Davinci Resolve 16: pVortex Fusion Tutorial

hey everybody today i want to talk about the p vortex node so this is a node that exists in the particle emitter system and this is really the start of a series that i want to do that just explores each one of these nodes in detail and the idea here is to sort of poke the node a little bit and sort of see what it does because the documentation is the documentation makes a lot more sense after you kind of have played with things let me put it that way so i just like to point out that i'm by no means any expert i'm really just sort of playing with these little things and sort of seeing what happens and some some pretty neat effects kind of come out as a result of that so if there's some other really interesting uses for this vortex node please let me know in the comments and maybe i can look at doing a tutorial on something a little more specific so the goal here is really not for you know me to be saying here's how this thing shall be used it's really a conversation sort of back and forth to say okay here's what i've observed that these tools can do and let's sort of see what we can build all right so let's get into it so what we're going to do is start off with a new fusion composition so i'm going to grab this fusion composition drag it down here and we're going to head right into fusion there we go we only have our media out and we want to set up a very basic particle system so we're going to start with our p emitter node over here then we're going to bring down a p render over here we're gonna also bring in a 3d renderer over here because we want this all to be in 3d and then we're going to hook all these up now when you take a look click on your p render and you'll come over to output mode here it's going to it's just if it's set to 2d switch that to 3d and we want it to come into this node here and then we hook all these up and sure enough we have our very basic particle system ready to roll right there before we go any further let's bring a camera in because we're going to be using a camera because it's going to really help us look at different angles to really understand what's happening when we bring in our vortex node so let's bring that in camera is right over here 3d camera and we're going to hook that up to our render node not a 3d render node that's over here this is just a regular p render node so now we're going to click on the camera we're going to drag it up to this viewport over here what we see right now in this viewport here i'm going to make this single view right now and i'm going to give us a little bit more space so right now we only see our camera in here if we want to see our particles also we're going to take our p emitter and drag it up now you can see the particles in there and we look that our camera is sort of you know the lens of our camera is essentially right in the middle of this blob so we want to grab our camera which is over here and we're just going to drag it back a little bit so we can sort of see things normally and i'm going to go back in a two-up display here and i'm going to take the media out and i'm going to put it over on the right and i'm going to come up to here and i'm going to take this checker underlay and i'm going to click on that so we have a black background instead of the checker underlay so now we can see things from the camera's perspective as well as we can sort of rotate around the viewport here so alt middle mouse button lets you rotate like this holding just the middle but mouse button kind of lets you pan around like this so i'm going to click on the p emitter here i'm just going to move things around and i'm going to push d and that should center this in the screen okay so if you ever want to center your selected object just press the d key after you have something selected and again i hold alt and then that sort of locks this right to the middle of the screen so when i rotate i rotate around that particular object it's pretty handy so to keep things simple we're going to change the emitter region to do that we select our p emitter over here we come up to region that's this over here now region is defining where the particles are being emitted from so in this case our region is the sphere so that's where all the particles are burst from i don't want to use a sphere i want to use a rectangle i'm going to select rectangle and here we go so now when i play this all these particles are just sort of born in this rectangle they're not really moving anywhere right now okay that's all well and good so we'll stop that and i just want to lay this flat down so we're going to come down to x rotation and we're going to put 90 degrees now we've sort of flattened that out oh it looks like we're our z axis is pointing down now maybe we want to point that up so i'm going to go at negative 90 degrees there we go so let's keep it nice and simple like that and what we're going to do is we're going to bring in our vortex node right now so i'm going to take the p emitter and drag this back a little bit right click here or actually i won't right click i'm going to hold shift spacebar it'll bring up our select tool and i'm going to type pv for particle vortex and that comes up here i'll select that and i'll click add that adds it right over here i'm going to drag it on this line here and i'm going to hold down the shift key and when i see that line sort of come up underneath that means it's going to sort of snap into place so i let go of things and now we put our vortex in line so let's take a look at what's going on so i'm going to zoom out a little bit i'm going to take this vortex and i'm going to move it up here i just want to move it out of the way a little bit now that we have this going we can start to understand how this vortex system works so what i'm going to do first though is i'm going to go back to a one-up display over here single viewer and then i'm going to click on this little note up here this quad view and that's going to set up a bunch of different orthographic views as well as a perspective view so let's just take a few