DaVinci Resolve 16: pEmitter Tutorial Part 1/2

hey folks so today I want to start a series on the emitter engine within fusion what we're gonna be focusing on is mostly a single node in today's tutorial but there's a whole bunch more nodes that go along with it and the most important note is the emitter node and we're gonna be looking at that now so what the emitter node really is it's where all these little particles will essentially come from and then we can use all these other fancy nodes that we're not going to be talking about today to do some really cool stuff with these particles that come out of the emitter node so before we get rolling I'm just going to head back into the cut page here so up here I have this PNG file it's a pretty small file 64 by 64 pixels and we're going to be using this to help demonstrate our particle system so what I have right now is I have a fusion composition down at the bottom we're just going to go into this here we're gonna go into the fusion page and what I'm gonna do is open up our node editor and I'm gonna kind of start from scratch I'm just going to delete these we're gonna rebuild this pretty quickly so what we have essentially is just our media so this is what we would have at the start of a fresh fusion composition so if I right click here in the node editor and I come down to add tools and under particles I see all these options here a lot of options and I think each of these really deserves a tutorial on their own so I'm gonna focus right now on just the pea emitter as I was mentioning earlier so this is the emitter node called Pete emitter particle emitter I'm also going to bring down a pea render node I'm not going to talk about this too much today but it is necessary if we want to see the effect of the emitter so the media out is capable as playing stills and it's capable of displaying clips and all that type of stuff it cannot take an emitter node as an input it needs this render node that sits in the middle that allows the media out to understand what the emitter node is doing so when we hook up a very simple chain like this we'll get the defaults that we see above here so we're gonna click on the emitter node we're gonna come up here to our inspector and we're gonna focus on all the things that we see here so what I'm gonna do to give us some more real estate I'm just gonna close that close down my node tree so we've got a lot of space to check things out over here so just a just at a very high level the idea here and spending this entire tutorial just on this emitter node so we have a good fundamental understanding of how the source of all these particles works so then when we start to understand this whole particle system the fusion has to offer we can start to generate our own effects because we understand how everything sort of links together so that's really the idea here so I see how my render node selected here so I got to go back into the node tree and select the emitter no that's we're going to focus on now we see everything come up here for the emitter node close down the node tree close down this media pool and let's rock and walk so just to go quickly through all the icons up here so the first one here is our main emitter controls we're gonna go through all these in a little bit well so have assets icon here finally we have a style and we have region so I'm gonna start off actually with the style and the region and first of all I want to make a distinction between what's the difference between a dial and a region so a region essentially is this red circle in this case it's the region in which these particles are going to be emitted from and underneath this region button here we can go through a whole bunch of options where we can change what this region looks like and we're gonna go into that the style is when you look at each individual particle it's what that individual particle looks like so we can change the color of that we can change the shape of that we can change its velocity we can do a whole bunch of things to each of those individual particles and that will be handled under the style button so a good place to start I think is all these different options for different regions so our default here we see is a sphere and of course we can control the size that what I'm going to do right now is I'm just gonna come down to my playhead I'm going to move this back to zero I'm just gonna push play and off we go so nothing too exciting right now we don't have any motion we don't have any effects on any of these particles but this is the basis of our particle system so each of these particles here I'm just gonna head over to style for a minute let's put region on hold and I'll head over to style each of these particles are defined right now as a point so we see here our region drop down so our default here is sphere I'm not going to go through these in order I'm going to go through through these in sort of a what I would get serological fash we can set rectangle as well that sets up as rectangle that gives us a width and a height so I can take this width and I can go up to one which is the sort of full dimension and I can you know drag that up to the top and you can sort of you know once we put some some motion on these particles you can kind of imagine falling rain or something like that right so we can use this rectangle we can also use what's called a mesh now a mesh we're gonna we're gonna skip over this for the purpose of this tutorial because this tutorial I want to focus on 2d the 2d aspect of the particle system there's also a 3d aspect of things and a mesh is essentially a 3d object that we can feed in to define our region so picture something like a like a cloud or something that has a volume a mesh will have a volume and you can set up the particles to be emitted from either just the surface of that volume so let me just choose mesh I said I wasn't gonna get into it but we're not gonna