MUZZLE FLASH GUN EFFECTS IN RESOLVE 17 - Fusion VFX Tutorial for Beginners

[Music] hey i'm casey ferris i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube make sure to subscribe for more of that today we're talking about making gun effects and resolve 17. i have a really cool scene from my friend's upcoming short film where they happen to have a gunfight in the forest yes and they're shooting and violence and all the great things that we love in movie land but look at this wait a minute wait j you just wait a cotton picking minute i don't think that's a real gun maybe it is i actually don't know that much about guns honestly one thing i do know is that this doesn't look nearly awesome enough so we need to awesome it up we need to add 40 more awesome to this which we can do with the power of movie magic we're gonna make this look like a hollywood style muzzle flash which is basically reality plus over-the-topness that's all gonna happen in the fusion page but before all of that happens i'll just take an opportunity and put a marker right here where the gunshot's supposed to happen and you know what i'll even be a good kid and label it oh baby there we go there it is and let's head over to the fusion page with my playhead over the clip i'll go down here and click on fusion so here we are on the fusion page if you don't know the basics of this page check out right here go here and learn a little bit because we'll take this somewhat slow but still be helpful to know the basics if we open up our keyframes panel which you can click right up here we can see everything laid out in a little timeline here and we have our marker so that's gonna make it easy to go to the frame that we need to i'll probably close this for now but we can come back to that later we can also remember this is just frame 19 and the cool thing about a muzzle flash is you don't really need to animate a whole lot of stuff everything pretty much happens just on one frame but what do we do how do we add the awesomeness the first major ingredient is the muzzle flash itself so we need to have fire come out of this thing all right needs to be a flamethrower and you can add this in all different kinds of ways but the easiest way and i think probably the best looking way is to use some nice stock elements something like this this is a clip of a real muzzle flash and the basic idea is that we're going to put this over this footage to make it look like the gun's making the muzzle flash this clip as well as the other ones that we're going to be using in this tutorial have been very nicely provided by the wonderful people over at action vfx this is a great place to get explosions and smoke and fire and fog and basically all the fun things aerial explosions debris sparks blood and gore all kinds of really cool stuff they even have some of these available for free check them out there's a link in the description so let's get comp in the very first thing that we need to do is put this muzzle flash over our gun since i already put this clip into the node graph we can just drag the output over our media in one and let's rename this shall we let's call this footage and this one we can hit f2 to rename this is going to be flash so the flash over our footage and we're done it looks great thank you so much for checking out this tutorial my name is casey ferris okay it's not perfect okay listen it does need some tweaking i mean the flash looks nice but it's going the wrong direction it's the wrong size colors don't match you know minor problems so let's select the merge and the first thing i'll do is flip this with this convenient little flip button huh flippy and i'll also size this up a little bit because generally you want you want a muzzle flash to be just way bigger than you'd think way bigger than realistic you know why because guns are cool and you know what isn't so cool reality that's why we make movies so this is the basic idea as we line that up right there over the barrel but there's a couple problems one this footage was shot at a high frame rate so we see this for one two three four five six seven seven frames which would be great if we were doing a slow motion thing that's super rad but we're not going to actually do that so let's speed this up you can do this a bunch of different ways but an easy way to do this is select our flash here and i'll hit shift space bar and i'll type time and what we're looking for is time speed i'll hit add and this time speed node this is going to change how fast this plays back this muzzle flash was shot at 60 frames a second and the speed of our film is 24 frames so let's do 2.5 times the speed and that should be about normal speed so now we have one about two frames i'll also set this to nearest because right now it's kind of blending these frames together which doesn't look particularly realistic so we'll just say nearest and now we have that nice bright flames of one two three and one or two frames is pretty much all you want on a muzzle flash this is great except for she's not actually shooting right there so we need to move this over in time to frame 19 where she's actually shooting the good news is this is a lot easier in resolve 17 than it was in 16 we can just go up to the key frames click on that that'll open our panel down here and if we click and drag in the middle of a layer here we can just push this back so i'll push flash back to frame 19 which is conveniently where our little marker