DaVinci Resolve 16: Text+ with Follower Tutorial

hi everyone so today we're going to be using the follower modifier on the text plus node to get an effect like you're seeing here the documentation for the follower modifier is pretty much non-existent it's a very frustrating tool to use I've had a lot of troubles with it I imagine a lot of people are having some of the same issues with it so I've tried to just break things down go through things pretty slowly and pretty carefully to explain how this modifier works it's a pretty cool tool if you can get it to behave properly you probably will experience a bit of frustration and getting there though so let's go through this together and we'll see what we can come up with so what a follower is essentially is you set up an animation on a single character and in text mode and it'll and you'll have an effect like you see on the screen here or you can set up a delay between how that animation is applied to all these different characters and there's a whole host of options that we can get into so let's get into it okay so let's get started here so I'm in the cut page and a fresh project I'm gonna click on titles and I'm gonna grab a text plus node I'm gonna drag that down to our timeline and release and we're gonna head right over to fusion so all our work is gonna be done in fusion so here we are in our node editor just a couple quick house cleaning tips before we get get going so right now I can move this anywhere I want I don't really like that I prefer to be snap to a grid so I can come here I can go arrange tools and I can select select to grid so anytime I move my nose now I'm snapped into a grid I really like that that's nice and handy another thing that we can change is if you notice here there's diagonal connection between these two nodes here if I come click on this gray space over here I can come to options and I can go down to orthogonal pipes right now direct pipes meaning a direct connection from each node I'm going to go to our THOG '''l pipes and it'll do something like this so it's a little cleaner when you have a lot of nodes in your node tree so that's really a preference thing but I'm gonna stick with this for now okay so let's get going first thing that we're gonna do is we're just gonna I want to change this background to black if anybody knows how to do this maybe there's an option I'm missing somewhere I know in the standalone version of fusion you could you could change the checkerboard pattern to black I have not fun not found that option yet so if you know please let me know it would be a huge help because every time I got to do something sort of like this so let's grab a background note I'm gonna put it here I'm going to delete this connection here by double clicking I'm gonna grab the outputs of these two and put them together and that's gonna generate a merge node and that merge node I'm gonna bring it to my media out I'm gonna change the title up here to follow and I'm gonna pick a font called top secret this is a font that I downloaded it I put this I put a link in the description below for that if you want that fun okay right now we still see we don't have any text showing up that's probably because I have my inputs flipped so this green note here is the foreground I actually want this background to be connect to the yellow one which is the background so I can disconnect those and and rewire things or I can come here and I can right-click on this and I can go swap inputs or ctrl T and there we go all good now so I got my fall all set up I'm just going to move this up to the top of the screen here so as far as the follower is concerned it is a very non-intuitive tool in fact anytime there's any modifiers involved which is what we're gonna be doing we're going to we're gonna be applying a modifier which is this grayed out section here onto our existing text plus node it's very easy to get lost there's not really a visual roadmap as there is in this node editor it would be nice if there was a nodal representation of what we're about to do but as far as I know there's not so we have to go through this somewhat clunky interface and it's very easy to have something not work without a simple explanation why I've certainly done all the wrong things in preparing for this tutorial and it's very easy to get confused and there's a lot of bugs that you can hit along the way so we'll try to keep this as cleanest and and as simple as possible and in order to do that I want to talk in terms of levels so there's going to be three main levels we're going to be kind of working at level one will be our text plus node over here that's sort of our top level level two is when we add a follow modifier and we're going to get into that in a second and then level three is going to be some more details within the follow modifier that we're going we're gonna get two so I'm gonna be referring to those three levels quite quite a bit here first of all how do you add a follow a follower modifier to a text plus so you come up to your style text here and you're gonna right-click on it and then you're gonna get all these options here and followers is one of the offers that we're gonna choose I just want to go through a few things on the interface specifically regarding these keyframe icons here so let's say we wanted to keyframe the text so let's say at frame 0 I won't follow to show up then I'm gonna go up to frame 10 and I'm gonna change that to follower it's a little bit off the screen but that's okay for our purposes here so that's been set up as a keyframe so now if I play this we're at frame 0 as we get to frame 10 we see that switch to