DaVinci Resolve 16: Steam and Smoke with Fusion Tutorial

hey everybody so today i want to cover steam and smoke effects using fusion so if you take a look to the right of the screen that's the default steam template that comes with resolve so we're going to use that as a starting point we're going to kind of unpack it understand how it works and we're going to see that with very small simple tweaks a whole world of possibilities in terms of the steam and smoke effects opens up to us towards the end of the video our particle system is going to look more like what you see in the middle over on the left side that's one that i've kind of just done for fun took me just a few seconds of some very simple changes so i very strongly recommend taking a look at my emitter tutorials that i've done previously those are linked in the top right of the screen so let's roll all right so let's start by bringing in a steam effect so we're going to go into the effects library we're going to take a look at particles we're going to come down to the very bottom one here steam and as soon as we click on that we see a whole bunch of nodes show up in our node editor i'm going to just zoom out a little bit here and drag this over we're going to keep everything that we've imported from fusion over here on the left and we're going to sort of rebuild things with our stuff over here on the right but for right now what i can do is just take this last node in the chain here i'm just going to drag it up to here and we're just going to hit play just to get a sense of what kind of effect we're looking at and there we go we see the steam sort of come up here so let's get right into it and find out how is it that we build this effect here let's just take a look at our nodes a little bit here so we're just going to zoom in a little bit on this node structure here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to sort of grab these nodes down here i'm just going to pull them down a little bit and i'm going to sort of separate them out a little bit because these aren't really the ones that we're concerned about this isn't really where the magic happens as far as this particle effect it's all up here and we're going to be going through each of these in detail by far the most important in this structure up here is our fast noise node this is what is really going to give us the ability to generate this steam or smoke effect i'm going to press shift space to bring up the select tool i'm going to type in fast that's going to bring up our fast noise add and here we go so on the right we'll bring up our fast noise and on the left we're going to bring up the default fast noise and off the bat they look quite different for now let me just close down the nodes at the bottom give us a little bit more real estate very first thing to notice is right up here on the right as soon as we imported our fast noise it takes our default resolution and bit depth and uses that so we have this 1920 by 1080 over here and we have 100 by 100 over here in general when we're working with particles it's better to keep things a little bit smaller we don't need a huge high resolution particle and when i say particle this what you see here is going to represent one particle in this eventual particle system that we're going to be developing so that's where it can get a little bit confusing because i would look at this originally and i would say okay this here itself is a result of a particle system there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in there but what we're doing is we're using this fast noise modifier that has nothing to do with the particle system so if i bring back our node tree here our fast noise isn't a p fast noise all the nodes that belong to the particle system are prefixed by a lowercase p this is just a node that's used for a whole bunch of different things it just so happens we can feed this in effectively as a bitmap into our emitter and that's how we're going to get the effect here so just keep in mind that this is going to be one particle instance okay so first things first how do we take our node on the right and change it into a smaller resolution 100 100 resolution well we can come into fast noise here we come up to our inspector and we're going to click over here on image an image there's this by default it's selected on this auto resolution we're going to take that off and we're just going to change our resolution to 100 by 100 and we're going to we can take our bit depth also and we can change it back to i think it was float 16 with the other one okay so now these look nothing like each other so the one on the left we kind of see things centered it looks more like a particle where on the right we're kind of smeared across the entire screen so let's address that first so we can come over to this note here this is the color node now we're not interested in the color just yet we can modify that later but what we are interested in is this type here so right it's set up to two color and you can kind of see that that's the black and the white that we see here right so there's color one which is for black over here and there's color two over here so that's where we get this but what we want to do is we want to have something that's kind of looking more like a particle instead of something that's smeared across and kind of extends to infinity in either either direction and to do that we can take the other choice from this type drop down and that is gradient now in terms of gradient what we want here is we want something that's radial and you can kind of get a sense that yep that's sort of a round thing right so let's let's come down here we'll choose radial so these nodes here represent our start and our end so if you if you when i highlight over this one here this is the end node so you can see that's changing these values here and then this is our start node over here so we want