Avengers Disintegration Effect with Particles in DaVinci Resolve & Fusion

hey guys avengers endgame is coming to theaters last week so I thought I'd take the opportunity for a fusion particle tutorial and I think you know which effect is coming now yes this one this effect has become quite popular and I think there are around a dozen or so tutorials out there and practically all of them use After Effects and most of them use either stock effects pre-built or they use trapcode particular now of course these tools have a good price tag and everything I can do here can be done with a free version of DaVinci Resolve or with fusion standalone so I think it's a good time to add some fusion magic into the Thanos disintegration effect I will start this tutorial by talking about the basic idea and my setup for this effect then I will go step by step and create a rudimentary basic version where you can follow along if you like and then I will give you all the tricks and tips and techniques that I'm using to bring it towards the final result that you see here creating the full version of this effect is probably a bit more on the advanced side or at least it can get quite time-consuming if you want to do like everything that is possible but creating the basic version even if you have beginner to let's say intermediate user of fusion should be possible and I think there's a lot that you can take out off from the the workflow and the principles that I discussed that being said let's dive in quick note if you want to follow along with me you can go to my website we have X telecom and download the full package with my footage and fusion krump and everything no registration required nothing just download and you can use it as you like while you are there if you do decide to sign up for the newsletter I am currently working on a full course for fusion inside with of 16 and I've notify you once it gets out now coming to the effect I am currently in fusion studio version 16 everything I do here you can do exactly the same way in DaVinci Resolve the reason why I'm in fusion is that it's easier for me here to do test renders rather than via the deliver a page from DaVinci Resolve and also I know that I will be working on this effect for quite a while so I prefer the stability and simplicity of the standalone version rather than all the editing and extra capabilities of resolve now coming to the effect at hand what do I actually need I need basically three things I need a clean plate meaning I need to have my background without me I need rotoscope of myself and I need the particle effect first of all clean plate I am in a quite simple scenario here because the camera is on a tripod so all I need to do is get out of this chair and I have the background without me so here it is the clean plate let me do a quick a be comparison on a separate window you see this is the clean plate this is with me so it looks mostly fine there are a few issues so on the one hand there is a shadow in the background I'm casting this shadow and I'm casting a shadow here on the keyboard which is going away but then again if I go away the shadows maybe should also go away so that's not bad actually unfortunately the mouse moved a little bit by accident and the chair moved up so that part is a bit undesired I didn't know about it when I created the the video but I first thought maybe I could do some funny effect with the chair rotating or jumping up or something like this didn't really work out and didn't look so great but I also knew that I could easily hide it just by zooming or by putting particles over it while it's transitioning so all in all I'm satisfied with the clean plate now coming to the removal of the foreground I'm using rotoscoping here now you can use green screen if you have one but then you need to take care of spill and need to think about background shadows and so on and so on I'm using rotoscoping which is actually not that much work here because first of all I'm hardly moving in this sequence and second of all the rotoscope doesn't need to be perfect because a lot is being covered by the particles and it also needs to be good in the places where the particles are generated so I can be very selective with this effect and I don't need to do like you know hundred frames of perfect matching rotoscope now just a few tips if you decide to rotoscope yourself you have basically two tools here you have the polygon and the b-spline this one is good for smooth areas this is good for rectangular and edgy areas let me make a little bit of space here and just do a little bit for example if I want to go to scope my my shoulder I would maybe start with the b-spline here and generally you should think about joints you should think about areas which are moving since my upper body is hardly moving I would start maybe on the left side with a shape something like like this just quickly so this could be my first shape I will never do a rotoscope which just goes all around because this is almost impossible to handle what you want to do is you want to keep shapes simple you want to keep shapes which themselves don't twist or transform so that you don't need to go into changing individual points but you can just move whole shapes so it's never a problem of having too much shapes you can make like 10 shapes like this or 20 and that doesn't matter the point is you want to animate as little as possible that means you don't want too many points you want the points so that you can somehow control them so at areas where you can can can find them and and see them so that these points are solid like this one should be above this fold and it should be throughout the scene above this fold even if later things change right so you don't want the points to shift around and you want to animate you want to keep your animation minimal so that you can easily do Corrections later if you have 100 keyframes and then you there's one point which is not matching then you have to go through all the keyframes and try to fix it again and then you find some other point is not matching and so on so thereby you can really go crazy so don't do this