DaVinci Resolve 16: Fusion Spline Editor Tutorial

hey everyone today we're gonna be looking at the spline editor in some detail and the spline editor lives in fusion but in order to get the spline editor up and running we have to have something to actually keyframe to do some animations upon so to do that what we're gonna do is we're going to start on the Edit Page I've refresh project here we're gonna go up to the effects library we're gonna come down here to effects we're gonna grab a fusion composition we're gonna drag that into our timeline now a fusion composition is simply an empty sandbox where we can add a bunch of nodes and do whatever you want within Fusion so we're gonna be setting up a very basic animation and the purpose of that animation is not going to be certainly to win any awards it's going to be just to show off what the spline editor can do so let's get right into it so we've created our fusion composition it defaults to 5 seconds long currently our frame rate is 24 frames per second the default frame rate on a new project so 24 times 5 is going to give us a hundred 20 frames so when you go on a fusion we can see if we look on this bar here which is counting all our frames for this particular fusion element we see this bar here is it 118 it's counting by 2 so this yellow bar over here represents 120 so I'm gonna close down temporarily the spline editor the spline editor is this window down here I can turn that on and off by coming up here and I click spline off it goes right now we just have to have to set up a basic animation here ok so we have a clean node editor we only have this media out node and everything that we add has to tie into that media out node and that will represent what we actually see with our Fusion element so right now we're just gonna create a background so I'm gonna grab this background node from over here I'm gonna drag it in I'm gonna connect this up to our media out we're gonna take that background and we're going to from the color selector up here and take this pure red red 255 now what we want to do is add a mask on top of that a simple rectangle mask will do for our purposes here so I'm gonna drag his mask down here and then hook the rectangle up to this here so this is called rectangle 1 background 1 so we see here that this rectangle mask wherever that rectangle is defined shows through to the red background so right now this is centered at five point five and the way the coordinate system in fusion works at zero zero down here and one one up at the top right so point five point five is right in the middle so what we want to do with this is we want to take our width and our height and we're going to set it to point one and point one so what point one essentially represents is 10% of the width or the height of the screen now what we want to do is set up some simple keyframes here so now I'm going to bring back the spline editor remove this over here so we have a little bit of room and what we're gonna see is when we add keyframes we're gonna see stuff being added into this spline editor window over here so what we want to do is a very simple animation I want to keyframe this at frame 0 I wanna we're gonna keyframe its width so over time I'm gonna have this bar just expand and width and then contract down to this size again so what we want to do on frame zero here let's come down and click width we're gonna move up to 30 frames and then we are going to change that value to 1 so the full width of the screen and then up at 60 we're gonna bring that back down to point 1 so it's a very simple animation I'll play it right now let's just go back to the start and we play that it goes 60 frames is back down normal and the second half of the frame since this frame is there's the second half of the animation since this animation is 120 frames long it's not doing anything that's ok so what we see here is we see that this spline has been added to this blind editor so just to make it fit we're gonna click on the zoom to fit okay so now let's take a look at the spline editor and see what we actually created there but first let's look over here at the left this here is the parameter section so what we see here is we see the width parameter which is the parameter that we're keyframing on that width parameter is a child of rectangle one rectangle one is over here and we're sweeping the width so this yellow in this case this yellow spline here represents the key framing and the sweeping of the so what we do is we single left click on this and we're gonna pick that same 255 red okay so now let's take a look at what was actually generated here so if you look on this top axis this x-axis here it's in terms of frames so we see our 0th frame right here and now the zeroth frame if you follow this down we see this control point that was created here that was when we had our frames over here set to zero and we set our initial keyframe this is what was created and if you follow this value over the y-axis this here is the point 1 that we had set up in our width control so when we bring the playhead back to 0 and we follow this down here we see point 1 show up here we look up at our width and we see point 1 here and as we move the playhead keep an eye up here on this width value as it ramps up to 1 which is the full width of the screen so there we go we can see it changing over on the right and we can see it changing up on-screen as well so that's what the two axes are we have our frames up here and we have the value of whatever parameter that we happen to be keyframe me on now take a look at these little check marks here when there are check marks like this that means you can grab these control points and you can edit them and do it every one with them if you click on this check mark it turns into this circle here that means the spline is still gonna show up but you can't control any of the control points you click it another time it just disappears altogether so we're gonna keep this on full edit mode for now we're gonna zoom to fit again I want to start talking about these all these features on the toolbar down here but before we do that what I'm going to do is I'm gonna duplicate this bar I'm