to start let's start in the center so we're going to pick our start node we're just going to drag that over into the middle here and we're going to take our node and we're just going to put it out it doesn't really matter where we just want to put it somewhere so we're kind of filling up this space here we see as colors are concerned we're inverted also relative to our source here so what we're going to do is we are going to come down to our gradient and we have right now two colors in our gradient our start and our finish our start right now is actually pointed to black so we're going to select that and we're going to flip that to white i'll just come down here and choose that one and then we go to our endnote here and we are going to choose black okay there we go now we're starting to get somewhere we're starting to kind of approximate what we see here but if you look over on the left here this actually looks a little bit like steam or smoke right away it's a little more defined where this kind of looks like just sort of a ghostly blob and that's where if we come over to the main controls here under noise this detail slider here we're going to crank that fully up to 10 10 is as high as it goes you can can put a higher value in there but it doesn't really matter it won't change anything for example i'll put 100 here well that didn't really change anything in any case we'll set that we'll keep that to 10. so here we go we have our particle that kind of looks like what we see over here that's pretty pretty close it's good enough for me for now one of the things that i want to point out is when you're making a particle in this manner you want to make sure that you're not extending past the borders of your image here so for example if i took this end point here and i kind of went out like this the reason is of course is you're going to be slicing off your particles your particle will actually look like it has this chopped off edge so that's why we want to keep it sort of within oops with a tough guy to grab there within sort of the boundaries here so it looks pretty good everything looks kind of the same here but look what happens when we scrub our slider something's going on on the thing over on the left here there's a there's an animation happening when we play things each frame this thing is changing ours is not so what's happening there so if you're familiar with the fast noise you probably already know the answer to this but we're going to build up the suspense a little bit here and we're just going to say that when i was first looking for this i i went to look for an animation i went into this fast noise modifier here i'm looking for keyframes you know what's going on here nothing's keyframed okay i opened up the spline editor i select my fast noise well fast noise has nothing that's been animated here so what is going on as it turns out what does this animation is let me just close down the spline editor i'm going to select our um fast noise again is this seed so what that really means is to see the rate here is the one that we want it's how much this is going to change frame to frame so i'm going to play this and i'm going to slowly increase the see the rate so i'm just going to increase it a little bit and you can see that things are slowly changing between frame or i can really crank it up and that value of 1 the maximum value is the value that they happen to choose over here now things are really starting to cook so we're using this seed rate here for a very specific purpose and now this is a super important point here you might think let me keep that playing you might think that this sort of seething action you see here is something that you're actually going to see during the full animation of the particle system but you're not what you're essentially doing here is each frame building up a different particle that's going to be used in your animation so when you create a particle at least the way they've done it here when you create a particle any particle let's say the first particle the particle is going to look like this so each particle is effectively going to use one frame out of this animation and i'm going to show you that in in detail later because it's a really important point and it really reveals how things work underneath the hood so stick around for that because i'm going to get into the details when we start talking about the emitter node how that really does work but just keep in mind for now that we're essentially building up a library of these particles that we're going to call on later when we build our p emitter system here and that's how the fast noise serves as a basis for the rest of our animation so let's put fast noise on on hold for now and let's take a look at these other nodes here rectangle and the brightness and contrast now i don't want to go into too much detail for these two notes here because they're not really the secret sauce it's really the fast noise and how it interacts with the p emitter that are the ones that we really care about but nevertheless let's go through these very quickly so first there's this brightness and contrast noise node so just to get a sense of what what that's doing right now i have my fast noise loaded and and just take a look at the screen how it changes when i drop the brightness contrast so when i drop this brightness contrast it's going to take this mask as a rectangle that's feeding this brightness contrast node and it's going to change things a little bit so let's just take a look and see what it does and then we'll go in and look at how it does it so we drag that on and there we go so it's really just brought down the brightness a little bit so effectively what they're doing if i highlight this rectangle note here and i just kind of zoom out there's a sort of funny shape funny oriented rectangle here which is essentially serving as a mask for this brightness and contrast i