lives yeah i'll just take an opportunity and put a marker right here and now we have things happening right here where she shoots boom you were supposed to be able to do this in resolve 16 but it was kind of buggy in 17 oh man it works great so let's make sure that this is lined up close our keyframes panel and select our merge which controls where our flare shows up and i want this second frame to be right there on the end of the barrel and it needs to be at about the same angle too so i don't know something maybe more like that get that lined up to be delicious all right so now this should look pretty decent boom all right there's a lot of our effect looks decent but to really sell this we need to add a couple more things the first thing is smoke now in the original footage this gun does shoot out some kind of smoke here honestly it's just not that convincing it sprays for one frame and it's gone we want nice billowy smoke you know always keep your smoke billowy again we can use a stock element i'm gonna use some gun smoke from action vfx i'll hit f2 and call this smoke and let's bring it up in our first viewer here look at that see nice and billowy and we're gonna put this smoke in there in about the same way but we're gonna put this under the muzzle flash so we'll put it here merge it over our footage do our little time speed thing at a time speed node at 2.5 and now our smoke should be playing back real fast there we go now we got to flip and position this size it up a little bit let's size it to a little bigger flip it and move it so the smoke kind of comes out of the edge of the gun see how that looks yeah something like that and again we're going to have this start at frame 19 open up our key frames and we'll move this over to frame 19. now at frame 19 we have a smoke coming out one thing i'd say is that it looks like this takes a couple frames to actually show up which is okay because it's probably going to be behind the flash let's see how that looks there's our full effect it kind of looks like the smoke shoots out afterwards which is not really what we want we kind of want the smoke all the way out so looks like we should push this back about three frames let's take our keyframes take the gun smoke and move it back a couple frames here and let's see what we got yeah get in there that smoke actually comes out a little early though so we what we should do is just trim this to start right when this muzzle flash starts which again we can do in the keyframes panel if we just grab the edge of it we can trim this and i'll just trim it to frame 19. so that's actually going to cut off the first couple frames so that that smoke just shows up there looking pretty good one thing though you'll notice this kind of black halo around the smoke and there's kind of a similar thing around the flash and that's just because when you shoot elements like this you usually shoot them on black and there isn't a super amazing way to kind of key out that black but the good news is you can add this with a transfer mode that will really blend this with the footage make it look really nice so let's go to our merge for our smoke zoom in so we can see the difference here and right here where it says apply mode i'm going to select screen and that just completely blends this in a little bit it also makes it a little brighter which we can adjust later same thing for the merge for our flash again apply mode let's go to screen and now that looks a lot better boom looks a little more realistic now the smoke is a little much you pretty much always want to keep things really subtle so we're going to take this merge for our smoke and let's take the blend and push it all the way down and then just push it back up to where we can just start to see that smoke so it's a little more subtle there we go just have a little bit that looks pretty good again this is something where it might not be completely realistic for this to have a couple frames of animation if we wanted to we could trim that muzzle flash so that we just have that first flash it's up to you whatever you think looks good so those are the big ones the flash and the smoke however we can add a couple things just to sell this even more the first one is we can animate this slide for this gun so if we look at our original footage and zoom in here the slide actually does move for the gun it does move a little bit you can see it right there but it's honestly just not cool enough you know it might be realistic but it doesn't matter because it doesn't look cool we need to make this look cool so what we're gonna do is cut out this slide and manually just move it back for one frame that sounds like kind of this big animation thing but we're only doing it for one frame so it's super easy and it really sells the effect i'm gonna close my keyframes make some room down here in the nodes and really what we're gonna do is merge this footage over itself then we're gonna cut out a mask for this and move this slide back so you can make a mask in a bunch of different ways the easiest way i've found to do something like this is to use a node called map control i just hit shift spacebar and type m-a-t-t-e and now we have our mat control node down here this node does all kinds of fancy things with mats and masks but what we're going to use it for is just to add our mask to our footage after the fact instead of duplicating our footage and masking it i can take the output of this footage