going to change its color essentially so we'll have two of these bars and we can change one of them and we can watch how they kind of behave relative to one another so let's get that set up real quick to do that I want to get rid I'm gonna double click on this and I'm going to detach the media out and you notice nothing shows up here because nothing is attached to our media we're going to grab these two here I'm gonna control C control V to make a duplicate I'm gonna change these names here because it's I didn't like the default naming convention that it shows so f2 to do a rename and I'm gonna just rename it rectangle to and background to now what I'm gonna do with this background color here instead of making it red I'm gonna change this to blue so I come up to this color picker here and we're gonna pick this blue here which is full 255 blue 0 0 red for red and green now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this background here and I'm gonna display it on viewer 1 I can take this background here I'm gonna display it on view or - we're gonna ignore the media out for a second so I come down on background 1 I click on this viewer 1 node and then I see our red one there and I come up over here and we see our blue over here so right now once we merge these two together and pipe them to the media out node they're gonna be on top of each other so I just want to change the position so we're gonna take this mask and I'm gonna move this up slightly so I'm gonna take its Y value and I'm gonna change that to 0.6 and I'm gonna come to the blue and I'm going to change that to 0.4 now I can take a merge node which is right here bring this merge node in and I'm going to bring these two together toss up the media media out it turns red now because it's not showing on any of the displays I want to put that up on display too and now we see both of our bars together with our final media out node so I'm also just gonna switch it up here to a single viewer so if I go back to frame 0 I'm gonna play this end animation when I did it when I did a copy the rectangle number 1 had those key frames attached to it so when I did a copy and a paste those key frames were copied over as well so both of these when I push play should do the animation and sure enough there they go okay so now I'm gonna take this bottom one rectangle 2 I'm gonna change this color here to blue pure blue now take a look over here because they're fully overlapping this blind shows up as purple that's because you combine red and blue you get purple once we start moving these nodes around you'll see the individual colors of the individuals blind once they're offset from each other okay so now we're done our noble to editing so I'm gonna turn that off just to give us some more room so I come up here I click on nodes and now we have our full bottom half of her screen dedicated to our spline editor and again I'm gonna come over here I'm gonna click on zoom to fit and there we go and notice how this fits only up to the sixtieth frame because that's where our last keyframe resides even though our fusion animation goes all the way up to 120 so there's a couple controls up here which are for vertical and horizontal zooming so I want to zoom out a little or zoom out a little bit there we go and I can use the scroll bar down at the bottom here so now I have my zeroth frame starting here and 120 is up around here so I'm just gonna play that and we're in we have our loop set to on here so it's just gonna loop continuously just very quick these yellow bars at the ends here they're set to the zero width and one hundred and twentieth frame right now I can pull these in and it's effectively shorten my animation so if I grab this one over here and I pull it into whatever 46 when it loops it'll just start to this frame here the same thing goes on with the other guy but we want to do this full full spread here so we're just gonna let it rip here we have time zero starting here so you can ignore everything off to the back one nice addition to the interface would do have a slightly different color when you're outside of the frames that you're looking at but in any case here's our zeroth frame here so here's where we start what's happening right now is we're taking this width parameter and we're sweeping it straight up to number one so we're doing this transition in a very linear fashion we're ramping right up to one and immediately when we hit one we're coming back down back down to zero and so as I've talked about in my last videos this is kind of like a car accelerating from zero to full speed with no time for acceleration in between it's not a very natural feel it might be what you're going for but if you're going for something that feels a little more organic we're going to want to take this spline and we're going to want to curve it out a little bit so one of the easiest ways we can do that is we can look at our tool bar down here and the first thing I want to concentrate is these first six controls on the tool bar those are called control point interpolation controls and they are going to interpolate or work in between of the control points hence the name control point interpolation so these here again in terms of terminology are called control points so the control point interpolation toolbar buttons are going to determine how this line behaves between each of these control points so let's take a look at this very first one here called smooth so what I'm gonna do is I want to only work on our blue bar at the bottom and I want to keep our red solid so from what we learned before we can click on this once here that's going to effectively turn off the spline for rectangle one so we're only gonna be working on the control points and rectangle two so I can do a select all here I can do a box select like this or I can alternatively come down to this button here which is select all that's gonna grab all my three control points in this case and I'm gonna click the smooth button so now first thing that we see is we see the individual colors of the individual splines still purple down here because they overlap but here we see the red that hasn't changed it's still doing this linear