Getting Serious With VFX In Fusion - Casey Faris (ResolveCon 2022)

first of all this has been an amazing amazing weekend I can't believe the cool people that we've got to hang out with and there's a little bit more left I'm so excited ah it's so good um guys we're going to talk about some visual effects and uh we're gonna talk about using fusion and here's what's cool how many people are like visual effects infusion that doesn't sound like something I can do that sounds I'm very intimidated right now here's what's going to be cool at the end of this you can either you can either follow along during this if you have the files or if you don't uh I I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to make something really cool in Fusion at the end of this all right ah this is this is so cool there's no toast unfortunately um but but either there's toast or we Riot I'm here for the food all right I don't know what that voice was that's General Heckler I guess like get off the stage [Laughter] I don't know um here's something we're going to be making it's pretty it's pretty dang exciting huh pretty dang exciting so it's not perfect but I think it's pretty cool and um and this is this is how it's made this is how it's made okay check this out whoops oh boy all right so here's some of the uh the nodes that we're going to be using today and who looks at that and goes no thanks like that's way too many little squigglies and no thank you forever goodbye um here's the good news we're gonna walk through each of these and uh you're going to understand it or else so even if you've never done any compositing infusion uh I mean honestly I'm I'm just now kind of starting to get into the visual effects stuff I've been really practicing a lot I've been I've comped this shot probably 80 times in the last couple weeks um and I'm really excited to share some cool tips cool little things cool uh Concepts that I've been learning about visual effects in general and especially about compositing in uh infusion and I think there's going to be light bulbs for some of us who are a little bit into it and if you're new to it um I think I think things are going to start to make sense here okay so let's start out let's go to the edit page all right and I'm going to start with a a shot this is just our background plate so this is just a um a shot that we shot out at the the beach just about an hour that way and um the idea has always been to put some kind of spaceship in uh on on this part here and we shot it in Blackmagic raw and now this is uh this is Blackmagic film Gen 5 and so it's all gray and washed out and we have these light stands here to help with the tracking because we do have a moving shot here okay so we got a little bit of a an idea of what we're going to be doing here let's grab this and bring it into the edit page under the timeline and with our playhead over that clip we're just going to go ahead and click infusion okay so we talked a little bit yesterday about how nodes are just a flow chart right and right now we have a really basic flow chart we have media in and media out media in takes a piece of media from the edit page brings it into Fusion media out sends it back everything fancy happens in between now uh to make some visual effects what we're going to have to do is uh one I kind of look at it as solving problems right it's creative but it's also like if you think about what you want to make and then compare it with what's there right now chances are I mean you can it might sound like a negative way to to say it but I look like well there's a few problems here if this shot is supposed to look like it's supposed to look like this a shot what's wrong with it tell me from the from the audience here what's what does this mean I need to spaceship right that's going to be pretty that's going to be a very big factor in having a spaceship uh almost essential I wouldn't say okay so we need a spaceship uh what else yeah it's washed out right the colors are kind of washed out so that that isn't great um okay so we got to put the spaceship over it we got to deal with the colors what else might be wrong with this yeah well well this isn't Tatooine this is this is a non-specific non-star Wars Planet all right we don't want to get sued all right this is bad doing it's it's way worse okay okay somebody said something though uh what's wrong with this needs more contrast yeah that's part of it what else light stands you I mean the guy didn't park his spaceship on top of light stands right so we're gonna have to deal with some of that okay that's probably enough to get started we'll probably figure out some other other jobs we need uh to to go first okay so here's the first really cool thing infusion if you type shift space bar it brings up this select tool palette okay this is really cool in fact you don't even need this toolbar if you don't want you can save a little bit of screen space and get rid of it if you want to you can go um and go up to is it Fusion yeah Fusion show toolbar and uncheck that we don't need that that's fine we're going to just search shift spacebar just like that and now I'm going to type in note note and that'll make a sticky note and so this is a great place if I double click on it to give us a little to-do list so we need to add a ship cool no problem we need to deal with the colors hmm we need to get rid of the light stands okay let's just start with that that's probably plenty for you know depositing this live so uh let's start with the obvious it needs a ship right so where are we going to get a ship well luckily luckily uh we have a ship rendered out of blender and so if you're following along in the media pool here if you have resultcon VFX kc2a open you'll have a saucer3.exr who knows what an exr file is who's like familiar with that wow okay so an exr file is a still image and it's generally um you'll find that uh 3D is rendered in exr's a lot exr is a very high quality format and you can actually combine a bunch of different layers inside of an exr and so you can make a 3D render and you can have uh you know Reflections and you can have all kinds of different um they're called passes that you can that you can decide to view and it's all built into one image it's really cool so this exr is a image of our saucer and I'll just grab that and drag it in and if I hit two on the keyboard everything breaks I quit all right I won't quit um the reason why it breaks and why it's red right here is this layer here under our inspector is not selected so if we select layer we have all these different layers that we can view from our render which is uh from blender here so if we select combined here's our spaceship okay now like I said there's all kinds of different layers if we switch to a different layer like AO which is ambient occlusion this is what that looks like and there's all kinds of different things oh man you can just go crazy looking at all the different things here some of these don't show up but some of them make sense anyway so we have the uh the spaceship we want to put it over our image so how do we put something over something else in fusion page I'm origin out a merge node right so we'll take the output of this media in two and merge it over our media in one just like that and I'll select media out one and hit two on the keyboard and as Alex would say job done we're we're pretty much done so we'll just go ahead and render that it looks pretty good okay it looks terrible all right it looks terrible uh why does it look bad well um one of the reasons is the ship's really big so that's that's probably a problem um it's also really uh contrasty it's a little darker and it just doesn't match with our footage there's there's kind of some stuff wrong with that so let's okay so now that we've added a ship um well well we still need to deal with the colors uh