don't see a huge difference here so if i were to move this mask up a little bit you'll see it just makes the top of the particle a little bit darker so i'm not sure exactly what what the effect was that they were going for here i think they just wanted to maybe control the overall brightness a little bit and somehow came up with this with this shape here but what we'll do to keep things simple is i'm just going to put a brightness and contrast note i'm not going to worry about a mask so we have our fast noise selected shift spacebar bri there's our control right there and okay so we bring our fast noise up here and then we take our brightness and contrast and i'm going to drag that over top here and it's not going to change anything we see at the up top here we change to the node that we have selected but if you take a look in the middle here there's just kind of a little bit of a a pretty bright region so maybe that's what they're going for as far as dialing this contrast back a little bit and all they did was take the gain and just dial it back a little bit so if we wanted to do what they're doing would be as simple as bringing in a rectangle mask here changing the size a little bit hooking that up to the mask input to the brightness and contrast and then we would have the same sort of effect there but let's keep it simple we're just going to leave this out for now all right so now we can turn our attention to the emitter node this is where things start to get pretty interesting and it's really the interaction between this fast noise and this emitter node that gets this effect and actually what turns out to be a pretty simple manner but it's the interaction between these all these nodes that we really need to understand so let's take a look at how that works so we're just going to ignore everything on the right for now so i'm just going to go into my single viewer mode and we're just going to focus on the on this example over here first thing i want to do is we're looking right now at brightness and contrast as we see up here i'm going to bring in the emitter node take a look at that and we see it did not change to the emitter node here because as i was mentioning in my p emitter tutorial you can't directly view an emitter node you have to view a renderer so if we go down the chain here there's this turbulence node we're going to ignore that for now and then we come down to this p render one underscore three and that name is what you see up here so it's actually this node here that we're looking at and because we have this render node here if i click on this set to 3d as an output that's what brings up our 3d display here for simplicity's sake now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back into 2d mode just to explain things in a little bit more clarity so what i want to do there to do that i have to take this i'm just going to sever this connection for now down to this output section here we'll call it and we're going to take our 3d mode and we're going to change that to 2d there we go now we see this show up here scaling can be pretty far off between the world of 2d in the world of 3d that's depending on how the camera was set up and all that type of stuff so what we'll do for now is we're just going to go into our emitter node and we're just going to increase the size of these particles for now just to get back to something that we were sort of seeing before so to do that we go over to our style and we come down to size controls and i'm gonna crank this up to five for now so that doesn't quite match what we're seeing things are a little bit smaller still but in any case it's a pretty neat effect that we see here so let's take a look at what's happening i'm going to close down our nodes at the bottom so we have a little bit more space to take a look at things and i'm just going to pause it here so as i was sort of saying before each one of these little puffs that you see here is actually one of those frames from the fast noise that we created earlier and things get a little bit confusing when everything is all kind of smeared together so what i'm going to do is i'm going to isolate things a little bit and only show one of these little puffs so to do that what we can do is we can come over to our number and you'll notice right now the number is set to 0.5 and it's set to 0.5 which means every second frame it's going to birth one of these particles so here's a crazy point this entire very cool looking animation it's looking pretty cool already is only 60 particles because we have 120 frames here and every second frame we're at least releasing one of these particles so that's pretty impressive what we're going to do on we're going to go back to frame 0 and we're going to change this to 1 so we get that created right away and we're going to keyframe that and then we're going to go to particle or sorry to frame the the second frame and we're gonna bring that number down to zero so essentially that's just gonna give one little poof of smoke and nothing else is gonna be born after that so we play that and there we go okay perfect now what we can see here i'm just going to zoom in on that region a little bit here so take a look at the the life of that particle all it's doing is changing a little bit in size but it's not doing that seething that i was talking about before right so this is just a single frame from that fast noise and we're doing some changes that we're going to go through here we're changing the size over lifetime and that type of stuff but effectively a single particle in the life of this particular particle system is fairly straightforward all it's doing is it's fading in a little bit it doesn't just pop into life it's fading in and that's done by if you go over here to style you come down to these fade controls about 15 into its life is when it's sort of fully popped into life and then it slowly fades out over the end