instead make simple shapes like this and then if you have to animate them take the whole shape and move the whole shape at once either by animating the center right click animate on the center and then if I need to do a correction let's see if I even need to add here maybe I want to bring it a bit closer here then I just move the center coordinate or I just mark all points and move all points together but I'm not really starting animating individual points if I can help it now I have one shape here I can just select this shape and then add the next one let's say I want to take the lower arm here I can just maybe take a polygon for example sorry if I selected the previous one and then click it it should be automatically yeah it's automatically being linked together and now I can do the lower arm the shapes can overlap no problem so I take a polygon here which is it straight I pick some points which are recognizable so inside I don't care this may be overlapping here I have if I want to smooth a point from the polyline I can press shift s and then it gets smooth so I can make it match perfectly and if I want to change like the curvature a bit I can do it like this so this way I can really use very few points which is easier to handle and make the shape pretty good again doesn't need to be perfect actually I'm probably much more detailed here right now than needed for this effect now if I bring the masks together here in the viewers then you can see just by adding they automatically get like overlapped and combined this is because here the pink note says merged this is the default so this way I can continue covering me with different shapes and I get the full rotor scope now again how detailed you have to be really depends I can show you what I built up front I built this one which is fairly detailed and let me actually connect it and let me connect this to the sorry let me mascot the foreground with this so I get this foreground here and you see it's quite detailed but if you look in detail you will see there's some wobbly motion here and of course I there's no way I'm gonna rotoscope hair so I just cut it off and so on but then again you will not see this at the end so depending on what effect you do you can get away with something much much worse with this if your particles just blow in all directions then basically the rotor almost doesn't matter you just need some place where you start your particles and then everything else will be hidden behind behind the particles this one is is fairly detailed what I suggest is start with something you can create in ten minutes or so and then create the effect and then see if you how much detail you actually need I will no not I will not spend the next 1 hour of this tutorial by by rotoscoping just to show you the the final result that I did here before so you see I named the the different rotor splines based on where they are so I can easily change them later now each of them has a few key frames again probably more than I need so I did my arm here you see the individual shapes and something which just fills the body so again take the take the main parts of your body or the main shapes there any any joints that are moving you might want to do separately so you have an upper arm at the lower arm the hand moves a bit more so that's why I took the the hand from the top and then then from the the bottom and sorry where is it yeah and and moved it individually also I did some tracking here I was actually able to track my hand and track your water shape well again you can spend a lot of time on this you can do a lot of things you don't necessarily need to for a basic effect you can get away with a much rougher shape so much for the rotoscoping now let's see how I can build a particle effect from this okay now I have cleaned up a little bit this is my starting position now for the particle effect now what I need is I need something that generates the particles which is either a particle emitter or a particle image emitter these are the two tools that create particles then I need a particle renderer and then it depends whether you work in 2d or in 3d I'm working in with 3d particles so I need to put the 3d particles into a 3d scene and render from this 3d scene so let me quickly set this up if you're looking for the tools you can find them and the effects towards particles so particle emitter is not the image emitter I want the regular one and I tell you why in a second then so a particle renderer this one you always need otherwise your particles won't do anything and now the particle renderer can either work in 3d or in 2d if it works in 2d it directly generates you an image if you want to work in 3d what I want to do here and which is the default then it renders the particle into a 3d scene so now a 3d scene requires a renderer again and a camera so what I will do is I will add a 3d merge here which is here and renderer edgeless this tool and a camera which I have here now the camera should go into the merge and I probably don't see anything but that's fine let's see what the particles are now in the particles typically what I do is first increase the number a bit so there's a chance we see anything and the second part which I typically do is I don't work with point particles because point particles are almost impossible to see they're like one pixel sin and they can be very useful but what I typically do is I first work with some blobs or something bigger until I know that I have my general arrangement right that I have my motion right and so on and if I want later if I want points maybe I can crank up the number to some insane value and and do that at the end but just for working I typically go to my style here and let's use an end gun in this case and something solid maybe and I don't want something with five edges but with four and now I really want to see where I am here so let me actually check the particle render here and close this so now something very starey come here and big so let's reduce the size of this in the emitter I have size controls and I okay maybe I increased the number too early we can do that later now you see the