get too far into it the region type we can set to a volume or we can set to a surface so if you picture something like some three-dimensional shape like that let's let's use the cloud as an example we could set up a particle system so that the particles are being emitted from within that entire volume but we're not going to get into that into much detail there is one other 3d object here which is a cube so we're gonna skip over that one as well so we did sphere we did rectangle we looked at mesh we can also have a line when you pick line it kind of just shows up as a point so you got a grab there's actually two of these little handles on top of each other just grab one and drag it over this way and you can see here that all these particles are being emitted along this line looks a little weird now because again there's no motion on these particles so they're all just sort of staying there on the line but that's one one other region that we can use we talked about cube I'm gonna come back to bitmap in just one second and of this actually go to all first all just means entire screen essentially so we can also set up a Bezier curve so when I click on Bezier up over here you see all the Bezier all options and I'm just gonna grab my mouse I'm just going to click some click and drag some random weird-looking shape on the screen and I'm gonna close it off and by joining to that final point and now I've defined that region there so I can do whatever I want here I can select these nodes here I can smooth them out I can grab these Bezier handles and I can kind of do whatever I want so you can get pretty fancy as far as defining a very custom region finally we can come up here to bitmap now before I click on bitmap I want to bring up I'm gonna stop this animation right now I'm gonna bring back our node editor because I want to point out something very important so what you see here let me bring in it let me bring in a fresh emitter no just to just to sort of prove my point here here's the emitter node I'm just gonna drag it in what you notice with a default emitter node is it has no inputs all it has is a single output node that we would connect into our render node right here I actually do have an input and that's a P emitter mesh input and that little triangle showed up as soon as I I'll use this was something as an example I'll click on this emitter node I'll come over here to region I will pick mesh and take a look at the left side of things here there we go there's that little triangle to input a mesh into this emitter node the reason that's still there is even when I go back to any other selection back to sphere or whatever that little triangle doesn't go away so I just wanted to point that out so to keep things less confusing let's just I'm gonna delete that I'm gonna start with a new emitter node hook things up there we go so there's no inputs right now so when we what we just saw is when we select a mesh we can have a little triangle input show up also when we select a bitmap we have another one of these triangles show up and we can tell by hovering over the text says this one here is emitter dot region and then bitmap where's the other one said and mesh so this is where we're gonna feed in an actual bitmap and that's when we're gonna pull in this media pool here under stills I have that icon I'm gonna drag that icon down and it creates a media in I'm just gonna quickly rename that I'm gonna call that arrow because that's that purplish bluish arrow and I am going to feed the output of arrow into the input of the emitter node which is the bit Mountain note and now which you can see is the region I'm gonna play this here the region is actually that arrow shape so this bitmap is actually defining this emitter region and it's using if we go over if we select the emitter we're selecting bitmap we have this this field here which is a region bitmap pointing to arrow because that's the name of our node over here our bitmap node we're set up right now to our Alpha Channel I can also pick different channels so I can pick red green and blue for example so if I pick red you'll notice that those there was a couple lines on the side that had some red color in it those those have a value of 0 in the red channel so we don't see the entire arrow so take a look and switch it back to to our alpha Channel and you'll see there's those sides appear again so if we look down here we also see this little slider that has a low and a high value so what this essentially is is representing is what alpha values do we want to have the emitter emit articles from so to explain that a little bit further what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come up here I'm gonna click on this dual viewer mode I'm going to you know what before I do that what we're gonna do is we're gonna make these particles a little bit easier to see and we're gonna come over to the style and now we're set up as a point what we're gonna do is we're gonna come over here to end go on we're gonna go through this in more detail after but for now I just want to get things set up so we can see things a bit better I'm gonna select this circle over here I am going to take this size control and I'm just going to crank it up a little bit so we can see things a little bit more clearly I'm also going to come over to back to the controls node here and I'm gonna increase the number of particles that we have just to sort of fill in things a little bit so that's good enough for now so what I want to do then is I'm gonna come up here I'm gonna close that fewer down I'm gonna open up our node editor and I'm gonna grab our arrow and I'm gonna drag that arrow into our first viewer here over on the Left close down my nodes again and what we're seeing here is our full color representation of our bit of our PNG file first thing I want to do is comfort this control here and I want to bring this drop down here and I want to select