and just drag it into the mac control and the output of the mac control and merge it over our footage so now we have something going on like this now we just need to add a mask to it i'll grab a polygon mask put it near it but we're not going to add it quite yet with this merge 3 selected i'll just hit 2 on the keyboard and go up here so that we can see our footage without any of our effects over it and on this polygon mask all i'm going to do is just draw a shape around the slide as it doesn't even really have to be super great just generally what the slide looks like something like that but you'll notice it's not getting cut out or anything the reason for that is we haven't hooked up the mask so we need to do a couple things normally what you would do is just grab this polygon mask and put it over our footage and that will do what we want but that masks the entire footage for everything and so we'll never actually see anything other than this mask that's why we're using this matte control i'm gonna grab the output of this and you'd think you'd put it in this blue input but you actually put it in the green input for matte control and then let's select our mac control and go up to the inspector and we have to change just a couple things when it says combine we're going to select combine alpha and then all the way down we're going to say post multiply image and now it looks like nothing's happening again that's just because we have our merge selected and we're merging this footage over itself if we were to just select the matte control we can see it's doing what it's supposed to do so let's adjust our mask with that selected i'll just soften the edge a little bit yeah something like that maybe and then down here with our merge let's select that i'll hit 2 on the keyboard and now with the merge selected remember emerge controls everything about the foreground layer pretty much and so what i'll do is just take this copy that we've made and just push it back a little bit and the good thing is we don't have to be that great right here because the flash is going to be over it and you'll never know whether this is actually a good job or not so i'm just pushing this back a little bit kind of estimate where the slide would be and the other thing i'm going to do is just turn this on for one frame we can do that with the blend which is like the opacity of this merge and so at frame 19 everything's happening we want this to be on so i'll click this little keyframe diamond here and then i can hit left or right on the keyboard and you see it looks real weird that's okay because this is going to be completely gone at this point so we'll just turn down the blend on that frame frame 19 everything's happening and then frame 20 will turn it all the way down again so this just appears for one frame so and it already looks pretty good right it's so fast that it's hard to really tell that it's just just kind of a hack job you know what i mean one last thing we'll do to sell this a little bit more to make it a little bit more sully is after our mac control let's hit shift space bar and type directional blur yeah we'll just use that top one and now we can blur this slide to kind of give it some fake motion blur so push it back a little bit and adjust the angle to be about right and now we have this really blurry because you know if the slide moves that fast it's not going to be sharp that just makes it a little more believable it looks nice so when we combine this with everything else looks really nice so that really starts to sell that effect it doesn't look like a fake gun anymore and you can adjust this to be more or less extreme if you want to the last major element that we're going to add is a shell just like our slide we don't really have to do that great of a job because it's going to be blurry and it's only for one or two frames but what we want is to make it look like this gun is shooting out a casing here which again may or may not be realistic but it looks really cool so in between our slide and our smoke and everything we're gonna add a shell this is also some stock footage from action vfx take a look at that this is just a rotating shell which is super convenient for stuff like this so cool so what we can do is just basically throw this over our footage make sure we size it right and at frame 19 we can pretend okay if this comes out of right around here for the gun maybe it shoots out this way let's say by this time now that everything's crazy it's already shot out this far again this may or may not be accurate it doesn't really matter it looks cool so this is where we want this shell to be at this time and so we can just keyframe this i'll keyframe it down here in the merge let's take a second and rename stuff i'll hit f2 call this shell and with our merge selected here in the inspector let's add a keyframe to center and then we're going to animate this again this is something that we don't want to be around for long so this next frame frame 20 will just have this like almost off screen something like that and then it'll be gone forever so let's animate the blend for this so at frame 18 we want the blend to be all the way down just hit a keyframe there and then frame 19 we want this all the way on 20 we want it all the way on and 21 all the way off all right so now we can see that shell coming out this is moving super fast so we want it to be really blurry we can use our directional blur with our shell