let's go to frame zero so you see I created some stars here but this enron can not only create stars can also create rectangular there's this parameter star eveness which sounds funny and you can get everything from stars to blobs and I want something that's close to an rectangle now here I have some particles now how do I get the particles to match the image first of all I can get the overall shape and then I can get the color as well from the image now you may be thinking there is this particle image emitter what the particle image emitter does it it creates a raster and by default for every pixel of the image you get one particle in a perfect rectangular roster and these particles remain aligned to the image I did work with us before for this effect there are two points why I stopped using it for this particular effect and I can can show you why first of all the problem with the P image imager is that the image remains linked to the particles meaning I have a video so video has noise and the image is changing and on the on the boundaries where I'm moving my hand or so my masks are changing and my transparency values are changing and that means the particles after they are created still change with the image now there are maybe ways around that by basically using freeze-frame for the particle generation but this was definitely one issue by the particle image emitter didn't work that well and the second issue was just because it takes the the image for every every frame or the video sequence for every frame it also takes a lot of computational effort and this one here was much easier to handle the only problem now is it's not that intuitive to get the image onto the particles but it's not that difficult either and I show you how you can do it now so if you use the regular image the regular particle emitter you can go here to the region setting that exists in practically all particle tools and you can decide in which region this tool should be active and here I can choose bitmap now that means that I am using a bitmap meaning a 2d image to define the region in which this tool is active and here active means particles are being generated so let me connect the foreground now to this tool since I selected bitmap as the region I now have a input here to the particle this is there because I made this selection now I have linked the image and if I now see here in 3d space what happened now I definitely need more particles to see what's happening let me increase the number even more 200 mm yeah there you have it so you see that my shape is being used so from the bitmap the Alpha Channel is being used as the region that I'm defining for the particles I can can use this now for the animation and so on but let me also get the color right so to get the color I can go into the particle emitter and here it says color use style color and style color is what you define here so if you want the particles to be brown or some ash color or so from the beginning you can define that here you can also define with color over life can make them change into a darker tone and so on what I preferred actually here in this for this particular effect is not to use this but to use the image itself so that the particle will really look like they're coming from my shirt or from my skin or from my hair right so and to get this I can use not use style color but use color from region and there you have it now it's my self mapped onto particles pretty good start next thing I might want to do is animate them and move them away and I need to make sure that my particles are being generated in some clever way now the question is really how do you want them do you want to create all the particles in the beginning then you can just use frame 0 with a high number of particles and then animate this parameter at frame 1 make the particles 0 and then animate them to disperse or something or the alternative what I want to do is actually I want to kind of dissolve myself step by step and create the particles only where I'm being dissolved so to do that I create a mask which does exactly this effect now let me do this simple way let me create just one simple mask which just moves up and remove myself from the image so let me use let me use a b-spline for this I'm creating one mask which let's say is a little bit wobbly so that it doesn't look too artificial and this mask I want to move up so let me pull it down so I have some space here you can press shift l if you want points to be linear and your and this mask I want to use to remove parts from this picture so for this I should multiply this mask so this is what it looks like should multiply it with the original mask with this picture and to do this year there are lots of different ways to do this what I like to do is I just like to add channel boolean nodes for this now you can use merge you can use transforms the different ways I use ctrl spacebar boolean I find my channel boolean this is basically a channel logic operation sounds a bit complicated in the beginning but it's actually very simple so the operation I want to do here is multiply and if I do multiply and attach the masks to the foreground then what happens is that channel by channel what is coming from the background is being multiplied with the mask and my output is what I have masked out now I wanted to remove and not add so I should probably invert this mask and this way I'm removing now let me animate this mask over time so at frame 0 I want this mask to be out of the frame let me animate the center for this I just animate the the center parameter to be just out of the frame and then let's say it I don't know frame 90 let's say I want myself being completely removed like this okay so before I continue with the particles let's do a simple trick to see how this looks like in 3d and how it looks like over the final background so for this I will add another object into my 3d scene and I will just add I will just add a plane with the image of myself projected onto the plane so for this I have a image image plane 3d is the name of the tool again you can find it on the effects under the tool sections and I'm