and go to connect to polyline stroke we should have the option to link this to the end of the right one parameter that we ordered the keyframed in the mass Pane and if you can't see that it might be because you've accidentally skipped that step so you'll have to go back and animate that parameter first and once you've connected those two parameters together if you played back the arrowhead is moving along at the same rate as the stroke so the only thing we need to do now is to move the arrow here then to a slightly better position because it's not really where we want it to be you could do that easily by jumping into the shading Tab and scrolling down to position and from here you can adjust the offset control to reposition where the arrowhead is and there it is your Arrowhead is following a path now I realize this feels like a bit of a hack method but using a font to generate a shape like this probably isn't as uncommon as you think it is for an awesome for example is a free font that's made up entirely of unique icons and they get used on a substantial amount of websites chances are you'll probably have seen many of these already but once you download and install that phone you'll be able to use these icons inside of fusion all you need to do is copy across the glyph from the website into the text no diffusion and then select the font which is really handy if you want to combine that with a method that I just showed you to create something like this or maybe even this just a quick one for me before I finish up here this Channel's growing it's grown a lot since I first started and I always try my best to get back to every single comment that was left on my videos but it's getting harder I know a lot of you guys post questions in the comments so if I haven't got back to you then I'm really sorry please know that I'm not intentionally ignoring you and feel free to just pester me in the comments until I get back to you I will eventually do that if you like this video give it a thumbs up and if you didn't give it two thumbs down regardless if you want to see more Motion Graphics in DaVinci Resolve hit the Subscribe button and I'll see you in the next video thank you

Channel: Ryan Osborne

Views: 21,084

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Id: 43keFmBx1k8

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023