follower let me just pull this yellow bar in here just oops this yellow bar in here just so we're showing only the first 40 frames let's say I'll just loop after that so we see it switches from follow to follow her now you'll notice since I set this up as a keyframe and I right-click on the styled text these items do not show up so it looks like he cannot set up keyframe animation on changing the text at the same time as adding adding a follower and the reason I bring this up is because this icon over here can be a little bit confusing because it's kind of doing double duty in this case it's showing you that it's red so that means we're keyframing on this it has this little arrow over here and if I bring up the spline editor but that's essentially saying is there's another keyframe over to the right of it there's nothing to the left if I remove this slider in the middle this turns gray meaning there's no Keefe keyframe or control point at the specific frame but there is one to the left and there is one to the right and I can go and jump on those if I want now if I want to get rid of the these keyframes I can right click here and I can go remove text plus styled text and that gets rid of everything there and now if I right click in style text I can now add a follower before I had a follower keep an eye on that icon there so what's gonna turn red and I kind of make sense I guess because we're gonna be keyframing within the follower so I guess I can buy that if you were to come and click on this if you thought you could do any key framing as you move your Slyder around so say i came up to frame 30 and i wanted to say okay you know what I'm gonna put a keyframe here when you click on that you're actually gonna delete your modifier so I'm gonna do that again here so I right-click I add a follower and then you'll notice up here I can now select this where this was great at before if I click on this now that's grayed out again I have no modifier attached so just something to keep in mind okay in any case though we're talking about fall or modifier today so let's get into that I'm gonna add a follow modifier now I opened up what I'm going to refer to as level 2 so remember level 1 what I'm saying is our text plus node at the top then our modifier when I click on this modifiers this follower 1 is level 2 that's what's been created so we're one level down now now we're gonna get to all these in a second but what I want to do first of all is I want to set up an animation and what I'm gonna do on an animation is I'm going to do a rotate animation what we're gonna do is we're gonna rotate each of these letters into place one by one before we set that up though I just want to give a big big word of warning here that these items here are pretty much the same ones that you're gonna see if you click back on tools there's a lot of commonality there it's very easy to get mixed up if you think you're in modifiers and you're really doing something on tools and then something doesn't work properly or vice versa it's very easy to get confused and that's why I'm really hammering the point home that we're working in terms of levels here so let's go into level 2 which is our follower we're gonna go into a transform here and we're gonna open up rotation now here's a really interesting thing about how the follower modifier works I can take any of these controls here and I can move them around and absolutely nothing is going to happen that is until I set a keyframe so if you want to do any global changes you got to go back up to level 1 where you can move the the tracking for example and that will instantly have an effect you know undo that go back into level 2 which is our follow modifier and I want to rotate Y so I'm gonna click a keyframe here and that's brought up our hierarchy here so we see our text + which is our level 1 then we're down into our follower here and inside of the follower we have what we want to change this is not a level three that I'm talking about it'll get into that in a second okay so what we want to do let's go to frame 0 or key framing Y here so I'm gonna set this to double click in there I'm gonna set this to 90 degrees and what we're gonna do is by frame 30 which I'm gonna jump over to now that's gonna be set to 0 degrees let's just Center this I'm gonna play this animation here and there we go so that's pretty nice we see it sort of it's been into place just gonna make things a little bit smoother just by selecting these two notes here pushing s there we go all right very quickly one thing I'm gonna add is opacity to this now here's where things get pretty confusing and where you can really get lost here so this is where I'm gonna talk about level 3 which is when you click on the shading here under shading elements you have each of the you have 8 potential shading elements you can select from and for those of you that are not familiar with these you can use these shading elements and customize them however you want you cannot drop shadows you can add outlines whatever you really want to do and it does get tricky here because I have the shading elements here under modifiers I also have shading elements under tools which is my top level I have another shading elements here so if I want to turn on a shading element say I wanted to turn on outlines I select item number two I click on enable and we see the red outlines appear I'm just gonna give us a little bit more space here we say we sit we see the red outlines appear but for now we're gonna turn this off we're going to come back to this in a second because there's a really important point that I want to make about this but let's just