ship is too big okay needs to move over and then let's see if we play this back then uh oh well this uh this image this image doesn't move along with our shot so we're going to have to deal with that too oh boy deal with camera Shake and it looks like our job is just getting just getting worse and worse here but here's the here's the great thing we got the basics here we got we got the ship over the shot so we're like so we're most of the way there what should we what should we tackle next what do you guys think should we make the ship smaller or should we deal with the colors what do you think um scale the ship okay let's scale the ship I'm not it's not a trick question I'm I'm literally we could probably do either one of those and it would be fine so let's scale the ship okay so first thing let's do uh we can scale something in a bunch of different ways in fusion um one way is you can select the merge node and you can adjust it here in the inspector of the merge node so you can adjust the size and the angle and the center and all that stuff in the merge node but here's a big concept to understand for Fusion it's not really a good idea to do that okay here's why um there's nothing I guess wrong with that necessarily especially if you're just doing something quick but one of the advantages of nodes is that you have this map of all the things you're doing and uh you the great thing about having a map is you have everything laid out and it can be really clear of every little step that you're doing and if you have the merge doing anything other than just merging something over something else and you you know have it also adjusting the size and the center and all that stuff then you're kind of hiding some special things that you're doing and so if you come back to this a year later and you're like yeah I need to fix that shot and you're like why is it acting weird well it's because you have stuff in the merge that isn't obvious if you just look at the node graph okay so what we want to do is add a transform node I'm going to select this media into let's actually rename this first let's say F2 and we'll call this ship underscore Mi for media in and then this media in one let's rename this F2 we'll call this background footage Mi for media okay just let me know so let's take this ship Mi I'll hit shift spacebar to select a tool and the tool we're going to look for is transform and I can quickly bring up a transform just by hitting x f not brings that up that's like the little shortcut and I can hit enter now nothing happens because we're telling it to transform but we're not telling it to transform it in any way it's just transform it and do nothing with it it's like great yeah awesome thank you we're paying you how much uh transform okay so now we can adjust the size and we can move this around and it functionally works kind of the same way as the merge but the advantage is that we see what's going on here in our map and then we can say all right do we like it transformed or not we can just turn this off and on and kind of you know decide that later so you're kind of setting yourself up for Success later okay so that's pretty good um maybe we'll even change the the angle of this a little bit Yeah there's our there's our um there's our little shot okay now let's talk about colors this is kind of a a big thing um you all were paying attention during Colin's uh session right because that's going to make this a lot easier color space transforms that that should sound familiar now um what we want to do is use color space transforms on this uh to basically make everything uh have colors that roughly match okay now the problem with this with any kind of compositing especially uh if you're compositing CG is that you're starting with a certain color space so this background footage this is in uh Blackmagic design bmd film uh Gen 5 okay and then this ship is actually rendered in Aces and who knows what Aces is okay so uh Aces is a color space that uh it's it's actually a way of color managing but there's a color space that you use when you render out 3D called Asus CG and long story short uh it's a lot of um it's a lot of space for colors to kind of play around in it's really high quality it's great but it's different than a than a camera okay so we're going to have to in some fashion bring both of these color spaces into the same color space just like we were talking about earlier uh Colin was talking about bringing everything into DaVinci wide gamut intermediate right it's sort of a similar thing now since we're in Fusion we're going to bring this into linear space now linear space is uh it's a way of treating color that mimics how like physics works in the real world okay so if you have a light that is twice as bright as another light it's going to look it should look twice as bright right that's like how the actual physics works but to our eyes it doesn't necessarily look twice as bright to a camera especially a camera that's shooting in log it doesn't look necessarily twice as bright and so there's kind of this messing with all of the colors that's happening with our footage and we need to basically bring everything into reality mode and into uh linear space so that we can put things together and if something's twice as bright that it that the actual values are twice as bright okay if you're a little lost here it's okay just do what I do for now okay so background footage the first thing we're going to do is add a color space transform I'm going to move this over a little bit I'll hit shift spacebar and type color and I'll go down to color space transform and hit enter and this is the same thing that we see in the color page for our input color space we're going to use Blackmagic wide gamut gen 4.5 that's what it was shot in input gamma is Blackmagic design film gen 5. output color space we're actually going to use the same thing for this one we're going to go with Blackmagic wide gamut gen45 and the output gamma we're going to go linear okay so all that's doing is it's taking all of the colors like all of the different kinds of colors that could be there it's not doing a whole lot to them but it's it's adjusting the uh it's adjusting the brightnesses to kind of make sense um when we composite now this ship this we have to do kind of a similar thing so I'll take this color space transform and I'll hit Ctrl C so I'm copying this note switch over to the ship and hit Ctrl V and now it's going to ruin it it's just going to just just destroy it that's just because we don't have our input color space set right okay for our input color space we're going to go Aces AP1 and linear all right again if you don't know what all that means it's okay I'm also going to take off our tone mapping turn that To None same thing over here we'll take our tone mapping onto none okay now what that's going to do is bring these both into linear which effectively is going to look real bad okay so if it looks bad chances are you might have done it right okay most of the time but it's like we were talking about earlier this is the raw chicken okay don't eat this we're going to do some stuff to it I'm going to take another color space transform uh just hit Ctrl C and then after this merge hit Ctrl V all right we're setting up our color our color management here this color space transform we're going to start where we actually were here which is Blackmagic wide gamut gen45 and linear like this and let's go with wide gamut gen45 linear and we're going to turn this back crazy sauce into Blackmagic design film gen 5. so look at that that's interesting what we've effectively done is nothing to our background image but we've taken our foreground image this ship and we've transformed it to match better with the background image okay you can do this a bunch of different ways we could put them both in DaVinci wide gamut