of its life here which you would sort of expect as the smoke or steam or whatever sort of dissipates as it rises and expands so we see the particle getting larger over its lifetime by this curve here we can see that the size is also related to the velocity by this control here and that velocity is set up back over here where we have some velocity and a little bit of velocity variance and again i i cover all the stuff in the p emitter tutorials so that in itself when you break it down just a single particle is actually pretty simple and then i'm just going to remove this animation here so we can get everything back to how it was before and then we get this effect that looks something like this and again this looks a little bit different than i showed at the start and that really has just to do with the size so if i were to play with the size of those particles i could probably get things to look like like how they did before where everything was kind of smeared together a little bit more okay so i'm just going to stop this somewhere here now we kind of see we have a particle here we kind of have a particle here we have a particle over here and they're all different and that has to do with that seething that we were talking about before but it's a little bit confusing when we're talking about these sort of kind of clouds of particles and that type of stuff so i'm going to simplify things just to really drive home the point how each of these particles are sort of chosen and assigned and to do that i'm going to head back to the cut page just for a moment here and i have a simple animation that i've created and it's one second long and every frame a counter just simply ticks up so it starts from zero and runs up to 23 because i have a 24 frame per second project setup right now so that's all this clip is going to be doing so if i go back to the fusion page and i bring up my media pool i'm going to bring back the nodes as well i'm going to take this fast noise for a second and i'm going to just get rid of it and i'm going to bring this clip in here so now i have a media in node which is essentially that third or the 24 frame animation and i'm going to hook that up to my brightness and my contrast and what you're going to see here first of all the sizes a little bit crazy so i'm going to bring that size down a little bit we'll go back down to 0.5 as what they had it set up as before and now i'm just going to play this animation let's take a look at it here let's change a couple of other things just to make things a little bit simpler here what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that fade in fade out i'm just going to get rid of that all together so we come down to the fade controls and i'm just going to go sort of full out like this here i'm also going to take these merge controls and i'm going to crank up this burn in so it just shows the numbers a little bit better let's take a look what's happening here so what we've effectively done is we've taken each particle from our particle system and we've just assigned a single frame from an animation that i created here and that's the exact same thing that's happening with the fast noise it's just taking essentially an indexed frame from some source and assigning a particle to that so if we go back to time zero there we took our zeroth frame and i'm just gonna use the arrow keys to jump one frame ahead there's our next one that gets born there's a set our third one that gets born and so on and so on and so on and so on and how this mapping happens is from this animate drop down right here so what that particle birth time means well really it gives you this effect here the first particle that's born will be mapped to the first frame the second to the second and so on and so on and so on we can change this a little bit and we can come to overtime and what does this do this here will keep all particles referenced to the same index we start off as a zero we go to the next frame they all change to one then they all change to two and they all change to three and so on and so on and so on so we can't use this one because this would essentially pick the same single particle to duplicate to duplicate over our entire animation and it would just look stiff and rigid there's a third option here and that is particle age and this is essentially a counter so we would start off at zero then we go to our next frame this one is ticked up to one this one starts off at zero then we go one more now this one's up to two so they're all going to be counting by one so effectively if we were to use that method we would be changing our we would be changing each particle as we sort of go along throughout the animation which in essence would be taking advantage i suppose of that seething that we put into into play and make things look a little bit more chaotic so we're gonna go back and we're gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of rebuild the original system here and we're gonna go back and we're gonna play with these here but i wanted to use this example to show really clearly what frame we're pulling in from any particular source all right so i've sort of refreshed this left side here back to its default setting so this is what you get straight out of the box as far as the resolve default template and back over here i've reintroduced uh what we've built earlier on in the tutorial with our fast noise and our brightness so what we're going to do is we're going to sort of go through this and rebuild this and the goal the goal here is not to rebuild this exactly so ours is going to look a little bit different we're going to play around with a little bit where we can see we can kind of push and pull things to give ourselves some unique looks but i do want to go through the process of rebuilding this because there's going to be some common problems that kind of come up so first thing we can do is we can bring