How to Draw Masks & Polylines in DaVinci Resolve - Use the Pen Tool like a Boss!

drawing with the pen tool drawing masks and Vector shapes and things like that is an essential skill these days when it comes to design and compositing and if you don't know how to do it this is the video to show you if you already know kind of how to do it why are you watching this video don't do that but for everybody who does let's let's go let's just go ahead and make a new Fusion composition I'll just right click here in the media pool and say new Fusion composition and leave everything as default and hit create and we'll double click on that Fusion comp to open it up in Fusion all right and let's just start with a background node I'll grab this background node and connect it to our media out and that's going to give us a black screen just something so that we have something to work with here now let's talk about masks and how they work you're sort of in the middle of our toolbar we have a couple of mask nodes we have a rectangle ellipse polygon and B spline and what these do is they draw shapes so I can take this rectangle down like this and it will draw a rectangle shape I can grab the edges of this and and adjust the sizing over here in the inspector I can adjust the corner radius and the width and the height the center move it around and that kind of thing I'll select this mask and hit two on the keyboard to just bring this mask up in our second viewer I'm only using one viewer right now because I have this little button checked here just lets me concentrate on one of them but yeah over here in the inspector we also have a few different options including soft Edge softens things you can uncheck solid to not fill this in boost up the Border width to just draw a border you can even do fancy things like animate the border with this length slider adjust it with the position slider so you can make all kinds of different graphics and effects and everything just using these controls very useful let's talk about a ellipse mask grab this ellipse mask and hit two on the keyboard and we have very similar controls here we have our soft Edge our border width solid we can invert any mask with this little invert button and then we have Center width height and angle but let's get to the polygon tool now this is a tool that lets you create a custom shape by clicking and dragging so let's just make a little Blobby I can click and drag click and drag and I'll make this kind of little Blobby shape alright so this is the kind of thing that you draw with a polygon mask super useful if you want to create a shape that isn't a ellipse or a rectangle or if you're trying to trace something out or draw some very specific kind of shape there are a few other controls with this polygon mask we of course have our level filter soft Edge and Border width invert and solid our Center and our size which just sizes this whole thing up we also have three degrees of rotation which is interesting Z rotation is normally what you think of as rotation but the X and Y kind of squash this so it's almost like it's flipping this in you know kind of Two and a Half d space right so that's nice but we also have quite a bit of options here in this upper part of our interface most of this stuff you probably don't need to worry about a whole lot they're kind of different selection modes and everything but by default you're on this insert and modify mode which will let you grab points and move them around you can grab the handles on this point to kind of adjust the curve and you can click anywhere on the curve to add a new Point all right couple things that are useful you can click on this button here to select all points it's a nice way to do that if you don't want to drag a marquee and you can change all of the points to be soft or to be linear like that depending on what you want to do you can also control which points you show so key points would be the main points for the curve and then the handles are the little handles out here that control how the curve Works around them and you can hide or show either of those we also have a shape box which is really helpful if you want to say scale all or part of your shape and click on this and this will give you a little kind of transform box thing where you can kind of move this around like this this is a great way to adjust your mask if you need to kind of scale it all at once we have a button to delete points which I have them all selected but that will just kind of delete them like that we can also reduce the points if we select whatever points we want and hit reduce that will try and draw the same shape with less points so if I have a few extras like this and I select them all and then reduce the points that will take away any extra points that we have and there are a few other things that are a little bit more advanced one thing that's worth showing is this double poly mode if I click on this this will let me soften parts of the mask and keep other parts not soft I can hit tab on the keyboard and that will switch in between the soft Edge and the hard Edge and so I can grab the main Edge the hard Edge and move that around in normal mode and if I hit tab that'll select the dotted line in red and I can grab the edges of that and I can have this kind of Fade Out along this line so that's really great if you have something that doesn't have a uniform Edge you can get pretty detailed with this kind of thing pretty neat so those are kind of the main controls we have a b spline which is very similar to a polygon the only difference is that instead of clicking and dragging you just click one point and what it will do is kind of average out and soften in the points so you always have a really soft kind of organic shape so this is really nice if you want to have this kind of soft shape but you don't want to adjust curves all the time you can kind of just have it average out for you from these hard edges very nice tool let's go ahead and grab another background here and we'll just make it green and let's go ahead and mask this background I'll take a polygon and just connect it to our background here and let's talk about how to use this polygon mask a little bit in a nicer way let's say we want to draw something like a tree we could draw something like kind of a cartoon Evergreen sort of tree by just clicking all the points and letting them be sharp like this and that makes this path and towards the end of the path if we go over our first dot it'll show us this circle and when we click on that that will fill it in then it switches to adjustment mode and we can move these points around as we want afterwards so now we have this kind of basic little tree let's say we don't want a pointy tree like this I'll just reset our Mass we want it to be kind of puffy well we can use a combination