we could do a bunch of stuff but this is a simple-ish way to do it that would work fine for this this tutorial here okay now we still have a problem of its gray and washed out so congratulations we've done nothing it's awesome but here's what we're going to do we're going to preview what this would look like with a rough color grade on it so that we can do our compositing and everything and kind of pretend like it's already color graded but we're going to do that in a non-destructive way where we don't have to composite everything after it's color graded okay so we're basically looking at it through a fancy lens uh just infusion so that when we bring this into the color page things don't break all right the way that we do that is up here in the upper right hand corner this little lattice thing here this is our Lut and I'm just going to go down to Blackmagic design and we're going to go to Blackmagic design Gen 5 film to video and that won't be perfect but it'll give us a pretty good approximation of what this will look like with some color Management on it you know with with a grade on it okay so now this is already looking better it's already looking a lot better and honestly we haven't done anything creative it's like Cullen was saying earlier uh it we haven't made any major creative decisions all we've done is just treat our colors properly right so that's cool all right so we've we've we're actually doing pretty good here our ship was too big well now it's gone now it's not too big anymore we even moved it over uh okay I split those in two just to make it seem like we did more it was kind of one thing but it's fine it's fine okay we dealt with some colors that's pretty good um but now uh we have a couple more problems here um one is the light stands so why don't we why don't we go ahead and deal with that but actually before we even deal with that we're going to need to deal with the camera shape so again this camera is kind of moving back and forth and the ship isn't which um if we had a news story about that and we were interviewing somebody looking at it that would be classified as a dead giveaway all right that's a dead giveaway so what we want to do is grab the motion that is happening in our clip and we're going to take that and we're going to move everything else the exact same way all right that's called a match move we're matching the movement the way that we do that is with a planar tracker you can do a bunch of different ways but a planner tracker I I really like so I'm going to take between our color space transform and our merge right here again shift spacebar we can search for anything in the world the world is our burrito let's type p-l-a-n and that's going to bring up planar tracker or Patra as I like to call it so get our Patra and hit add and now this brings us into tracking mode I'm going to hit two on the keyboard just to bring this up and look at this oh baby what's happening here uh this is actually giving us a linear signal and then it is being transformed by our Lut that's why it looks crazy sauce we can just turn off Arlette for now and it will look a little bit slightly more reasonable but anyway we can grab our tracker and we can click anywhere on our background here and we can draw a shape and generally what you want to do with a planer tracker what it does is it selects a group of points all right you're basically selecting an area on your image to put a bunch of trackers and then it kind of averages out the movement of those trackers the planar tracker infusion isn't really like a planer tracker like uh mocha it's basically just a way to group a ton of points and kind of get the motion from them all at once without having to set one tracker here and one tracker here it's it's a lazy way to do it that works great and that's why I love it okay so I'm selecting the area of the image that I know has two things one it's close to what I want to put in because I want that that ship to be sort of near there and two it has high contrast because by default what it's going to look like look for is a difference between a light pixel and a dark pixel and it's going to latch onto that and then it any movement that happens it's going to try and put that that tracker there the entire time it's going to do that a few dozen times around here maybe more than that and it's going to give us a tracking result before we get crazy before we get crazy and start tracking we're going to go over to the inspector and I want to set a couple things first of all I want to set our render time or our reference time I'll hit set and for me it's 58 it doesn't matter what it is for you I I was so irresponsible I didn't think about this at all I just started randomly in the middle of this shot fortunately it's okay we just need to make sure okay 58 that's great um tracker we can leave his point motion track or motion type we have as perspective so what this does is it figures out the type of motion that it's trying to make from this perspective is like if you're tracking my hand and my hand does this right that's like perspective so one side is moving differently it's kind of moving around in 3D space that's something you'd want to track if your camera was moving a whole lot right um and by moving I mean like translating in space like moving back and forth um but there's a whole list of these things and generally at the top of a list like this that's the simplest and the bottom is the most crazy so what we really want to do just to save time and resources and it's just less problems is we want to pick the one closest to the top that we can okay translation is moving like this translation and rotation is moving like this and rotating translation rotation and scale is doing that and also getting bigger and smaller all right so what of these are happening well it's moving back and forth and it's probably rotating a little bit because I happen to know we shot this just holding a camera like this probably it's going to be a little bit of rotation so I'll do that I don't think it's scaling because we're not moving the the camera back and forth or anything so let's just go translation and rotation and everything else should be good and let's go ahead and hit this far right button here this is track to end okay watch what it what it does so that's going to grab a bunch of points and it's going to track them so now we've tracked like the last half of our shot to go back to this point so we can track this way a quick way is just to go to go that's going to bring it back to reference time which is 58. and then let's track backwards so we're tracking that backwards and now we've tracked this entire shot track the movement just like that to see if we've done a good job a great thing to do is here under operation mode where it says track just switch this to steady and now what I like to do is zoom in and put this like on the corner of the screen so that we can see really easily how much it's moving around and then play this back and see how much it moves and we're zoomed in at 400 percent and it's not moving too much it looks pretty good for what we're doing if it was moving around and tweaking and kind of doing a bunch of weird stuff more than just what is you know uh Native just because the resolution and stuff if it's doing it more than this we'd have a problem but this is going to be a pretty good track okay so we're just using this this uh steady thing to check and make sure our track is good so as long as things aren't moving around that means we have a good track I'll switch this back from operation mode steady to track and now we're going to do something magical this button right here create planar transform we're going to click that and here's what's going to happen once we click that it's going to make a new node and that node is going to be like a holder for all of the movement