in our emitter node so we're going to bring that down here i'm going to skip over turbulence for now if you take a look um i'm going to turn turbulence on and off over here so take a look over on the left here so that's with it on and that's with it off so there's definitely a it looks like a little bit of a change i i i can't notice it that that drastically um so these you know when you add things like turbulence and that type of stuff that that might be something that's a little bit more subtle and you just want to sort of adjust to taste so we're not going to add this turbulence note here it's something that that you can add on your own if you like in any case we have our emitter node then underneath if we ignore this turbulence then we're down to our render node so we'll bring down a render node here by default it sets up into 3d which is perfect that's what we want so now we can take uh well first thing we have to do something to our emitter node because if we take our contrast and hook it up to our emitter it doesn't let us and that's because we have to define our style and remember what we said a little bit earlier is the style here is essentially a bitmap and that bitmap is the fast noise essentially passed through this brightness and contrast and passed on to the emitter node so we make sure our emitter node is selected we come up here into style and instead of point we want bitmap and you notice the little arrow here with the bitmap input showed up for it so now we can take this and we can drag it over here and we can bring it on top of there we can connect our emitter down to our render node and now i'm going to pull this render node up here and we get this horrible looking pile of nonsense so what's going on here well let's sort of unpack all the things that are happening here so the very first thing to see is uh by default our animate is set up to be over time and when we looked at overtime earlier when i would have numbers displayed that's when the indexes of all the different particles all ticked up at the same time so they are all zero they were all one they were all two and so on and so on and that's why you can see that here everything sort of looks the same and is kind of moving the same so that's not the one we want we want to come down here to this particle birth time okay so that's still looking like a big pile of junk so first thing that we can do is we come up to the number so we're just things look a little bit busy we're just emitting way too many particles right now we're 20 times the number of particles that this system here is is generating so i like their default value we're going to go back to point point five and then you start to see things sort of pop into to life is we're starting to get there a little bit so let's get some direction some velocity going because everything's just sort of sitting in place here so to do that let's make sure we have control selected come down to velocity we want a little bit of velocity and we're just going to sort of adjust this to taste uh something like that probably looks okay but of course we're going in the wrong direction so we want we want to come down to our angle change that to 90 degrees so we're sort of pushing up we also want things to kind of spread out right to have a little bit of a of a cone here so in terms of our angle variance and i don't really know what the numbers that they use but that doesn't matter we're just going to sort of pick what we want let's say 40 degrees okay perfect so now we start to see things are kind of sort of moving out this way so now as we look through this animation let's take a look at some of these particles they're pretty lifeless right you can see like this particle here for example well that looks kind of boring right it just looks like a sort of a static object kind of floating in space so we want to animate things a little bit so let's start to play with the size because what we're doing down here as we looked at earlier is we're increasing the size over time which makes sense in terms of how this would actually work so let's go down to our over in style and we'll go down to our size control and here we're going to start things a little bit smaller but we're going to end things a little bit larger and that's all using this default size as uh set to 0.1 things look a little bit small so let's sort of crank this up to something we can appreciate a little bit more okay so now we're starting to get somewhere so we start to see our cloud kind of go up like this but one of the things we notice is everything's just blown out in the middle we don't see any detail here so to address that we can come over to our contrast here and we're going to bring the gain down a little bit more here so that looks a little bit better but we're still not really seeing any of the detail here and i said earlier that this rectangle mask doesn't really matter i was wrong so let's bring that mask in here and what we're going to do is we're going to connect that mask into the input here and things have gone horribly wrong because we haven't set up our mask yet so what we're going to do is we're going to bring back our brightness and contrast note and there that square there is the mask that we've created so we're going to take this mask and we're going to make sure it's selected here and we're going to increase the width to make it go sort of full screen we are going to also bring it down sort of to the bottom here now you'll notice there's these two very distinct regions there's the dark and then there's a light at the bottom here because our mask is sort of applied to this sort of bottom section here so what we can do is we can use this soft edge here which is going to kind of smear this edge out here so watch let's take a look at this as i move the soft edge and we can kind of see that that kind of smears out so as i pull this back i'm going to leave it off