adding my self on to that image plane now I have my self in 3d and of course the animation now takes place in well 3d and let me see the render and I don't see anything and that's because of the camera position so let me fix that as well and for now I will just deactivate the particles so let's just stick to the image plane here I deactivated the particles and where's the camera it's in the middle of the scene of course so I need to move the camera back and further back until it matches probably I can I can zoom in or actually let me move myself over the background to see if everything is aligned so I'm moving over the clean plate and if I bring this into the view I can now see yeah so actually this looks pretty well aligned and I can again move the camera to make it match perfectly okay so now I have the rotoscope version of myself sitting on the chair of the clean background now if I play the animation this that I am being removed from the background as time progresses like this now what I want to do is I want particles to come in exactly as I am being removed so for this I can actually use this mask here just look at the Alpha Channel for now I can use this mask and I see that this is shrinking and what I want to do frame by frame I want exactly the part that is being removed I want exactly that part to generate particles and the easiest way to to get this to get the particles exactly where the mask is being removed is to use the current mask and the mask from one frame earlier and combine these two I can actually achieve this just with a simple subtraction and time stretcher tool now I just have to be pay attention to which mask I'm using I should probably not use the mask which is masking myself because my hand is moving and so on so from one frame to the next that will not line up but the mask that I'm using to subtract that mask is is fixed I didn't animate that in shape I just move it up the picture so I can use that mask to get this this one frame difference this is this B spline here and I have a tool called a time stretcher which I can use for this control space bout time stretch or no time speed sorry time speed I believe yeah this is the tool this has a delay parameter let me connect it and look on to it on the second [Music] scream so let me bring them in full size so this way they move side by side now if I use the delay you see that with - this one is moving ahead of this one and with plus it's moving behind what do I want plus or minus I want plus I want a delay of one frame let me type it one frame delay and now I can subtract the two masks from each other let me add a channel boolean again again boolean merge whatever is your preferred tool I add so I have to pay attention by default it takes the mask input but I want the background input and foreground input and now if I use subtract let's see what happens I get blank and this is because I'm subtracting from the right area which is one which is bigger than the other one the part that I'm actually carving out so instead of subtracting the foreground from the background I can switch the two tools ctrl t for switching background and foreground now I have switched them in my subtraction operator and now if I look at it now I get the difference so what I have now is I have a boundary here which is just the one frame difference of my subtraction between current frame and last frame and this one frame difference I will now use for my particle generation so instead of connecting the full subtracting the full tool here I will use this one here in to my channel boolean and here I don't see much but I see basically the part of my image which is being affected by this mask comes here into interplay and if I now activate the particles again and look into it in the 3d view actually that's directly move we can look at the render as well and I sometimes you see this kind of effects where ah I made one mistake here I changed the logic here for my particles okay let's look at the particles first and then I have to fix the image plane this one currently doesn't make sense so let me let me actually remove that for for the time being and let's just look at the particles what you see now is that frame by frame my particles are being generated and it's taking a very long time to render for me let me pause this and check again the particle emitter now I'm creating two thousand particles per frame and that was fine to see in the beginning the the picture on the first frame but now I'm actually creating it in slices but I want much less so let's just create let's say yeah 50 or just 20 should be enough and now my playback should be smooth yeah so I am frame by frame slice by slice creating particles and now this particle should be there where I removed myself and for this I already had that before let me restore that now I changed the logic here and let me copy this note and use the B spline as I used it before to subtract and I can add this again to the side let me move it down to the image plane here and the image plane back into the 3d now I'm creating particles exactly in the place where I removed from myself and the particles have limited lifespan that's why they disappear again at the end let me fix that particle emitter lifespan I am using 150 frames and you know it doesn't matter they just should be staying to the end I can just make it maximum or whatever now the particles will stay with me till the end now I will start with the animation and then you will also see why I am working completely in 3d I'm using 3d particles and I projected the rotoscope version of myself onto a 3d image plane and the reason for this is that now particles can in 3d space move before and behind me behind the parts that are not yet dissolved and this way I get a little bit of more depth into into this effect now of course in a perfect world I would have a 3d character model and be working entirely in 3d I'm pretty sure that's how Marvel is doing it but they also have ready-made 3d models for all of their actors and 3d scans and so on and they have slightly different resources at hand but for the homemade version Here I am just trying to get