color inspector and then I want to turn that on and what that's going to do is bring up this little guy up here where we can wherever we're scrolling over our image here we're gonna see the red green blue as well as the Alpha values so the RGB we don't care about too much because our emitter is set up to key off of the Alpha Channel so we want to look at these alpha values and we can look at those alpha values directly by coming up to this selector here and coming down to alpha so now we see our alpha mask essentially and now we can start to see how the alpha Channel relates to the actual particles that are emitted so what this white region represents it's basically saying anywhere this this anywhere this arrow here is white that is where we can emit particles from so if you look out into the black space over here we see our alpha value up here is zero when we move into the middle of the arrow we see that alpha value go up to a full one but if you kind of look around these edges here so there's an alpha value of zero point zero two and so on and so on so where we see different edges here these are effectively different levels of transparency and that's where if we go back into our node editor and we select our emitter come back over here into region now that's where the slider comes into effect here so if I bring this value this top value down from one anything that's set up as one here will not be emitting particles anymore so if I bring that down just even the slightest little bit most of our particle emitter region has kind of disappeared in a sense and so all these values that show up here are how have alpha values sort of down in this region that fit in between point five and in this case point nine eight nine so let's take that and move it out a little bit we can take the lower end and we can bring it right down to zero and that essentially includes all the black values so that kind of ignores our alpha mask in a sense we probably don't want to do that but we can set things anywhere in between to just pick up particular alpha values that we want to see here so using this slider one thing we get all so if we wanted to is we could actually invert our masks essentially here by pulling this back all the way down to zero and then we can sort of bring this value down a little bit and you can start to see the inversion of that arrow show up there so if we were to go back here and increase our number then we can get a very clear delineation of that sort of inverted alpha mat since this is a keyframe of all he'd get some pretty neat effects just from playing with this little alpha slider here all right so I'm just gonna set this back here to default value so that's 0.5 and 1 and now we're back to our regular alpha mask I want to point out something quick I kind of alluded to earlier but a potential gotcha that you can run into if I highlight over this arrow here this is the emitter input from the arrow bitmap if you read what it says on the pop-up its dot it's the emitter region bitmap so if I come over to style here I'm gonna changes from n-gon and I'm gonna bring in a bitmap here what I can do or what you notice first here is a new arrow came up here and this is p.m. inner one dot style bitmap so those are easy to confuse if you're not paying attention because you have one that's region bitmap and one that's style bitmap and those correspond to their icons their style and their region icons up here so just something to be careful of so what I can do here is I can take this arrow I can also put this into my channel over here and now I actually see the little arrows as all the little particles so I have an arrow alpha mask defining the region but I also have those little arrows showing up as the actual particles so we're gonna go over all these controls in in a bit but what I want to do for now is I just want to set this I'll keep this a bit bitmap for now I'm gonna go back into my region I'm gonna change my region to rectangle ok so I've gone back to the region and I've redefined it as a rectangle 0.5 0.5 just to sort of keep things in the middle of the screen for now so if we had over here back to controls what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the number and I'm gonna keep it a 10 right now so it's a default of 10 but what happens or what this number means is this is a number of particles that's going to be created per frame so if you look now we're up at frame 103 yourself so if we go back to our first frame we have 10 particles that are showing up here if you're counting there's a couple that are kind of overlapping over here well we can also look at is this life span here so this life span is set up to 100 so that means 100 frames this particle is going to last for so what I'm gonna do for now just to help make things a little bit clearer is I'm gonna set this to 1 so that means each frame these pixel are these these particles are gonna die off and the next frame 10 more gonna be generated so I can see that by coming down to our to our timeline and I'm just going to sort of step through so there's another 10 there's another 10 and so on and so on and so on what we can add to that if we want a little bit of flavor to that as we can look at this number of variants and there's a number of variants for an example say we set this to number 2 what that means is this number of particles generated per frame is gonna vary from 9 to 11 so it's gonna take this value of 2 and it's gonna equally split it below 1 above the value 10 so from 9 to 11 and just to prove that will go down to will change this number here to 3 so this variance now is gonna go from 2 to 4 so if we look at we go through these frames to 3 so we're never gonna see any more than 4 or any less than 2 so our lifespan again this is how many frames that the particles are gonna last for we'll keep this up 1 for now we're gonna be cranking this up a little bit later and then there's also the