for now and i'm going to go back into our kind of full animation and you can see that very sort of distinct region and i'm just going to play with that so we'll set that somewhere around there now things look really bright up top and they're kind of things are just sort of popping in in the bottom and you remember previously we talked about this fade control so we want to take the emitter we want to come down to fade controls and right now this is saying it just sort of jumps into life immediately but we don't want that to happen so we're just going to pull this off a little bit and now we can see things start to fade in and we also want to take this fade out and really pull that back so there we go now we're starting to get somewhere still a little bit too bright sort of up at the top here so let's play with that a little bit but you know what before we take a look at that i want to show you um something about billboards essentially so what billboards would be in sort of the video game context is some type of um bush or tree or something that you would see and it's always facing the camera so it always looks like no matter where you're looking at it from you always see sort of that front view it always kind of looks like a full tree that's sort of the same thing that's happening here so what we can do is we can come into controls and we can come down to rotation and i'm going to click off this always face camera it's set on by default but i'm going to click it off just to see what happens okay so we don't we see a little bit of artifacting there but what i'm going to do is i'm going to rotate around to the side here now you see the sort of billboard nature of things right you see these are these particles are just these kind of fake two-dimensional planes so if i click on always face camera no matter which way we look at things they always look sort of volumetric and full okay i'm just going to go into the emitter and i'm going to just crank up the velocity a little bit it's looking pretty good and i'm seeing a little a couple of artifacts in there sort of some pop in that type of stuff that that can happen when the the number is set sort of a little too high there's a little too much going on there i'm just gonna reduce reduce this down to 0.3 okay so that's starting to look pretty good over there so let's play around with this a little bit now so that so let's come into our emitter node and we're going to go into the style and we're going to play with this drop down a little bit so we talked here about particle age is now we're basically running through this i'm going to bring up the fast noise here we're running through this animation here so every single frame that the particle lives on it does this exact behavior here so that gives so that gives us more of this sort of chaotic nature that you sort of see here and what we can do is we can come back to that fast noise and we can play with this c rate a little bit and we can kind of bring things down a little bit so it has a little bit more of this rolling effect and we can sort of bring this see right down a little bit that's actually looks pretty cool right there something something like that so if we bring up our fast noise back over to here so here's what things look like right now and we click on discontinuous we kind of see this the sort of spider webby effect when this is checked off there's a bit of a smoother look to things when you put on discontinuous you kind of get this this effect here and this can be pretty a pretty dramatic effect so if i take this off for now we go back to our main render node we take a look at this now here okay that's all looking good we click on discontinuous and it's a it's a much different effect we can also come down i'm just going to zoom in a bit here we can also come down and we can play with colors a little bit and we're going to do that through our emitter node so we're going to come click on our emitter node and we have colors over here so we can first just set a default color and change it to sort of whatever we want we can pick this i don't know kind of poisony poisony green yellow kind of thing or something like that so we can also play with the color over life so we have a note here that starts off as white and white what that essentially means is we're going to use this sort of default color that we started with but if i click over here we add another node i can drag this over to the end and i can pick a different color here let's make it this sort of red or something so we can kind of see that we're we're changing to red as we go up so look what we've done just a few simple changes that we've made to a couple of these different nodes and look how far off we are to our original effect that we had here and that really shows the power of really understanding the basis of this system here like we've gone through today the sky is really the limit as far as different effects that we want to add we haven't even started to talk about other nodes that we can apply to this like directional forces vortex nodes you name it there's a whole bunch of other stuff that we could do here we're going to save that for for a bunch of other tutorials so we haven't built this structure sort of one-to-one and that wasn't really the intention here what we wanted to do is just get the gist of what this was doing here and then sort of come up with our own effect over here and notice i haven't really even talked about these bottom nodes that much we've talked about those in our last emitter tutorial and i don't really think there's value of going over that again here so i think that's a good place to cut it off thanks so much for checking us out and we will talk to you all soon you

Channel: Darren Frenette

Views: 18,103

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Id: IXeWKbg73ZY

Length: 31min 53sec (1913 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020