interpolation between the control points but now we have this blue is a nice smooth curve here and if you take a look at the animation you can see the blue is moving a little more organically there's some elasticity to it almost so it has a bit of a more natural feel so that's just a the most simple thing that you can do to add a little bit of life to your animation to any animation now say that boxy sort of mechanical animation is what you're going for similar to the red one I can do a select all again and I can click the second tool on the toolbar here and that will set it back to linear now the two splines overlap each other okay so now if we take a look at this invert button here so this invert button no matter what I do doesn't actually seem to do anything according to the manual if you if I were to select these two nodes for example and I were to click invert it would put this one up to the level of of this guy here and it would bring this one down to the level of this one here no matter what combination of nodes I select or what mode they're in it doesn't seem to ever enable so either I'm using it wrong or there's there's a bug with it if I am doing something wrong please let me know in the comments below and I'll put an edit in the description to rectify that in any case we can move on to these next two ones here so these here are called step in and step out if we want to kind of go away from these organic smooth curves we're talking about we can kind of go to the extreme the other way and do essentially steps in between different nodes so let's get that set up and see what that looks like so I'll go back to linear mode just for a moment what I'm gonna do I'm gonna turn off rectangle - I'm gonna enable rectangle one and I'm gonna add a couple more nodes in here so I'm gonna you can just click anywhere on on one of the lines and you can add a new note a new control point story so I'll add one there I want it frame 10 and then I wanted it frame 40 and I'll add one at frame 50 now what I can do there is when I select all these nodes I'm gonna select step in so what step in does is it goes in towards the next node and then when it hits the next node on the timeline it jumps up to that value and so on and so on and so on and gives you the staircase effect so I'm just gonna for the moment I'm gonna turn that one off I'm gonna turn on rectangle two I'm gonna do the same thing and then add nodes at those key points then I'm gonna select all those and instead of a step in I'm gonna do a step out now I'll show the two together and you'll see how they differ a little bit so step in we go over horizontally to the next node then we jump up to it whereas with step out we make the jump first then we Traverse horizontally and so on and so on and so on so I'll play these two together so we can see how they look so again the red is step in that's this one here and the blue is step out so here we go let's move it back to the start so again using this it's a very digital discreet nature that you see here so that could be something that you're going for and that's where these will come in useful okay so I've kind of reset things a little bit I've gone back I've taken rectangle one which is a red spline here and I set it back up to linear interpolation between all the control points and I have rectangle to set up with just the default click of this smooth function here so what I'm gonna do is I want to turn I just want to focus on the blue spline right now it's a rectangle too so we can we can do that a couple ways we can turn off rectangle one in our parameter tree here or we can also come over to these ellipses here I can click on that and I can select show only selected tool and so nothing shows up right now because I have nothing selected but as soon as I select rectangle two which is what I want to work on that's what's going to show up over here so I can hold my mouse wheel down my middle mouse button and then I can drag anywhere here and again I can scale with these two controls up here and I can scroll with a slider down here or this one over here one of the things we haven't talked about yet when we select one of these control points you see these Bezier handles that's what that's what these guys are called over here and what that does is when you grab these Bezier handles is it really allows you to shape your spline in whichever way you want so if I want to skew this over to the to the left here I can pull things this way now you notice when I move one that the other one kind of rocks along with it like a teeter totter I can control select either one of these if I want to sort of break that symmetry and then I can independent there and I can move these independently so let me just go back to the default smooth here okay that looks good so let's just go through a very quick example of how I would use these Bezier handles to change my animation so let's say I wanted the blue box to expand really quickly and slowly come back down to its original size so first I could maybe just grab this control point I can skew it over a little bit to the left I can take this Bezier handle and I can kind of pull things out this way here and what I like what I don't like down here maybe is that this is a little bit too abrupt so I can select this one which it's own handle and I can pull this out a little bit so what this is gonna do it's gonna do a very slow start and during this quick transition here it's gonna snap up almost to its full size and then slowly come to its full width as we reach our maximum here and then it's gonna do almost this linear slide back down so let's take a look at how that looks we'll go back to frame 0 and we're gonna play so you can see there we go we get that very quick transition here in a much slower transition as we come back let's say I want to reverse that I want to have a slow entrance and a quick exit and I can come down to the 6 tool on the tool bar which is reverse and that will just flip things around so now as we as we come back the playhead we can see that expand slowly and quickly come back during that transition there so we know that our fusion animation is 120 frames we're only really using 60 so we