do one thing at a time here so I want to go into modifiers level 2 so I'm in my modifier my follower modifier and what I'm calling level 3 is whatever one we have selected here because there's eight different ones so right now we're on this first one here so any changes that we do in here only affect element number one and not two three four five six seven eight and I'm going to show you why that is important but but for now I also want a key on this opacity here so we're gonna let these letters fade in so let's take our opacity here I'm going to click on this as a keyframe so let's go zoom to fit here and we see I've set up a keyframe on key on frame 37 or it's gonna be full opacity here and I'm gonna come back to frame 0 and I am going to create another keyframe there and I'm gonna take the opacity down and I'm gonna ctrl select these two nodes push s just to smooth those out so let's see what we have now so there we go that's nice okay but what about the actual following everything's happening here at the same time yep now is where we get down to the business here so we're going to go back to so again we're under our modifiers here so we're in level 2 now and we're gonna come back to timing now what we want to set up here is a delay that we can set up between each one each of these animations happen so let's go through these one by one first there's a range I want all characters if you're to select character range you could pick only 2 through 5 or something like that notice that's indexed to 0 so f would be a zero not a 1 in any case we go back to all characters we'll take a look at this order after because it's better to show you live and we can set up our delay which is down here we're gonna be setting up this delay either between each character or between the first and the last character so what does that mean so we have it set up a delay between each character I'm going to set this to 5 to 5 frames so what that means if I come back to my zeroth frame here now right now at my zeroth frame everything's black because my opacity is down to 0 so I've gone inside my follower so that's level 2 select element number 1 which is my level 3 and then I'm just gonna take opacity up and put it at 1 just for now so what I want to show you here is so if we go back to our follower and we click on timing we have 5 seconds between each character so I'm gonna use my right arrow key just to step through frames so I'm on G row right now and take a look here as I as I click through those that this one's going to start moving and then 5 frames later this one is going to start rotating so here we go so 0 1 2 three four five now in the six you'll watch the Oh move here we go six seven eight nine ten now on the eleventh the first L is going to start moving three four two digit and so on and so on ozone so it's five frames between the animations of each of these characters here if you think about how the follower is working we're setting up an animation on some L element that's defined up here because we set our range to be all characters and our order is left to right that means the very first character is what we're essentially animating and everything else after that I was defined by the order and everything here will follow by some delay so if we play this here we can play with the order we can go right to left and I'll work backwards we can go inside out we can go outside in where it's working on the outside letters first inside out and so on and so on so we can you can play around with these here but we're gonna stick with left to right for now so the next thing that we want to do is modify the positions you might start with everything pulled off the screen so things kind of slot into place but for now I'm just gonna start up here and I'm going to end the animation down at the bottom half the screen just to help visualize what's going on so we have our follower selected so we're in level two right now I'm gonna select shading here because that's where the position is located it would be nice to have something global as far as position but we don't have that option it's inside each of these elements and that's why I'm really bringing this level three into play whatever we're doing here is not going to apply to element number two so I'm actually going to turn on element number two later and we're gonna see what you have to do to make that kind of sync up okay so let's open up the position here and on position what I want to do is I want to there's a video link up top that explains the the difference between displacement and XY coordinates so I'd recommend checking that out if what I'm about to do is is unfamiliar to you I want to change the Y offset that's gonna drop these letters down to the bottom half of the screen so in order to do that and to set a keyframe on this but if I were just to click the keyframe now it would set it up in terms of displacement which to me is not as intuitive so I'm going to right click on offset over here I'm gonna go modify with I'm going to go X Y path that there is going to set up a separate XY coordinate that I and that I can play with so we're back at frame 0 so that's good and I have a keyframe set up there and it's I'm gonna turn off the X because we only want to look at the Y so the Y is green so that's the one at the bottom here so I'm gonna take these here and I'm just gonna disable these and so the only thing with this checkmark on is is the Y here so I'll move up to frame 30 now it's you'll notice here if you look up the X and the y those are both set up to be keyframes so I'm gonna use the Y I'm gonna bring it down right about there to the bottom of the