as much 3d as as possible into it with these little tricks to animate particles you basically use forces and you use initial settings of the particles so at the time of creation of the particles you can decide what they should do and you can start them out from the creation with an initial velocity and certain random parameters and spin and and so on so that's a good point to start then they will continue moving like this from the initial velocity onwards and then you can apply forces the most common ones for me are a directional force which just accelerates them in one there action turbulence which makes them you know turbulent fly dispersed and so on and gives more more random behavior and friction is often quite useful now there are a lot of other tools in the particle library if you just look into the the particles you can can see a lot of a lot here what you can do point false you can merge particles from different systems and so on and so on if you're starting out I'll start with those start with the initial parameters give it some directional force potentially potentially some friction which slows them down again or counteracts the directional force and some turbulence to make it more interesting if you start with this you are you already have have the tools for for quite quite nice and interesting effects so giving it some initial settings let me go into the emitter again here I have the velocity settings so I give my particle some initial velocity and I always give give variance because I don't want everything to to look like you know mechanical so if I let's let's actually also see how it's doing so like this maybe that's already fine and maybe I give as variance often I use either the same value or half the value or depends on how much variance you want something less so now you have some particles that move faster than others to see it let me move them here into the empty space I can do this with the angle here so the anger the X angle zero is moving should be moving right yeah so at the moment they are all moving to the right at angle zero so 90 degrees is upwards 45 should be around the diagonal or that less than 45 so I move in this ya know I should see them move upwards let's see ya know they are moving towards this corner we have some some space that they actually make it a bit bigger and again always like some variants so it doesn't look too mechanical maybe maybe half the angle Z now we we want to be in 3d so at the moment if you see in the 3d viewer we are all in one plane now if I add some some Z angle let's say I want them move a bit back then I don't know as a plus or minus mi so invest the camera here's the camera okay - seems to be pointing backwards not too much just a little bit let me actually type it sometimes these controls are bit tricky and but now I want to do enough variance so that some are actually coming to the front so I would make the the variance quite big so let's say 20 so I have a variance from minus 10 under plus 20 and minus 10 and - - so it's from plus 10 to minus 30 if you combine the anger and the variance so this way I should have some particles moving in the front and some in the back does it look like this not much to the front actually what if I increase this even more okay now I get some into the front okay yeah so I have some moving and it seems like they are moving up but they're moving at the same speed as I am the solving so maybe I want them to move a bit faster let me let me increase the velocity just a bit so that I'm getting some particles actually in front of me and the variance maybe as well okay so now you see them moving to the side and some are in front of me some are behind me now it can be hard to see this if you're if you are just in a quick animation maybe you don't realize that something is in front something is impact but even if you don't consciously notice the individual particles you still get an overall impression about it and I think the subconscious or overall feeling when you when you see a clip like this is impacted by these kind of details okay now my particles are already moving now let me add turbulence so that they don't all like move in in one stream and for this P Tribunal's control spacebar P turbulence there I have it and let's see what happens by default not much so perhaps I need to a bit more let's just crank it up yeah this looks more like it so you have okay now you see them maybe even though let's just bring them all well you can play with the parameters maybe that's too much and then especially when you have more particles you can sometimes see these kind of strings of streams or things swirling around it also depends on the density so the density so the strength is how strong the particles are affected and the density is whether the turbulence are happening on a big scale like you know like big words or whether on tiny spins and the best way is always to just dry out and and see how it looks like so this is with the higher density even even higher now I can hardly see it small then I think you can see the the spin a bit more and it will be more visible maybe if you add more particles but then again if we add more particles then also it's it's more difficult to have the like life interactive feeling here okay but for explaining the tool again you can spend hours with these kind of parameters but just for getting a general impression this should be good enough I mentioned the directional force and friction so if you don't want to accelerate your particles from the beginning or if you want to accelerate them later let's say you want some like some wind or some whoosh effect or something come through the scene what I would do in that case is just add a directional force P directional force there we have it and I can animate it immediately let's make the strengths 0 so it has no effect and let's say everything should should go until maybe here and then I want some force to have them like push out of the frame then I animate here and go let's say a few frames for what actually I can just give one kind of impulse let's give over five frames or so I go to full strength and then stop it