that we just tracked okay so I'll click that and it's going to put it wherever it wants it might put it in Narnia I don't know um but you scroll through and you finally find it and this is going to be our best friend all right in fact I'm going to rename our best friend I'll select it and hit F2 and we'll type track underscore pxf pxf is short for planar transform XF is transform right track pxf great and now planar tracker you've done your job thank you I appreciate you but go away I'm gonna go ahead and delete that we don't need the tracker anymore because all of the data is in that tracker tracked pxf okay now we're going to do something that will almost work are you ready for this it's going to be so almost great you're going to be like wow man this is this is almost worth it so I'm going to switch to Media out and hit 2 on the keyboard to bring up our shot I'm going to switch back and turn on our Lut so we can see what's going on and now this part of our tree right here is our ship so this is our ship and our color space transform and our transform I'm going to move our transform up and right before our merge that's where I'm going to put this track trainer planar transform I'm gonna hold shift and if you hold shift while you're grabbing something you can drop it right there on a connection okay so this is in between by the way my arrows go like this because I've right clicked and went to options and I've chosen orthogonal pipes okay you can also choose direct I started liking orthogonal because it's nice and nice and tidy okay so now this is almost going to work it's going to be great so as we play this back it's going to sort of move with our camera isn't that great I know nothing about VFX this is my I did a terrible job tracking goodbye no um there's actually nothing wrong here because remember we checked our track everything was cool we checked with everybody we we we wrote letters and they wrote back and they said I'm sorry sir it is everything is great and then so I respond and I say what gives what gives why is this look at this this is still in dead giveaway territory like it sort of moves along with it but look it's like it's like moving around it's weird well the reason for that is because when you apply tracking data and really when you transform stuff inside a fusion this is a huge a huge concept you have to have a matching size for your foreground and your background okay now this is a problem this is a problem because your foreground and your background aren't going to have the same size stuff all the time like what am I going to do like perfectly design everything to be exactly where I want it that's why we have post-production man like we're gonna move stuff around we're going to resize stuff so like what what gives well what we really need to do is just put this uh this Flying Saucer on a background that's the same size there's a bunch of different ways to do that one way that I've been doing that lately is using an effect called crop okay so here uh between our color space transform and transform I'll select color space transform and hit shift spacebar and type c-r-o-p and this is crazy this is very technical all right but if I hit enter it moves up we'll deal with that in a minute but this track will work now the track works and it's solid it's great that's because what the crop actually does is kind of a weird it's like a weird uh thing to call it because it doesn't necessarily crop something it puts it into a different size and so what's actually happening here is we've gone from this let me actually there we go we've gone from something that looks like this this is our image to this and we've just cropped the top of it which makes it the same size as our background and now our tracker and our transform and everything they go yeah everything makes sense and I'm happy now this could be a problem depending on what size of image we have but for this kind of thing like you can move this around and everything we could offset this and like use the Y offset and move this back in the center if it's cutting it off or whatever it doesn't really matter what's important is the resolution here okay so now if we go back to two this is moved around but we can still grab our transform and we can move this around and it's going to stick wherever we leave it we can resize it we can do all this stuff and it's going to be totally fine because of the uh of of the order of the things that we've done here okay so remember order is important this is a flow chart first we have our ship then we adjust the colors on it which you can't really see on this but then we crop it then we transform it then we apply the tracking data and then we put it over our image and then we do our color space transform so that it actually looks decent okay so we've done a lot of things here we've dealt with our camera Shake and now we have to get rid of our light stands so uh how many people have used image editing software and uh like cloned something out before okay lots of us this should make total sense this is going to be the easy part all right we do have to do something a little bit tricky before we get to the easy part but don't worry it's gonna be okay so click anywhere outside of our nodes like probably up here I'll just click there for a second and hit shift spacebar and we're going to type time t-i-m-e and what I'm looking for is time speed or to speed okay enter that's going to make a Time speed node this is a really really useful note what this does is it remaps time okay and you can do this for uh time like all kinds of speed ramping and everything but most of the time what I use it for is a still frame okay let's go ahead and just pick any random frame um I think we were at frame 58 earlier so track uh yeah reference 58 let's just keep it let's keep it classy let's let's keep it at 58 doesn't matter we're going to um we're going to pause this image right here let me just turn off my saucer so we can look at this we're going to pause this image right here so that we can clone out these light stands without having to clone it out every frame because it's moving around right so we're basically going to take a still photo and we're going to clone it out and then we're going to track that little piece of the still photo over this as kind of a patch and that's that's how we're going to paint out our light stands so the first thing we need to do is make this into a still we're going to start at frame 58 so with this time speed I'll go over to the inspector and speed we're going to say zero delay we're going to say 58. all right that's all we have to do and now if we play this back um actually I need to actually I need to actually hook this up so under after color space transform let's take the output of this code space transform and put it into time speed and if I hit 2 on the keyboard it's kind of we have to deal with the colors but as you can see are guys not moving and our camera's not shaking it's just a still okay if we have a still we're doing great now we can take that still and we can clone it out just like we would in a photo editing app right so I'll take this and we're going to add another node shift spacebar and I'm going to type paint p-i-a-p-a-i-n-t or just type pnt and I can't type there we go and I'll hit add so now we gotta rearrange our nodes a little bit this is this is to be expected okay and we'll go from the top down and this paint node that's what we're going to use to do our clone uh it's not real obvious how to set up a clone with a paint node okay but here's how you do it you select the paint node you go over to the inspector and this second little icon here with two brushes is clone mode all right just click on that so now you're in Clone mode and it almost looks like you could do stuff here but you can't you have to go over here to the fourth icon