of just clicking once to get give us a hard Edge and then I can click and drag to get a curved Edge and then click once to get a hard corner and then click and drag for a soft corner and so on so that we can make this kind of puffy tree right so you click and drag when you're drawing to adjust these handles and you just click once if you want it to be sharp now this one I actually want to be sharp so what I can do is just take these Handles in just kind of push them in like that and that'll make this sharp and I can kind of adjust this from here to be just the way that I want if I want to adjust these handles independently of each other normally I can grab this and they'll both move together but if I hold Ctrl then I can do one at a time so we can really kind of refine this and make this really sharp like that same thing here holding Ctrl and we have a lot of say over what our curve looks like just using these handles so yeah now we have kind of the puffy part of the tree and of course if I want to draw something like the trunk to the tree I could you know maybe get some kind of brown and we'll also draw a tree trunk kind of shape like this so now we have the trunk and we have a little tree is that nice I can select to all of these points and move this around I can scale it up with the size like that whatever I want to do in fact what might even be better is just to grab a shape box here and that will move the actual points instead of sizing The Mask something like that now we have our tree now one thing that I see people doing a lot is if they want to make a curve like this maybe something like this tree trunk you'll notice that this tree trunk I can make a really nice shape here with only a few different points one two three four five six seven eight nine points I see a lot of people doing stuff like this they'll take a polygon put that on here and then they'll just put a whole bunch of points here like this and that's how they draw shapes and I mean you can do it that way there's nothing I guess wrong with that the only problem is that it's a lot harder to adjust it like if I don't like this curve I have to select all of these points and move them around and then you know kind of adjust them together and it's just really a pain and so in general you want to keep the minimum amount of points that you'll need to make a shape just because it's easier to adjust later one thing I could do is select all of these and then reduce points like that and then that will get rid of most of those points and so if you find yourself doing that you could use the reduced points but most of the time you're only going to need just a few points here like I don't need to point up here I don't need several points I could do something like this maybe select these I could go up and soften them like that and I get the same basic shape but it's a lot easier to adjust it look at that so much easier so you always want to draw with just a few little points get away with the minimum amount of points here again you don't need all of this I really only need like one point on a curve most of the time right so I can hold Ctrl and move this out and I can get a really good result just with a couple points of course if you need to make that more complicated you can add more points but surprisingly often you don't need to make tons and tons of points even when you're rotoscoping that kind of thing speaking of rotoscoping let's take a look at that here's the general idea behind rotoscoping it is using a ask to trace out something in the image now in the studio version of resolve there are some fancy tools to where you won't need to rotoscope as often but sometimes even with all the fancy tools we'll need to do something like Trace something out something that's high contrast like this you might be able to do something like key the sky but for an example of something you might rotoscope you could do something like grab a mask and we'll just connect this to our media in and I'll turn off the mask for now and again we're just going to pretty quickly just kind of cut this out with not too many points depending on your background and what you're doing you might need to use more points but generally you will Trace out whatever shape and then when you apply it that will kind of cut that out right then you take this and you animate it over time the way that you do that is by selecting this mask and you go over to here where it says right click here for shape animation you can right click here and say set key and that will remember the shape of this mask and where all the points are right here at frame 65 okay so let's take this turn this off again again it's maybe move down a few frames and then it's a matter of grabbing all your points and moving them back over to where they're supposed to go and changing your shape to make sure that it matches everything perfectly this is a very very tedious process that most people hate and actually if you were going to do this you'd probably want to do this with tracking you'd want to track the image so that it kind of helps you rotoscope it a little bit but this is generally how the process is done you move in between the different frames and make sure that your edges are right on and you check it every single frame and once you're done rotoing you'll have a cutout that moves along with your subject right that's kind of the general idea if you want more on rotoscoping let me know in the comments and we can do a whole series on that that'd be neat but that's kind of the idea with masks is you pick whichever one of these masks is closest to what you want to do sometimes you have to draw a custom shape with a polygon or a B spline and when you are drawing a mask click and drag to make soft Corners click once to make hard corners and use as little points as possible and your life will be much much easier so there you go there's some pen tool wisdom I hope this was helpful for you if it was make sure to let me know that if you want to learn more about working in Fusion we have a course for that it's called Pro compositing and effects inside of fusion make sure to check that out at groundcontrol.film hey thanks for hanging out with me you're the best I hope that your pen tool is easily editable which is a hard word to say edited editable

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 31,901

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, How to Draw Masks & Polylines in DaVinci Resolve - Use the Pen Tool like a Boss!, fusion tutorial davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve tutorial for beginners, how to use mask in davinci resolve 18, how to use mask in davinci resolve, how to make a mask in davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve fusion tutorial

Id: PYExcRXM5mo

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023