basically next frame again zero so let's see how that looks like hardly noticeable so either I need a longer duration of the of my push or a stronger push let's go for the stronger push so not much actually I should go for a longer duration because I want all particles affected so maybe I should go until until I'm fully dissolved and then then push also to change my keyframes let me go to the keyframes here I hate this window actually if I do f4 I can at least get the full size here and I can and here I can show only select a tool which is the wrong one sorry I need to select it where is it P directional force this one I wanted and whereas my strength should be here this interface here was much better in fusion 9 actually compared to fusion 16 it's more difficult to navigate them that was kind of feels like a step backward well I am in the better version maybe it gets better soon let's see but it still works so I wanted to come quite a bit out yeah so I'm pretty close to this point and maybe I start a bit later as well so this way I can move my keyframes and [Music] okay and my directional force is going minus 90 actually I wanted to go I think I wanted to go to zero if I want to move it to the right because otherwise my directional force is working against me yeah there we are so now I have a push to the right and maybe even more point let's just double it let's see point four yeah so this way I kind of push my particles out of the frame because I have very strong sudden winds in my office okay good a last point friction I don't think I needed here typically if you use directional force over a longer period of time as long as the force is active the particles are getting accelerated that means they get accelerated and accelerated and so on and it doesn't stop right so if you have particle moving to the left and acceleration to the top then you get like a curved particle trace and stuff like that if you want to limit that acceleration then friction is usually a good thing also if you have particles moving fast in the beginning and you want them to kind of slow down a bit like I mean explode at the beginning and then have the ash fall down or something like this then you should experiment with friction let me keep this for the basic animation not yet the Marvel kind of effect but good start I think for a few very simple steps I might want to change in the emitter I can crank up the number of particles once I'm satisfied maybe instead of 22 I don't know eighty and I can change the size I can have some size variance here so at the moment I have point one that's actually make it smaller I make the size like half zero five maybe and at the same time gives some size variance of maybe also the same also so this way my particles you know don't look all the same when they are created and also they can spin so in under rotation you have have spin so I can just give a little bit I don't think I need much but we'll see in a second again some wherever I put something I also put some variance so that not all look the same I let them spin in all direction but if I remember correctly the spin is quite aggressive these parameters so let's let's see how it looks like now they're almost too fast or maybe too small okay so we can add more size Marian's science variant slit let me make the size variance actually even bigger than the size so we get some big particles and a lot of small yeah okay and then a lot of particles and some color effects and so on and then we are getting close I will save this now as the basic version and I will open the final version now and I will tell you about all the different tricks and what I I did in order to come up with my final version [Music] okay this is my free flow of the final composition and before I dive into it let me show you again the full thing in in full screen and pause a bit to show you a few things first of all you can see that I have all my hair here so I am not using the rotoscope version but I'm using the original plate here and I blend in the rotoscope version only where I'm actually applying the effect so the rotoscope version with not-so-great edges only comes into effect here where where the effect is actually happening but but not on the rest of the picture second of all if you look at the shadow in the background you also see that I'm blending it over so I'm blending and here the shadow has gone now same on the keyboard so in the beginning the shadow is there and here I'm blending over to the final version of course the the chair the problem is still there and I will just mask it by zooming at the end and working in 4k by the way in the real version so I can zoom another thing here is I have massively more particles as you can see but not just more particles but particles of different kind so I am using these n-gon square particles that we used now in the basic version I'm also using point particles you can hardly see them but if you if you look closely or even if you don't see them you might notice them they're like tiny little dots here maybe here on the black you can perhaps see them also there are some big particle n-gons in in the background and so what this is there is actually a layering happening here so I have particles coming up from the front and then I have darker particles from the back speaking of lighter and darker you can also see that the particles don't have exactly skin color but I am desaturating even more so before the particle effect happens I have a little texture crawling over me so that I'm introducing like this kind of falling apart desaturation texture thing where like my skin turns into into ash before it turns into particles and then once it turns into particles the top layer of particles is already tiny little bit darker than this textured part here and then if I go further I have a bottom layer in the center at least not under the arm because there I wanted only smaller particles and then when I come to the main body I have bigger particles which are in the background and at the end I extended the scene so I still have some particles swirling around perpetuated by the turbulence so I have like these