where it's just a single but a single brush stroke I'm not the one that looks like the Clone this one the stroke one you would not believe how many times I get these backwards and I'm just like why isn't it working there's a massive bug write a report like no I just forgot and so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna zoom in and I'm going to hold my click and drag with my middle Mouse button here to move around in the canvas close my media pool because I need some room and I can hit alt to pick whatever part I want to clone from and then I can kind of line this up right here and I can paint my thing I don't have this set something's weird and I always forget what it is I don't have my paint loaded there we go okay make sure that you're actually viewing the uh the the node you're working on I'm going to reset that make sure I'm still in the right mode there we go time speed is going right into paint yep so it's coming from it's coming from color space transform you could also take it from background footage is that true no that's not true it's coming directly from color space transform into into time speed so color space transforms splitting it right it's going right into time speed and then we're going into paint okay for some reason yeah it shouldn't that you shouldn't need a merge node okay so we're gonna do that and then we're gonna start oh something's wrong what is it this has happened before there it is there it is yep it just keeps giving doesn't it okay so great you're gonna believe how many times I've done exactly that all right if you want to adjust the size of this you can hold down control and drag like that right so we'll do that hold down Alt and is it thank you God okay it's actually going all right so we're gonna do kind of the same thing I'm gonna do a really great job this time um because I'm doing this live but you get the idea you take a lot of time and you paint this out and you do you do a much better job than I'm about to do okay and that's kind of how you get rid of something and we'll just kind of truck in here okay now um you would want to put in those clouds you would want to take more time but you you guys you guys have all cloned things before it works the same way all right so now we've basically gotten rid of our light stands now uh this is going to work perfectly because we're still on a still and um yeah it's absolutely fine except for nothing's moving and we don't see anything that we want so what we're going to do is merge this over everything uh merge this over our background image actually before we merge our ship over it so we'll take the output of this and merge it over our color space transform like this and so what we're doing is we're splitting our color space transform that's going into time speed and it's getting merged over itself but we only want it to do that right where that uh those light stands were we don't want it over the whole thing because we want our guy to walk right so we're going to use a mask a mask remember only it tells a node to only do whatever the node is doing just right here just inside of this this circle okay so let's say shift spacebar and I'll type um let's do polygon so Pol will bring up polygon and I'll hit add that'll add a polygon mask to our merge and I'll just bring this down below and what we're doing what we're saying is okay when you merge this over only do it inside of this mask so I'll select polygon and I'll just kind of draw a little box here and I'll hit two on the keyboard and at frame 58 this will look beautiful there's our stands and we're just going to take those out like this and we'll just kind of put this little patch over here so here's with the patch and here's without it we're just getting rid of those stands make sense okay we can also feather out that mask a little bit I'll just soften that edge a little and we'll call that good now we're going to run into a problem here immediately if we move off of frame 58 look what happens weirdness happens look at this oh goodness no um this is weird right that's not that's not going to work out so what we need to do is we need to use our tracking data that we already made for sticking our uh our ship to the shot and we're going to put that still over the shot and move that along with the shot and we're also going to do that with the mask so we can take this track pxf and I can hit Ctrl C and click off of this and hit Ctrl V to paste it I'll hold down shift and just put this in between our merge and our paint and now this is going to move along with our with our shot same thing for polygon I'll hit Ctrl V with the polygon if I have something selected it will paste it after after whatever I have selected so we have this tracking data being applied not only to our ship but also to our still and to the mask that controls where R still shows up okay so we're saying just do it here and it's being tracked and the thing that we are masking is being tracked and the ship is being tracked on top of that okay so now that will give us if I turn our ship back on go to our media out turn on our Lut now that will give us a shot without the light stands that is tracked and has our ship tracked on there pretty cool right now there's a uh yeah we did it we got rid of the light stands this is great now this is a a pretty decent composite so far and actually I'm going to take a second and kind of label things so this tree right here this is our ship so a little cool thing that you can do in Fusion is you can select a bunch of nodes and hit shift spacebar and type UND and that's going to make an underlay underlay I'll hit enter and that makes a little panel behind it where you can label stuff which is very nice so I'm going to click off of this hold down alt and click back on it and then I can select the underlay by itself if I don't do that and I just grab the underlay it'll move everything so I'll click off of it hold down alt and click on this so I'm just selecting the underlay then I can hit F2 and rename it and we'll call this ship like that and I can right click and set a color so I don't know we'll make it Orange okay so now we have this kind of labeled I'll start to spread these out a little bit just because it looks nicer when they're spread out I used to want to keep things like together a lot but it looks nicer when it's spread out looks like you know so I'll select all of this stuff this is our paint out and I'll hit spacebar paint or no underlay UND old hold down alt select that F2 same thing and we'll call this paint out will make it a pretty color like violet okay there's our paint out so um that's kind of the basic idea but there are a couple there are a couple things uh that I want to clue you in on um one is I'll make keep ourselves organized here one is there's a problem with our colors okay the other one the other one is some 3D nerdiness which one should we talk about first what do you think it's your your call 3D nerdiness okay so one thing that's really cool about making a 3D render is you have control over everything you have control over the lighting you have control over the quality um you know I this ship isn't the most realistic model in the world uh modeled it really quickly but you know we could make all kinds of greebles and little like crazy things on the ship and add lights and everything but what's really cool about a 3D render is you have all of those layers we were talking about earlier so one of the things with this shot is that the brightness of the top of this ship is just a little bit too dark if this was out in a sunny day I would expect the top of this ship to be a little bit brighter okay so to fix that we can do that with a color a color corrector right and we could even put a color corrector on here and mask it and that would work so um yeah let's try that so I'll take the ship here and we'll