variance so again that's the same variance on the number of frames and it works in sort of the same fashion as this number variance here down here we have color use style color well our style is actually set to bitmap so there's there's a color associated with it but really the color is coming from the actual bitmap so what I'm gonna do quickly is I'm just gonna go back to this end gone over here so now we're back to these dots just for fun I'm gonna crank up the number a little bit here come back to style and then we can choose your color there so the color is coming from this style there's also another optional if I go back to the main controls here and I pick use color from region so I'm gonna select that now and that's turning into white and we over here to region and there's a it's just such a rectangle is not really a color associated with this region however we can go back to make this bitmap which was our arrow now if you look at this the color are starting to map to the original colors from our bitmap file so I'm gonna put this number back down 10 but what I am gonna do is increase this lifespan here so it increases its lifespan up to a large number of frames then as I scroll through this here and I'd be getting more and more of these particles accumulating and now you can start to see the the the arrow take shape so now I can look at this position variance here now what that does is that's gonna essentially blur the boundary of our region so take a look as I slide this up here so we're starting to kind of exceed the boundaries there so that kind of gives that soft edge of sorts to your whatever your region happens to be so it was a very quick example to show a little bit about this position variance I've kind of keyframe bit so I've gone back I've set the number of particles up to 500 I've taken a lifespan I brought down just to 5 frames and what I've done is I've keyframed position variance so it frames 0 I have a value of 1 and then on my final frame it it comes down to a value of 0 and that value of 0 means there's no variance on my initial region so what you see over time is all these particles kind of forming into a particular shape by the end of the clip okay so I've reset things and I have a sphere showing up here and just a quick note I was mentioning earlier about regions 3d regions talking about the cube and the mesh a sphere is a 3d object as well but we're gonna be just focusing on that on the 2d nature of it right now ok so let's take a look over here at style so we're set up to point right now so what we want to look into is what are these guys down here do so there's an apply mode add and emerge and there's this sub pixel rendered checkbox here as well so let's dig into what those do and in order to look at those what we can do is we can I'm gonna hold down ctrl key and I'm gonna use my mouse scroll wheel to zoom in here and so when you zoom in on this sort of field of particles here you can kind of see a bit of a gridded nature show up here right things are kind of they look like they align to a grid perhaps and of course they do they align to a grid of pixels so if we go over to this here to bring up our magnifier and then I'm going to turn on the magnifier which you can see there is a number of these particles line up on that grid of pixels now you kind of have to ignore the checkerboard pattern in the background and really just look at that screen door grid that you see where the all the all the particles lies so those are those are actual pixels and so those particles sit directly on the pixel grid now what I'm gonna do very quickly I'm just gonna change the color here just to just to show what this apply mode does here so I'm going to go into style I'm gonna go down to color controls color controls I'm gonna take these values down green and blue down to zero and I'm gonna set this to 0.5 so what I'm gonna do now is going to come back over to here to the controls I'm just gonna increase the number a little bit until I see exactly what I want to see here which is this brighter particle right here so what that is that's actually two particles that overlap each other and when we have if I go back to the style control if we have our apply mode set to add resolve is gonna add up the value of those two particles so if I take a look down here this empty space right here is gonna fill up when I said when I mouse over or something so I go mouse over one of these particles over here the red value down in the bottom status bar is 0.5 which corresponds to the value that I've set up over here if I come over this one here and I look at the red value its value is 1 so 0.5 plus 0.5 equals 1 so all it's doing is simply adding up each of those channel values if I come over to this grid here you can kind of see a whole bunch of the bright particles show up so if I come over here to apply mode I changes to merge keep your eye on this one here merge is just going to loops merge those two particles for this frame anyway together and treat them as a single particle so that's what merge does so let's take a look at this sub pixel rendered take a look at this particle filled here when I click this sub-pixel rendered things kind of smear together and if I come look over here we look at our magnified grid and now those particles are not aligned to a specific spot on the pixel grid they're kind of smeared between pixel grids here so that's what the sub pixel rendered checkbox is doing it's on each frame its smearing each of these particles so checking this on can give you potentially a more smoother effect as you travel through a time line but because of the nature of the computations is going on behind the scenes this is a little bit more expensive in terms of the load on your workstation isar gonna uncheck this for the moment and i'm gonna change my style from point down to the bottom here to point cluster so point and point cluster both share these apply