single particles floating around now let me show you what this means in the floor so let's go step by step first of all I have my starting from my clean plate by the way I'm working in a linear space that's why I edit this gamma tool if you don't know what that means don't worry about it you don't need to do it basically I'm working in 16-bit float linear space but it's not really necessary for this effect anyhow it doesn't matter for this a color correction on the background plate let me make this a bit bigger here so you see that the shadow Here I am faking a shadow which is then being phased out over time so that's what what this is doing for the background plate you see here polygons and these are let me show you in the big view so they start or black and then I'm doing something some masks like this and basically these are merging between the foreground and the background so this is the real for ground without any masking and if I go over this here just yeah actually this is not entirely the real foreground but they this masks here only control the background area what is happening in the foreground happened once before that happened here so what i'm doing here is i'm using my rotors line to add to merge the clean plate background over the foreground so instead of putting myself over the background i'm actually removing myself from the foreground by inserting the clean plate here and here you see the problem because of difference in the shadow but this part will be behind the particles and it will be again cleaned up by by these masks one step later so if i look into this here you see that these masks actually remove the artifacts from this procedure here so here i have clean plate original plate clean plate being moved over and then afterwards i have here the transition between again trend original and and clean plate by removing these artifacts masking them out so yeah removing myself instead of adding myself that's that's one effect i'm still adding myself into 3d space but now i'm adding only the effect version so i'm not adding the full version i'm adding it for effect only so for the particles the particles can still go behind and before me except for it at the boundaries that will not be accurate so wherever my rotor has not be accurate it will also not be accurate at the end but where the particle moves like before one strain of hair after nobody will see so i don't care about this but for the the whole picture it's still accurate so if i look into the effect preparation i do some 2d preparation first so my original mask where is it now this flow got a bit confusing sorry about that so here i have my mask my cutout piece the same way I did it in the basic version but this cutout piece now also gets the texture so I'm adding a texture here and after the texture ad saturation and even some like colorization so I color it a bit more brown so this is the color that I want to see on the texture and on the particles and how is this coming in this is actually not the the same mask that I use for the particles I created a separate mask which moves in earlier and which moves in slightly different so I have this this soft boundaries here which I don't want for the particles I want this only for this mask I have a soft mask here and I can show you the mask this is the mask and it kind of starts with the arm welds of the particles will start and then here it creeps in a bit from the side and over the shoulder I thought that's maybe interesting and I created this mask this is a very simple mask by the way this is just like a shape like this and shape like I don't know just a few very simple shapes and I use these shapes on the original roto to put these smooth shapes over the original roto shapes now with this I get this colorization effect colorization in texture with the texture in place I am using what we did before I am slicing taking out the slices frame-by-frame which are creating the particles and that is happening here but this time on the darker color eyes diversion so I'm creating the dark particles already with the darker image here but otherwise it works in the same way as I did in the basic version however I am doing this not only once I am doing this two times and the second time here I have or actually three times to be very precise in the second time I am doing another different time delay so this is like what five frames back and this one here is based on I think one frame back let me check one frame backyard so the first one here I create this stripe for one frame back then I go five frames back and create another stripe and another one no sorry this is the same sorry okay so I have my my stripe in two different times and the reason for this is the layering that I do at the end so in 3d here I am rendering my particles multiple times and one set of particles here get transformed and being pushed into the back and let me see if I can show that quickly to you I have here my my cut out foreground image and here I currently don't see anything so let me move a bit forward let me deactivate the particles because otherwise the rendering time will take too long ctrl P for pass through or deactivate this is a shortcut so I'm turning them off and now I can move through and I see yeah I should see myself turned dark and then being removed but not only removed once but I copied the time-delayed image one layer back turned it even darker and put that into the background so there is now the something similar to the basic version just not the colorization and the texture and then a second copy of this time delayed behind and darker and I'm using the second layer to create the bigger and darker particles so I have small and brighter particles in the front and then I which are like peeling off and I still have the background layer which is then turning into the the bigger particles so this is why I have multiple particle systems by the way you could in principle put all into one you can have different emitters in one particle system the reason why I splitted it here is also for performance reasons because I noticed that when I render a single particle stream with lots of