just bring this up and I think after our color space transform but before our crop we will hit shift spacebar and type color and the second one color corrector grab that and what we could do is we could add a mask to this and we could do something like bring up our lift except for there's a problem with that which is what we need to talk about but um we'll just do with something quick here to make the point we could game this up like this and then only select the top of this ship with a mask and that would be a way to deal with it right but uh because this is a 3D render we can actually use some of those other layers to make a mask for us which is actually called a matte which is a black and white image that controls the transparency of something so let's grab our ship Mi and I'm going to hit Ctrl C double click off of this and hit Ctrl V and I'm just going to make a straight up copy of this all right so we copied the ship but this time with the ship selected in the inspector I'll go over to where it says layer and again there's all these different kinds of layers which is just more than we can get into today but one of the things if we scroll down here uh there are some layers called normals now a normal in 3D is basically a way to describe what direction a face is facing in 3D and so if my hand was you know in 3D or whatever the normal of my hand would be straight out like this so um without getting super complicated this normal Z this is basically going to highlight uh the the places in the image that have a face in 3D that's facing up in the Z axis which is actually kind of convenient because if we have this ship and it's being lit from the sun which is up above it the the pieces of the ship that are facing up are going to be brighter so what we can do is grab this view layer normal Z and I'll just bring this up in our first viewer here and look what we have this is a white map of everything that's facing up in the shot if we were to view a different layer like why that's everything that's kind of facing um facing other directions X like that right but normal Z that's actually pretty useful for us right so we can use this to change where our color corrector happens I can take the output of this and just push this into the mask input of our color corrector and that will limit where our color corrector does things but if we select the color corrector we go up to settings and here where it says uh fit mask crop Channel Alpha let's change this channel to luminance what this is doing is it's taking the channel of the Mask whatever you have input in the mask and it's saying how do you want me to use this as a mask a lot of the time if you have a mask it's actually giving it an alpha channel so wherever it's transparent that's where you want things to be to not be affected but we're giving it a black and white image and so we're saying anywhere where it's black don't do stuff where it's white definitely do stuff so we've set that to luminance and now if I select this color corrector and go up to correction and I move this around it's only going to adjust the top of my ship and it's going to do it in a really accurate way a lot better than if I were to Roto this out right so that's pretty cool so what we can do is we can do something you know pretty simple like push this gamma up oops or the gain or whatever we want oops I reset this I went to settings and there we go luminance Isn't that cool so we can kind of adjust this and make it work a little better so it's only adjusting the top of the the ship and it looks a little bit more realistic for the lighting pretty cool okay so that's some 3D nerdiness you can use like that's a really common thing in compositing especially if you're using 3D compositing um man you can use those layers for all kinds of crazy things like it's wild there's actual magic that happens with that stuff okay but uh one thing I want to I want to kind of leave you guys with this is something that I've been uh honestly this is kind of one of those things where I'm like I've been compositing kind of off and on uh for many years and I never really understood this and I'm going to try my best to uh explain this in a way to where I would appreciate somebody explaining it to me without me having to read many books and articles and such on this learning VFX there is a problem when you have something like this where we have a ship with transparency right that's on a transparent background and you want to color correct it we kind of saw it a little bit earlier I'll just take this off uh real quick take this thing off we kind of saw this earlier when I was trying to color correct it and I grabbed something like the lift you see how it's adjusting the whole shot and not what I want Even though this is um even though this ship is it only exists like in the middle there's there's transparency all around that is because of a certain Concept in visual effects called multiplication okay so basically uh this is way too much to explain with Fusion here's what we got to do all right uh so you guys know The Very Hungry Caterpillar right this book you know what I'm talking about Eric Carl all right he right he makes the dopas books uh so here's here's his process here's what he does so this guy he paints on um on tissue paper and he kind of just paints randomly paints some that looks cool okay uh and he ends up with something like this and then what he does is he cuts out pieces and he puts them together in kind of like a collage art and he makes uh animals and all and kit like uh you know children all kinds of like cool stuff out of these pieces that he's cut out all right and then it ends up looking awesome well uh you may have noticed um when he paints this look at this right here look he set this down on the table and he's not being really specific about where he's painting he's just laying it on okay paint's going everywhere all right everybody in his Studio was like dude you've gone crazy uh he just gets it everywhere it's a messy right and then when he cuts it out look how pristine that looks that's not messy at all that looks awesome and look at this like this is beautiful imagine what it would be like if he cut out white paper and he made all the shapes and he put it down on the paper like this and these were all white shapes and then he took his drippy brush and he was like all right I'm going to color it in now how well do you think that would work out some people are very talented and could probably do a decent job with that but I know if it were me what would happen is it would be awful it would it would look uh well it would look about like this it would look like it would look like that but a children's book and then I'd bring it to the publisher and they'd be like sir please quit please quit making making this art okay why am I going into this well here's the thing when you have something that's transparent uh like this image and you want to do some color correction on it you kind of need to set it up the same way because if you're going to mess with the colors and cut it out it's best to mess with the colors before you cut it out so you don't get the mess everywhere so what we need to do instead of bringing in our cut out thing and then coloring it right is we need to bring it in and then lay it on a nice piece of paper where we can be messy and be messy all we want and then cut it out so it looks nice all right so uh here's something also that I hope that this shows up live um let me see if this will this will actually work it's sometimes hard to see this difference but it is a real difference and it becomes a very big problem sometimes um Let's uh oh actually can I do that I'm not sure if I can do that but here's here's basically how it works uh before you color correct anything with a transparency you need to lay it down on top of something so you don't