mode and some pics will render techtalks there's a couple other options here that point cluster takes a look at so we got way too many particles here it's I really understand what's going on so I'm just hop over here I'm going to bring this down to ten or so and let's just go back to the first couple frames here so there's not too many particles okay right there we see clusters of particles and each of these clusters look to be about five particles each we see over here that there's four but there's a bright one so that means we have this overlap going on so each of these five particles in a cluster and that number is set up in right here at number of points we also have this variance for the number of points in a cluster and that works in the same fashion as the variance options that we looked at previously so I've reset a region back to our rectangle here and let's take the style and now let's take a look at blob here so what blob is essentially think of it as a pixel but you start to have a bit of size control so I can take the size slider and then I can kind of start to move this up here right now my slider is limited to 0.5 I can come in here and I can type 5 for example if I want and I get some pretty big blobs and when do you do that just how these controls generally work now my slider has been reset so now it's set to a maximum value of 8 so just something to keep in mind so what a blob really is is essentially just what you see there it's kind of a blurred circle I'm gonna increase the size just so we can take a look at this and increase the size I'm going to decrease the number a little bit so that a little bit more clear okay there we go come back into style and I have this noise control also so we can put some noise on these blobs I'm also for now for this this video gonna skip velocity and Z scale here because we're starting to talk in different dimensions and also I'm gonna handle all the velocity stuff in the internet further tutorial tutorial we can however look at the size over life here so what if we want to do let's take some blobs just even do the thing I'm gonna just reduce the size just a little bit here at the start and what we'll want these blobs to do is perhaps grow over their life so I'm gonna just drag up a note here and so what you can see I'll just let that loop is if we look at a particular blog we see the size increase up to a point and then sort of decrease to the end of its life and the X scale here is determined of course by its life lifespan I can select notes here and I can push s key same thing the same same shortcuts that I would use in the spline editor apply here and so I can drag these little guys down and I can do whatever I want here so just by doing that you can start to get some pretty neat effects there we can also take a look at a brush style and so what we can do is we can choose our brush so let's go through a few of these so here's this metal ball some of these are potentially useful some are a little bit a little bit cheesy this little fish one so there's a whole bunch of these defaults so I'm not sure how many of these you would use I probably if I was gonna want to use an image I would come and use the bitmap I would have a little more control but in any case if you want to check through some of these defaults there's some ones at the bottom here these little star ones okay maybe those would be alright one thing to note as you can see this star here happens to overlap and it's kind of cutting off this star well I can use our alpha so keep an eye in this region here if I take our alpha and I bring it down to zero it starts to blend them all together so I can use this alpha control to handle that kind of thing so not sure how beautiful brushes maybe you'll find useful this is definitely a cool one we're gonna look at this a lot more when we start to play with velocity and stuff because this is how you can create kind of a star field effect or something right then we're back here to end gone and gone is what we were looking at before so an end gone is an n-sided polygon so a hexagon would be a six gone or six sided polygon the sides we can define right here and gone sides were set to five by default there's a bunch of these end on types some of them are circles so they kind of ignore this number of sides but let's just sort of go through these real quick I'm gonna increase the size of this right here these here so we can just see them a bit a bit more clearly so if I click on this circle so I sort of get this blurred circle different effect circles here's just your straight old polygon so this is a solid polygon and you'll notice the starting this control here starting this kind of just pinches these things in or Bowes them out so watch what happens when I want to move this starting a slider if I set it down to a value of zero with about zero I'll just go directly to zero that means it's just gonna have these straight sides if I go to a negative number it's gonna convex them if I come to a positive numbers gonna concave them so then I also have some neat little effects here that I can see so this is uh what's this one called and gone star different shadings so shading from the inside out to the outside in vice versa and then I just have circles over here all right so we're roughly halfway through all the stuff that the P emitter can do so I think this is a good place to call it call it quits for part one so we'll be back in a few days we're gonna take a look at all this color controls we're going to go back into looking at velocity rotation spin we're gonna start to introduce the 3d aspect of the particle system so a lot of good stuff to come if you made it this far thank you so much much appreciate it and we will talk to you talk to y'all soon

Channel: Darren Frenette

Views: 5,630

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Id: CxNoApHCLzU

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020