minutes just to get this set up exactly how we want so the top view so that's okay so i'm going to keep this as top view i'm going to kind of zoom in on that this one over here i'm going to change this to front view let's say so this is looking in the xy plane i'm going to change this bottom one here to perspective so this is the one where we'll be able to sort of zoom around on and then this one here will go right and we'll zoom in a little bit here okay what i want to do is i just want to make things a little bit easier to see so right now these particles are all point particles i want to make them a little bit larger so so in order to see them a bit better i'm going to come over to p emitter i'm going to come over here to style so region remember defines where the particles are coming from style defines what the particles look like so the style here is point and i'm going to click the drop down and i'm going to pick blob what i'm going to do though is i'm just going to stop my animation right now because sometimes and i'm also going to save because sometimes when you switch to uh point which is very simple for your computer to handle to something a little more complex um you can cause a crash here so i'm going to pick blob and then we see these blobs show up sort of really quite large so i'm going to come down to the size control and i'm going to bring that size uh down considerably and there we go so i selected .005 that seems to give a little bit of volume but but it's still running pretty smooth our playback is running at full steam 24 frames per second so in terms of what controls sort of show up in here if i select the vortex and the emitter down here well then both both the controls show up on screen so i can see the region where my particles are coming from as well as i can see this sphere of influence i guess if you want to call it from the from the p vortex node okay so let's start looking at things here so we got our vortex node and it's selected up here so let's start diving in what does this vortex thing do so if we take a look at the controls up top here first we have our controls these are our main vortex controls this is where we're going to be spending all our time today so there's really not a lot there but let's dig into these sort of one by one to sort of see what happens so first let's take a look at our translation so our x offset y offset and z offset so we've changed our y offset that's when we just moved this sort of up and down a little bit right so we just moved it up to some random place so whatever value is is fine for now and our offset for x and a and c are set to zero so all that is is really a translation in space so that section pretty easy let's concentrate on these right here so strength and power so in order to sort of see what each one of these does let's sort of zero one of them out and look at them one at a time so let's take our power and we're gonna bring that down to zero okay so what happened there it looks like these things kind of sped up a little bit as far as how fast they're kind of going around the circle so let's leave power for a moment and we'll just take a look at strength let's just play a strength for a bit right now it's set to one so let's set that to zero just to kind of confirm that that's not doing anything so that's basically turned off our vortex so that's obviously not really that fun so we'll turn that back to one and we're going to answer the question as to why things are kind of going this way in a little bit we'll get back to that in a second so let's just take a look at this so what this vortex notice is sort of supposed to do is imagine these particles are sort of caught up in this swirling vortex that you'd see here and you can kind of by looking at the particles kind of envision what that sort of vortex would would look like if you were able to see it so let's play with strength a little bit so right now i have my animation running up to about 120 frames here so it looks like the speed of these particles at the end of 120 frames makes it up to you know roughly around here so let's just play with the strength and see what it does i'm going to crank it up to two okay we see the particles are moving faster and we make it all the way around to here so the vortex is sort of working harder in a sense so each of these particles is caught up in a larger storm as we increase the strength so to speak okay so we're two so what would happen if we set that to negative two oh we're going the opposite direction so negative values are really just changing the the direction of where this vortex is sort of swirling okay so that's all well and good so let's go up to 5 for example really crank this up okay very cool now we're getting somewhere first of all we've created a ring of particles so there's thousands of uses for something like this but in any case looks pretty neat here so as far as this setup is concerned what this what the with strength does is effectively control the speed of these particles here and it's doing that indirectly by changing sort of the strength of the vortex if you can think about it that way let's try a little experiment let's take this p emitter node and i'm going to duplicate that and i'm going to create another one so what i'm going to come down i'm going to click on p emitter i'm going to ctrl c to copy it i'm going to click in this empty space and i'm not going to push ctrl v i'm going to push control shift v and that's going to create what's called an instance and an instance is effectively a direct copy of this first emitter so anything i change in this emitter will change in this emitter and vice versa so to make this a little more useful we want to de-instant some of the parameters and one of the parameters that i want to de-instance and by d instance what i mean is sort of decouple it from this first emitter note here so let me show you what i mean here's the instance so i select this instance of the p emitter and i want to change its position so to do that we come to the region and it's going to be this translation here this xyz so we