How To Create A Lightsaber Effect In Davinci Resolve 17 | Star Wars

hey guys i hope you liked that intro welcome to another davinci resolve 17 editing tutorial and in this video i'm going to be showing you how to create the star wars lightsaber effect inside of the fusion tab if you're new to my channel don't forget to hit the subscribe button and click the notification bell to stay notified for my next uploads also if you want to see some awesome behind the scenes content of projects that i'm working on you can also follow my social media accounts links will be in the description below now the lightsaber effect is one of my first visual effects that i learned quite a few years ago inside of after effects and you can actually recreate this inside of davinci resolve inside the free version so if you don't have the studio version you can also follow along in this tutorial so let's open up davinci resolve and let's start editing okay so i've opened up davinci resolve 17 and here's my clip that i worked on a little bit earlier and as you can see we've got the lightsaber effect so i've already imported my clip so i was using this clip here up against the green screen we've got our actor swinging the lightsaber now i recommend when you're shooting to use a lightsaber that emits light so it can interact with lighting surrounding you but for this video i'm just using green screen footage so i recommend if you're in the same situation as i am and you're you've got someone swinging a lightsaber in front of a green screen i would recommend doing the lightsaber part first and then keying out the green just because you might lose detail in the lightsaber when it is swinging around with the motion blur so that's why i recommend doing the doing the lightsaber part first a couple of months ago now where i show you how to key out green so if you want to check that out you can click over here this tutorial we're just focusing on the lightsaber effect so all we need to do to start the lightsaber effect is we're just going to switch out to the fusion tab and we're going to open this clip up inside of fusion okay so we've got our clip inside of fusion so let's just play this back all right so the first thing we are going to do is we are going to create a merge so we can go over to this icon over here and we'll click that and that will create our merge node the next thing we want to do is we want to add our background this is going to be the core of our lightsaber so i'm just going to click over on this icon here click and drag it in and then what i'm going to do is to create the lightsaber and start animating it we can go over to our polygon tool and we're just going to click and drag that and we're going to connect the polygon tool into our blue arrow this is our mask and i'm just going to select the background and i'm going to change the background from black to white and i'm going to click ok and now it's white what i'm going to do is i'm just going to create a quick mask i'm going to make sure we're at the beginning of the timeline i'm going to zoom in by hitting ctrl and using the scroll wheel and i'm just going to create two points on either ends okay and then i'm just going to select one so now we've got our mask and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go and shift space and i'm going to create a glow double click that and then i'm just going to put this on our green layer which is our foreground and i'm just going to create some space so i'm just going to go up over here and i'm going to add a couple other nodes now a lot of people just use the glow node and you know change the brightness and you can see that it's making a difference here there's a little bit of a glow happening right here and i'm going to change the hv spread can't really see anything because it's white and we want to change it to something that's like red for example of course you can change the colors later on if you want to um so let's just change the spread i'm going to bring the spread down a fair bit and i'm going to change the hv ratio to about there i'm going to leave the brightness up and i'm going to bring the opacity out so now you can kind of see what our lightsaber is going to look like so a lot of people like to just use this lightsaber like it is i like to add a little bit more into the node tree so i'm just going to add a couple more nodes so i'm going to do shift space from background and i'm going to do a gaussian blur i think that's how you pronounce it gaussian blur and then right underneath it i'm going to go shift space and i'm going to add a color corrector cc all right so i've added these in so when i go to gaussian blur i'm going to go over to color first so i want the color to match the lightsaber color from the glow so i chose red for this example just so you can see it a bit better against the green screen so i'm just going to change that to red and then i'm going to adjust the gaussian blur and i'm going to bring it down quite a bit we don't want it to be too intense we just wanted to give it that bit of a feather around the glowing core just so it's not too solid so i'm going to go to color corrector and i'm going to also adjust the saturation as well i don't want it to be too saturated and as you can see there's a bit of a blur around the edges just so it helps blend in the glow so let's just bring that back up so you can see it's making a little bit of a difference i'm happy with that i might even adjust the blur a bit more so you can see with the blur it's also adjusting the glow so this is basically what it looks like without the gaussian blur and then when you just add in a little bit you can see it's starting to give the edges a bit of like a feather sort of glowing core look and then i'm fairly happy with that um so we can start animating the light saber so i'm going to go back to polygon i'm actually going to just so i'm not distracted by the glowing lightsaber i'm just going to take the background off just so you can't really see all the effects that we've added and i'm just going to select polygon and now i'm just going to make adjustments so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to i'm just going to make this mask fit better into the light saber so now we've got this so now by default every time you go frame by frame this is actually animating the mask you don't have to create any keyframes because by default the polygon is going to create the keyframes for you so i'm just going to go to the next frame you can use the arrow key or you can just click over here and then go to the next frame and then i'm just going to select these two and i'm just going to click and drag and then of course if you want to preview um what you've done you can just go back and you can see that the mask has tracked on by going frame by frame by default so if you want to have a look at roughly what your light saber will look like you can just go to your background and then just bring it into your gaussian blur and now you can see a preview of what your lightsaber will look like um i'm just going to take this off and i'm going to continue my keyframing until i've finished so now you can see that we've got our lightsaber following it so now we can bring this back into our gaussian blur so now we can see our final look and that's actually looking pretty good i'm going to do a quick green screen key just so you can see the lightsaber blade better because i'm going to be changing the colors so now we can see the lightsaber much more clearer let's just go into the settings and let's just play around with it some more so right now we've got red when we play that back it's looking fairly good so i'm going to change the color and there's two nodes you need to go to to change the color for this so there's the glow and then there's the color corrector just above it so let's just change this to green let's bring that up and then let's go to color corrector and then let's just bring this back up to green then now we've got a really nice bright vibrant colored lightsaber glow and then we can go to glow and we can adjust things even more if you don't want it to be too intense we can bring the spread hv ratio i like to have the hv ratio just below the halfway default mark just so you can see it glow a little bit better and then we can adjust the shine threshold so we can make it even more shinier if we want to um we can also adjust the opacity so if you don't want it to be too bright around the edges and all of that sort of stuff so what i really like about creating this inside of fusion is you're able to take the glow off and you can focus on just the rotoscoping if you want so when we select the polygon tool you can see where we need to animate it um i've added a transform node that's why it's looking like that but once we pipe this back into our gaussian blur now we can see what the effect is doing so yeah i hope you guys found this video helpful if you did don't forget to give this video a thumbs up if you're new to the channel don't forget to hit the subscribe button and click the notification bell to stay notified for my next uploads also if you guys use this tutorial for your own lightsaber effects follow my social media accounts and send me some of the clips that you've worked with i'd love to have a look at it and yeah thank you guys for watching i'll see you guys next time

Channel: McFilmin

Views: 28,669

Keywords: McFilmin, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve effects, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, How To Create A Lightsaber In Davinci Resolve 17, lightsaber tutorial for beginners, light saber davinci resolve, davinci resolve fusion lightsaber, fusion tutorial davinci resolve 17, how to make a lightsaber in davinci resolve, lightsaber tutorial, star wars tutorial, star wars lightsaber tutorial, davinci resolve tutorials for beginners, davinci resolve tutorial effects, free effects

Id: 209mfyFFBQs

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021