get it messy that is called dividing okay it's the opposite of multiplication it's like math yeah it's like math okay so you type divide Alpha divide and what that's going to do is ruin it it's going to just look worse all right so look at the edges here like dude do you want that as your final comp you're like oh yeah man this is this looks let's see why is it why does it even look that bad I don't know um what's going on what did I do what have I done I did something crazy to make it look even even worse than I thought it would um what's happening I'm not sure it's okay but anyway you have these like awful edges here that's because what it's doing is when something is transparent it's actually kind of blurred at the edges that's why it looks nice is because it has a little tiny blur and what happens is when you color correct that little tiny blur uh things get messed up and so what we do is we take off that blur and we make it really junky looking then we can do our color correction and then after we do our color correction so after this color corrector and hit shift spacebar and type multiply that's Alpha multiply and hit add what that's going to do is cut it out nicely so we're laying it onto onto a table that we can be messy on just like our hero here and then we're cutting it out nicely okay so now that it's cut out nicely we can do any kind of color correction we want to do without worrying about it oh it's because I was messing with the colors earlier I know how things work this is my first day and so um let's put this back into here but actually the right way let's put it into the blue input and we'll select luminance and we'll adjust our colors and we can push up our gain to match however we want to do right and now we have these really nice edges that make a whole lot of sense and I'm really baking that this actually looks different but we'll do this if I hold down control and select Alpha divide Alpha multiply and hit Ctrl p it's not going to work is it well believe me it is sometimes a very very big deal it will mess up the edges basically if you don't do it this way and so basically what you're doing here is in between divide and multiply you're making a safe zone so I'll type underlay and we'll call this safe Zone all right in this safe Zone that's where you can actually color correct stuff without ruining everything all right so that's where we want to put any kind of color correction on something that has transparency like that now that is a concept I didn't know about at all and so um when you are compositing something that has some transparency like a stock footage like stock footage that you might get of like a uh you know gunshots explosions anything like that and you want to color correct them and make them brighter um if you've ever tried that infusion chances are you put that on there tried to make it brighter and then it ruins everything and it's all because of this sinking thing right here it's all because of divide and multiply so if you don't know if so if your colors are acting weird you have to put it down on the table do all your colors and then cut it out nicely so that is the problem with colors and now we're we're doing we're doing pretty good on this on this whole thing I don't know if we'll have time I don't think we'll have time to do the shadow but I'll tell you kind of how I did it in this other comp here so let's switch back over really these like few Concepts that I've gone over if you understand some of these you have this massive toolbox to do so much stuff because a lot of the things are actually very similar okay so to make a Shadow here's all we're really doing with the shadow let's just zoom into the shadow this is three notes oh well there's more notes than that um this Shadow tint this is just color correction so what we're doing is it's hard to show you without the colors but what we're doing is basically just darkening this image and merging it over itself and with a multiplier mode so if I take this off right here we're just basically making a darker um a darker copy of our background and we're putting it over itself with a multiply transfer which means it basically makes things darker right and then I have a I have a mask which is cutting out this little Ridge here and then we have a mask that is cutting out the shape of the saucer and we're putting those together we're putting those together so that the mask and the saucer where those go together we have this little tiny bit of land here that is darkened okay this is the mask and then that goes through our tracker so that it sticks to the image and we have just the darker version of our image inside of that Circle which is limited to only happen on the sand right there okay so it's the same thing we're color correcting we're putting a mask on it we're tracking stuff it's kind of the same thing I also if you noticed earlier there was a smudge on this on this lens we were out here we were out on the beach and I think a piece of sand or something got on the lens right here and so you can kind of see the difference uh and when this moves around again it's really distracting there's kind of this little little smudge there and so how would you think we fixed that it's pretty much the same way that we fixed uh the the light stands and so we made a we made a still frame and painted this out and then tracked it back onto itself so that it moves along with the footage and then we put a mask on it that's also tracked actually I didn't even track The Mask I just put it right there and then that all comes together for the finished shot so really now if we zoom out here I hope that this doesn't look quite as crazy because we walked through a lot of this right we have our saucer which all we're doing is taking the saucer dividing it doing some color correction part of that is with that that normal Z which is just the upper part of our ship and then we crop it which we already talked about we're making it the same size we transform it to put it right where it's supposed to be we apply the tracking data and then we put it over itself I have a couple of little extra things here but for the most part that's pretty much what we're doing so I hope that helps you uh with your visual effects stuff and I hope that helps you kind of think about man some cool stuff can happen in the fusion page so so glad to share this with you guys thank you so much foreign well done my friend as usual you continue to impress me all right guys uh before we jump into some q a with Casey here uh we're gonna get our uh I'm gonna say our last online eligible giveaway of today which is going to be Giveaway number five for this big boy right here the da Vinci resolve quotes mini panel uh type exclamation point giveaway five in chat if you'd like to be entered into that giveaway and um at the end of our q a time we'll be drawing a winner for that and uh an additional in-house only winner for one of the uh Cloud store minis which is pretty awesome so let's move into uh q a here where's my phone in my pocket DOI all right any questions for Casey you're closer so you win hello um I was just wondering is there a specific reason why you put the divide and multiply nodes around the color corrector instead of checking the predivide post multiply box in the color corrector node yeah yeah um the the short story is that uh to do to with that little check box in the color corrector it's um dividing it and then multiplying it and then if you add another corrector it divides it and multiplies it again and you generally don't want to do that a bunch so if you had like three color correctors you're degrading your image is the thing so this this keeps it higher quality yep someone else another question also you're closer you win yes yes thanks again this has been great favorite weekend all year um I was curious we have such a