screen I'm gonna scale to fit there I'm gonna grab these points here so this dude's move these out a little bit there we go so let's play it let's see what we have now ok so that's looking pretty good let's say now I wanted to put an effect on this like a drop shadow or something so again I'm in the modifiers level here I have my follower up here so I can double click on this if I come down into here and I click enable that's not gonna do anything I have to go back up to my top level level one which is tools which is my text node go into my shading elements here and then click on enabled which brings up this by default it's set to a red outline I'm gonna change that to a light gray or something like that and now of course you see things have gone horribly wrong unless this is what you're looking for of course that's kind of a neat effect anyway but we noticed that the outlines are not dropping down with the rest of the letters but these outlines are spinning in let's turn the opacity back down so purple here is my opacity so I'm gonna select that node I'm gonna change that to zero so now when I run the animation you see a couple things here so the solid letters are fading in dropping down and spinning whereas the outlines are only spinning and that's because of this hierarchy that we have set up the rotation is done if I go into the modifiers the rotation is done on a transform which is rotating the Y right here so that applies to every element in the shading element drop down here however when we did the position change as well as the opacity change that was specific to element number one so what I'm going to show you now is how to bring those over to element number two so for example let's take the position change and get that to match up so in my tools top level level one I've enabled the red outline which I've changed to the white but that's okay so I could change this to gray I suppose and again this is where I'll do my global changes but if I want to do anything to do with this follow animation I have to go inside the modifiers here select my follower I'm gonna select element number two and I want to set up keyframes on both opacity as well as the position so I'm gonna come up here and click on opacity I'm not gonna set any values right now I'm just gonna set that up for keyframing then I'm gonna come down to position here I'm gonna do the same thing right click on the offset modify with XY path and if I come down and look at my note at it or now there's a whole bunch of stuff that's been added here so I'm gonna clean this up a little bit and we're gonna look at just the values for opacity for example so I'm gonna turn everything else off except for opacity and I'm going to do a zoom to fit here so now we see we have two lines here let me change this color of this Newton new opacity here so I click on this color here I'll take this orange and there we go so our new opacity value is up here we want to take the values of this blind here and copy them over to this one here to do that it's very simple we just right click here on our source spline there's our purple one right click copy and we go to our destination right click paste settings and there we go with the two overlap now it even copied over the color so let me just change this back to orange or red or whatever that is so if I turn off this original opacity there we go we have the the values that are added and copied over if we play our animation take a look at the app now you can see the opacity come in so now we have to do the same thing with the Y so now our outline is coming down with the characters let me just change that outline color to back to red just to demonstrate a little bit better and then when something like this is set up really it's anything goes if we wanted to take our outline and have that delayed a little bit I would lock this y-value here and remember the Y as our solid the solid part of our letter so now what i can select is these two nodes here which is this y control here i can grab these i'm gonna just gonna shift move them over a little bit and that'll just give this sort of a little bit of a delay kind of thing here I'm just gonna expand our animation a little bit there we go and that red is a little bit too much gonna change that back to a white or something like that now there is one bug that I have been coming across it didn't unfortunately happen during this demo here but sometimes when you're running these animations you'll see a little bit of a hitch you'll see one of the letters kind of pop up and and wiggle around like it doesn't really follow things smoothly to do that what I found you can you can do to get around that is if you come back to your tools of your top level click back on text you can just put a whatever your text is just temporarily put a space in and you can even delete that space afterwards I'm not really sure what's going on behind the scenes but it kind of gives something a little bit of a kick in it and get things going in so that's just something that I found 10 can work from time to time so to recap top level changes on your text plus node are under this Tools selection here you go down one level into modifiers and select your follower and as long as you're doing changes in this text or in this transform those will apply to everything if you come into the shading element here then you'll have to set each of those animations up separately so thanks so much for checking us out I'll talk to y'all soon I know

Channel: Darren Frenette

Views: 4,028

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Id: QsN12dgDf_A

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020