want to right click on this and we want to go d instance this translate group so what that means is this translate group here so these three values here are now independent from this one here okay so now we have our instance created so we want to raise this up a little bit so we're going to take our y offset and we're just going to bump it up a little bit now right now we see here's our new emitter up here i'm going to select them both so we can keep them in the perspective view this one's not emitting anything and the reason is is because it's not hooked up to our particle system so i'm going to just bring this back a little bit delete this line here by double clicking on it join these two together that's going to create a merge and then i bring this back into our vortex node here and now we see we have these two rings so one thing to take a note of let's focus on this top view here so at the start of the animation you can see these two rings kind of racing around and it looks like nobody wins the race it's kind of a tie right the outer ring is moving a little bit faster because it's traveling around a larger radius but they both look like they end back at the starting point at roughly the same time and the reason that is is because our power for this vortex is set to zero so think of strength as how much this vortex node is going to affect our particles but power is related to how far away the particles are from your source so the further a particle is away once we start playing with power we're gonna see a fall off over distance so let's just set this to one so keep your eye on this this one up here so again no one's winning the race here so let's come to our vortex node here and now i'm gonna take power and i'm gonna change it to one let's take a look what happens okay now we're starting our animation there we go what i'll do is i'm gonna just deselect this vortex node from down here so the control doesn't show up alternatively i could come up here and i could unclick show controls take that checkbox off that would turn off the green thing but let's just keep that on and i'm going to just deselect everything okay let's take a look at what's happening here this inner circle is now much faster this outer circle is now much slower that kind of makes sense because we've put a value in power so what that means is there's a fall off over distance now so everything that's further away from the center point here is going to be affected less by this p vortex node so you can get a sense of how these two controls work in conjunction again strength is sort of your overall strength but if you have your power set to zero you can go out to infinity away from your origin of your p vortex node and you're still going to be affecting particles when you start to introduce power you're going to be introducing a falloff over distance now it's going to be a fall off over distance when the power is set to a positive value if i set this to a negative value which is completely valid we're going to see over distance not a decrease in the effect of the p vortex node but an increase so what we would expect to see is after i press enter here is the outer circle to be winning the race let's do that now and there we go we see that outer circle sort of win the race so that's all this power is doing it's determining how particle is going to be working over distance so the further away you are if you want those particles to be affected less you want to use a positive number so i crank that up to 5 and look how slow things are going on this outer circle i can also put a negative number if i want things further away to be affected more so it's pretty powerful sorry okay so keep things simple i'm gonna take that power i'm just gonna turn it back to zero for now okay so for now i just wanna turn off this bottom instance here so i'm gonna come up here i'm gonna click on this little toggle switch here and it looks like it's turned them both off that has to do with the order it looks like that these are connected into the input so i'm going to select this p merge i'm going to hit ctrl t and now we have this bottom instance that's off and we have our p emitter that seems to be working just fine so that's perfect for now so let's dive a little deeper then into the vortex so i select my vortex node again and we come up here and we look at strength and power we understand how those work now our translation yeah we're good with that now we have size which is just the size of this of this control here i'm going to leave size for now because there's a demo that i want to do outside of this sort of ring demo that might explain the size a little bit better now angle x and angle y what do these do here okay well let's take a look at it so let's start off with angle y so remember y is our vertical axis here it's the green one so what y should do is sort of spin this ring around that so let's start off with a value of 45 degrees let's say and we'll get all our views in order here and there you can see that 45 degree angle from this top view and we can spin it around to whatever we want so 90 degrees or something so that's all this is doing it's just effectively rotating the effect of this vortex around that y axis and we're going to put that back to zero let's take a look at what x does we're going to do this in steps here okay so we're going to start off by i'm going to just do 10 degree steps so i'm going to start off with zero i'm going to change it to 10 and we see it kind of bowl over that way so here's the x axis right so you picture this vortex kind of rotating around that x-axis and kind of lying down in the sense so let's sort of take a look at what happens then we go to 20 degrees goes over a bit more i'm going to go right to 45 okay we see kind of shrinking down there i'm going to go up to 60. kind of got this weird shape here we're going to go up to 80 condensing down into sort of the original source and just sort of swirling things around there and finally up to 90 degrees so it's sometimes tough to really i'm gonna go back to zero here sometimes it's tough to