particles my CPU usage is still relatively low so I don't think that at least in the current better version and when I'm testing here I think there is not much of CPU parallelization in the particle system so when I started creating different particles and so on I just put it in completely separate streams and now what Fusion at least in the studio standalone version can do it can render different branches here in in parallel so this way I use more CPU cost that's the idea but it has no impact on the effect itself you could also merge everything together directly okay and now of course the the particles itself I have an insane number so here I have point particles and I'm not turning that on now because it will just take time but I'm starting out until here with 800 particles per frame which are being generated and then I ramped it up basically at the point when I move from the arm to the whole body I increase the number of particles so of course the the rotor shape that is cutting out the arm and so on it's also a bit different than in the basic version and the basic version I just used one rotor for all of it and here in this version I I first wrote it out the arm we moved the arm and then removed but the principle is still the same so but that's also why when I'm only removing the arm I use less particles because they are smaller and then I crank up the number of particles point particles here then I have two types of engines one smaller ones with 800 here 2,000 here going up to 4,000 and then at the end the bigger particles for the background I have also still what 100 up to alkylate increases up to 250 now there's a lot of fine-tuning involved and it does take quite a lot of hours to get to a point like this this is also the reason where this tutorial didn't really come out when I thought it would come out which was two weeks ago and this is why my intro originally sounded like this hey guys Avengers end game is coming into theaters this week and then Avengers end game came out before my tutorial and I had to do ADR on my own tutorial Avengers end game has come in two theaters last week yeah sometimes things take longer than planned but I hope you enjoyed it overall there are a lot of different versions which I made in between for example this one here I tried using the particle image emitter I didn't really like the the look of the particles here that's why I changed it later here is a version which I do only with one layer there you have a bit less depth but overall the idea is already here okay for the end maybe some lessons learnt around this if you decide to do a project like this especially if it gets on larger scope as I mentioned before start with as little particles as you can get away with just to get the overall animation right get the overall feel right frame length and so on and only then put up the the number of particles if you can separate it for example I can render only particles which are like the large background particles I can render them separately I can render the four born particles separately just to see how they look and get that right part by power and then at the end put it together again so I can convert quicker in between when it comes to rendering you should have some workflow where you can render temporary versions out to disk that really can can save you in in situations like this if you are on fusion standalone you can use the saver nodes anyways like like always also if you are inside the Vinci resolve they're still the saver node available and you find under the fusion menu you find render savers so you can still use that to directly render from fusion onto disk so you get then the DPX file sequence or whatever and you can render it take a coffee break and 20 minutes later or how long your render takes you come back note the sequence and you can then when you have the full sequence loaded into fusion or into resolve you can jump back and forth in the timeline without waiting and you can look at the whole thing maybe you try some color Corrections on the final render just to see what you might want to apply to the particles or so and then once you have an idea what you want to do next you do everything you want to do next change the particle numbers change the the the color change the mass whatever you problems you find and then you do the next render while having the next coffee break yeah so no matter where you work you should develop some some work through like this that you're comfortable with and where you are not sitting in front of the computer waiting for 20 frames to render only to then change one particle parameter because remember in particles whenever you change one parameter it has to go back and calculate from the beginning particles always go frame-by-frame they move frame by frame so if one force changes it goes back and you have to render everything and if you have the fusion standalone version I think this kind of complexity makes more sense in the standalone version because there is the render manager the loader and saver nodes are still fully functional and so on and performance there's still some performance benefits off of the standalone version that you may take advantage north okay so much for this tutorial now this was quite extensive and I touched based on a lot of different principles tools and concepts if there's anything in particular which you want to learn more about which you want me to explain in detail please let me know in the comments I might do a few more particle tutorials but then on more like individual focused aspects of it in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned on this channel subscribe like and let me know if there's anything in particular you want to see and see you around next time [Music]

Channel: VFXstudy

Views: 59,887

Keywords: VFX, VFXstudy, Fusion, visual effects, Blackmagicdesign, Blackmagic, DaVinci Resolve, Fusion Particles, 3D Particles, Disintegration, Avengers VFX, Avengers effect, Thanos snap effect, Tutorial, Disintegration effect, Resolve 16, Fusion 16

Id: WZmeptVLhpU

Length: 66min 23sec (3983 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2019