badass computer sitting right there the Puget systems maybe at the end of this if you just wanted to ramp like a gajillion particles through it infusion I just kind of want to see where it breaks that that would be fun we might we might be able to do that all right over here I saw you first um yeah uh for me uh just starting to get used to Fusion a little bit uh the thing that trips me up a lot is all these in and out points of each node how any any suggestions of how to start to wrap my mind about around that yeah absolutely so uh any node infusion if you uh Mouse over one of these in and out points it tells you what it is so that's a big thing uh usually the main one is yellow it's all about the colors so it kind of gets confusing because you know it can come from any direction and the directions don't matter it's all about the colors and the shapes right so uh your yellow is usually your main input your blue is always your mask input and then your square is always the output and those can be anywhere and it doesn't really matter it doesn't change it the other thing that you can do is if you are going to hook up a node to another node you can right click and drag instead of normal click and drag and you can drop it on a node and you'll get a nice little a nice little uh menu here and you can select what you want to connect it to so you have to remember you just say foreground and that's what you want to do it's really kind of comes down to getting some experience with the notes and I mean building something really simple like merging one thing over something else and getting really used to the merge node and you know this is a lot to take in all at once but really like you know the main concepts are you have your output and that outputs an image and depending on what node you're hooking it up to you might have a different reason to put it into a certain input you know a mask generally goes into the mask input right but up here this isn't a mask this is a matte this is actually an image that we're putting into the mask input which if we were to just drop this into the color corrector without being really careful just drop it on there it connects it to the green input just because by default color corrector the second thing you connect to it is the match reference okay so you can either right click and drag over there and select effect mask or you can be really careful and drag this over the blue input and connect it to the effect mask but you kind of have to like have an idea of what you want to do before you connect it and that'll that'll help a lot which again a lot of that is just thinking about it before you do it or you can just kind of put it together and see if it works and then kind of fix it from there which is often what I do well thank you so much that's been great I'm less scared now to touch Fusion than you know before so going back to the spaceship crop example when we're trying to do like the tracking the camera tracking part so we did crop since the video is 1920 by 800 and uh you know the the 3D Is 1920 by 1080. if it was the opposite would you do like a transparent solid layer to match it or you still do the same thing from uh I I'm pretty sure that if you put a crop on something and it's it's the smaller resolution it will just put it on the bigger canvas okay so yeah it's weird because it does crop but it's not necessarily always a crop it's more like put it on a on a canvas that's the right size yeah and it can also crop yeah so kind of kind of speaking on that um is there a reason you're using a crop and not a resize node yeah so a resize node will actually re uh it will resample the image and a crop is just kind of adjusting the edges of it right there are certain certain times where you could probably use either and it wouldn't matter a whole lot but I think generally you try and use a crop you can also merge it over a transparent background which is what I've done a lot what a lot of people do similar kind of similar result yeah thanks so it's it's rather new to see you use color space transform nodes in in fusion um just to reiterate on the last node in your meet before your media out the output color space is that supposed to be the same as the timeline working space of the rest of your project yeah okay yeah so it basically it takes it into compositing mode into linear and you put everything together and then you you're kind of pretending like this is how you shot it right so you're bringing it back into color into camera space this could also yeah it could be uh you know DaVinci intermediate if you want to it's whatever you're kind of working in because when you get to the color you want this to act basically like the other shots in your in your timeline that's the idea so going back to the crop I'm trying to make an analogy that makes sense to me would that would that be like in like Photoshop when you add to the canvas or technology a lot like that yeah the same sort of very similar yep any other questions for Casey here in-house okay we'll move on to one of the questions from our online audience here can you expose parameters for DOT exr files to work with Fusion like you can with let's say Unreal Engine um can you expose parameters to work with them what was the question can you expose parameters for exr files to work within Fusion like you can with Unreal Engine I'm not sure what they mean by work within with an Unreal Engine but you can be either you can um you can basically anything that's in an exr you can access with infusion and one way to do it is just how we did it which is in the media in you can select the layer you can also go to your different channels here and you can do things like this x Velocity Channel you can put you know different passes into these different channels and what's really cool is there are certain tools in Fusion that use certain channels and so if you have like your your Velocity channel from your render your velocity render level uh layer from your render you can put that into the right channel infusion so that something that uses that channel in Fusion can access that in the right way it's it's crazy it gets deep pretty quick um but yeah you can do that there's also um if you use reactor which is like a um it's a collection of scripts and plugins that kind of the community makes inside of fusion you can download that there are ways to split an exr into a bunch of different passes and you can do really fancy compositing stuff that yeah is pretty far beyond the basics so it's really cool this guy's the limit basically uh where can you copy the track underscore pfx1 is it linked to the original if I change parameters on one does it change the other yeah that's a great question because it's a little confusing so this uh track pxf you it there's not really anything to change it's just kind of a holder for the data right and so all of that data is pretty much copied from the track and so it's just it's just it's like a transform node that just has all the keyframes in it that's why you have all these ticks right here it's just a bunch of keyframes and so you don't really adjust a whole lot and so there's not really any big deal with just duplicating it a bunch because you're the the idea is that you get it right before you make those planar transform nodes and if you don't have it right you've got to fix it in the tracker before you make that planar transform there's also ways to use the tracker kind of as the same thing but this is like kind of a cleaner way to do it so yeah okay all right guys uh let's give it up for Casey that was an incredible presentation [Applause]

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 69,387

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, color, fusion, fairlight

Id: _qEf8o0wL60

Length: 72min 0sec (4320 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022