sort of visualize what that vortex is doing and it's better just to sort of come in and play with these values and sort of get a get a real sense of kind of how things work okay so let's take out some take a look at some other things so this control is kind of represented as a sphere for this vortex but you know what is that what does that really imply if i was to take this emitter down here and stretch it out along this axis what's going to happen is it are the particles that are sort of out here are they going to kind of wrap around you know what's going to happen so to change that we come down to p emitter we come up to our region and it's going to be the height the height is going to control us in this axis so we'll take that height and i'm going to move it up to 1. cool very interesting here so what do we got here so it's tracing up this cylinder here i'm going to add a few more particles just to fill that in a little bit pump this up to 20. frame rate still looks pretty good so that's pretty cool we can go as long as we want so i moved that up to five and now we've created this sort of big tunnel of particles that you sort of see here so while this control kind of implies that things would sort of swirl around this almost like a center of gravity that's not how things sort of work in reality we'll bring that height back to 0.1 for now and things are a little bit slow i'm going to go back to 10 particles per frame okay so that's pretty neat and you can see there's probably some value in this right there's a lot of things you can think of doing with sort of this ring of particles but let's see what else we can do let's take our particle system and what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this vortex node i'm going to control uh control c control v to make a copy of it this is not an instance and i'm going to put this in line again here let's take a look at what happened very cool we got spirals and again the power of each of these is set to zero it's just the strength that's been set to different values so if i take that strength i can play with that outer strength so that's pretty cool so take a look right here see how things kind of stop right there that just has to do with my lifespan of my particle emitter so i'm going to come over to my particle emitter i'm going to take my lifespan and just crank it up to 500. so then when we swirl around we're just going to sort of keep going until the end of the animation all right so that's looking pretty cool so i'm going to turn off our quad view for a second and just go to perspective so we can sort of see things on the big screen zoom out a little bit okay so that's starting always pretty cool and you can kind of envision if we put a bit of a directional force maybe or something on this you can start to get a a bit of a tornado kind of thing happening right so that's pretty neat but let's take a look at this vortex from a bit of a different perspective let me reset some things here okay so what i've done here is i've just kind of kept the same setup but if you look down at my node tree here i've just taken this p emitter and i've if you just look up this viewport i've changed the size to make it quite a bit larger than our vortex because what i want to do is just sort of send up a whole bunch of particles and see what this vortex sort of looks like when it sits in the middle of a field of particles i've also taken that second vortex that was giving us that spiral effect out of the chain so it's just our p emitter and our vortex so pretty simple setup and right now our vortex is set up to have a strength of 2.38 and a power of four so on the right over here i have what it looks like from our camera's perspective and then i have my 3d view here that we can kind of take a look at things so first thing to notice is our camera is looking this way here and we can see this kind of hole being sort of bored out and that was sort of that cylinder that was being created right that's that's sort of the same thing that's happening right now our power is pretty high which means our falloff is pretty high so if you look at the particles up over on this side here that are just outside of this sort of sphere of influence they're not really moving that much so let me just take this perspective view and i'll put it into front view and we can see that a little bit better here so here's the size of our control and because our power is fairly high it's not really affecting particles that are too far away from that sphere it's a little bit you know kind of affecting these ones just outside but the higher we move our power the more we sort of constrict things to just that this sort of sphere of influence so if we take this power for example and we were to take it down to zero now we're back to that kind of cylinder spiral thing that we were creating earlier and this is pretty cool can kind of get sort of a wave effect or something right so that's pretty neat but for now let's put our power back up to five and i want to play with the size a little bit just to show you how this size sort of influences things so if we come down to our size here and the vortex is really only affecting particles sort of within the sphere so when we increase size well we increase the area of effect as well right so and our strength is pretty high so we can bring our let's play with our strength a little bit and see what that does so right now our strength is let's move it down to one we see we're not having quite as great an effect bring it down to 0.1 that's just a very subtle movement in the middle and just for fun let's crank it up to 10 and we start to see okay yeah we got some pretty drastic effects here so pretty neat control there's almost nothing to change here there's not a whole lot just these simple controls give you tons and tons of options if you take the time to sort of play around with things

Channel: Darren Frenette

Views: 4,145

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Id: _wTjL__dwb0

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/hknewt]

I look forward to more of these.