go up to 60 frames as we come over here and then for 60 to 120 it's not really doing anything let's say I wanted to copy this over and make a duplicate out over here but I didn't want to set up new splines and do the same edits and all that type of stuff I can use what are called the spline loop modes there's three buttons on the toolbar that will control these modes so let's go through those one by one so I can select all my notes here and the first one I'm gonna look at here is the set loop and when I click that it's gonna duplicate essentially what I have and it's gonna go on and on and on for all eternity really our clip ends at 120 but visually this repeats sort of sort of forever but now the beauty here is any edits I do on the original get applied to the copies as well so that's a pretty handy tool this next one here is what's called okay I select all my nose what is called set ping pong and ping pong is gonna take a mirrored copy as its first copy then it's gonna flip it again and again and again so it's gonna ping pong back and forth between this original orientation a mirrored version of it and so on and so on and so on so the last tool you want to take a look at here is this set relative now what I've done right now is I've kind of gone and I've set things back to our initial state we're just using this smooth control here to get this I put on the set loop mode and you can see what we get here is this pattern repeats I'm gonna put the playhead where our spline ends and the copies begin so right here so if I grab this node here and I move it up well you can see what happens we're gonna take an exact copy of that and you're gonna see this big discontinuity as we jump down towards the starting point over here and we repeat and repeat and repeat the difference between that and set relative is I'm gonna undo that so now I'm back into normal mode I'm gonna click set relative I click on that and you notice nothing really changed until I grabbed this node here and move move it up and as I move this node up take a look what happens to all these humps over here we see them all kind of scale up so what's happening is it's still repeating the pattern but I've set my starting point relative to where my last control point was located so this is a good tool to use if you have some trend that you want to establish and have that trend sort of repeat where you grow and shrink something consecutively over a number of iterations ok I will undo that bring that back down to zero I'm gonna grab these nodes here and I'm gonna just take off that repeating mode and I want to just show a couple extra of these controls here so the first one here is this click append so right now if I click anywhere outside of us blind nothing really happens if I click on this blind I'll create a new control point but in click append mode wherever you click a node is gonna be created exactly at that point so up here I would click and I'm still holding so I can drag in you late a little bit down here I could click and we get another note created there so it's just a different way we can enter different control points so I'm going to come out of that mode here we go over to this next control here and this is our time stretch and that really does what you think so I can grab a bunch of nodes here I can come into time stretch mode and I have to move my playhead because it's covering this white bar here so these two white bars signify the start and the end of the control points that we've selected and I can grab either one of those and I can just stretch it over time shape box this is a pretty cool one I can click on this I can select a bunch of nodes it'll create this box around it with all these handles on it and I can just skew that box however I want and as I skew that box it's gonna affect the control points inside that box so for any 3d modelers out there this would kind of be akin to having a face sort of set up and you want to grab that whole face and sort of squash it a little bit to give it a bit of a different look you have most things set up how you want but you want to do these squishes or pushes or pulls to kind of fine-tune things so pretty cool and finally we have this control here I'm gonna go out of this box mode we have this control here and all this shoki markers all this does is wherever there's a control point it'll show these keyframe markers up top here so it just gives you a little extra visual indication all right so the final thing I want to look at is these controls down here so when I select a node it's gonna show me my current time which is my 30th frame it's also gonna show what value it is which is one so for either these I can just put in what I want so I want to change that to 0.5 okay there we go done I'm gonna do an undo and same thing with the time if I want to move this up to frame 30 to 35 for example I'll just put 35 in here and off we go let me just undo that again there's also a drop-down menu here some time you can take a time offset so if I wanted to go to 35 from here instead of entering 35 I would just enter oops I may reflect this again I would select time offset and I would select 5 frames so that would be positive five frames in this direction I can enter negative numbers as well so I put negative five that's gonna snap me back to frame thirty so there's also this time scale option I don't fully understand this I'm gonna skip over this one here when it comes to value though value is pretty straight forward offset we can do the same thing so I want to take this down to 0.8 so my offset from 1 would be negative 0.2 then I'm down to 0.8 I also have this scale factor here so if I wanted to take that point eight and go down to point four that would be half the value so scaling factor of 0.5 that brings me down to 0.4 alright well we've covered pretty much everything I wanted to cover as far as the spline editor is concerned thanks a lot for checking this out and take care of we'll see you all soon

Channel: Darren Frenette

Views: 4,978

Keywords: davinci resolve 16 key keyframe fusion editior spline bezier control point linear smooth handles

Id: wEOA-BcDMtE

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020