selected i'll hit shift space bar and type dir and that first one looks good directional blur and we're gonna want this to be pretty blurry to where you just about won't even recognize it and the angle to be coming away from the gun something like that and let's keyframe the angle at frame 19 that's the angle and then frame 20 and maybe it's a little different right so now it comes out and it's really blurry we might even want to be a little more blurry oh boy something like that again subtle is better right boom let's see how this looks it's even kind of just hard to notice it which when you can barely notice it is usually pretty good for stuff like this all right now we have everything basically added to the shot but any time that you do a composite you want to make sure that your colors match and make sure that everything looks good when it's color graded because right now we're working on the log footage this footage was shot on blackmagic and so it's good to kind of preview this with a grade on it because once we get into color we don't want to go back and mess with all the brightness and all that stuff for this comp so a way that we can preview our color grade is by using a lut overlay here in the fusion page so if we go up here to this little square thing we have a drop down menu and i'm going to select a lut that we have available for free from ground control gcbmdfilm2709 this is just a basic grade for black magic footage so i'll select that and then click on this white box and now we have our basic grade so we can get a really good idea of what the colors will look like and how all these things will mix together without having to go back and forth to the color page and the good thing is this is just a preview so when we get into color this is still the log footage that we can play with so let's move over to frame 19 and see if there's anything that we don't really like first of all this shell is way too bright and saturated one thing that might be really easy in this instance is just to turn the opacity down because we don't need a whole lot of detail it's really blurry we can probably just grab this merge and turn the blend down on those frames to really make that less crazy that works fine for the flash maybe this is coming in a little bright it really depends on the shot that you're working on but if it is after our time speed here we can hit shift space bar and type color and add a color corrector you can also just drag it here from the toolbar and we can go through and mess with maybe the gain just bring that down just a touch just to make it feel like it just blends a little easier let's take a look at the smoke smoke seems fine i would say but here's the difference for the muzzle flash before the color correction and then after that's pretty nice but one thing that we forgot is hey you know if you have a big hole fireball exploding here in your scene it should actually light other things adding that interactive lighting is just like the finishing touch on top of everything so how do we add some interactive lighting here well again we don't have to animate a whole bunch of stuff because it's one frame and so if we can just kind of approximate if this were a big light where it would throw light we can just basically kind of paint in some shapes to kind of simulate that light so let's do that with a background node i'll go here to our toolbar and i'll just drag one down here we'll just put this over everything else it doesn't really matter kind of put this wherever and i'm going to make this the same basic color as our flash so let's do kind of a yellowish orangish something like that in fact i can even unhook this and then grab the exact color from our muzzle flash and now we're just going to add a polygon mask to our background and draw a shape where we think there could be some light so maybe there's some light on this tree something like that i'm gonna keep this a little bit smaller than i normally would because we're gonna feather this out a lot something like that soft edge and it looks really bad but again we can use our transfer mode if i select merge five here where it says apply mode instead of normal let's go to screen and now if we blend this down and take it back up real subtle and see it kind of adds a little bit of light to our tree i'd say maybe this background is just not orange enough so even though we did sample that color let's make this a little more saturated something like that and we want to make this polygon really soft so now we just have a little bit of lighting coming in on the tree but the tree's not the only place that's going to be lit up we also have a light on her face and probably on her hands maybe her shoulder here and so to add another mask to the mask that we're using we just have the mask selected and click mask node again we can add another one and by default these will just add together so we'll do kind of the same thing have a little shape on her face here make it a little smaller and we'll soften this out there we go again nice and subtle subtles the way and it might not look like you're doing much but even a tiny little change will help sell the effect let's add another mask to her hands again select one of these masks and click on polygon add a little bit to her hands here soften that out maybe a little bit to her jacket soften it out there we go so now this light is affecting things in the scene some of these masks might be too intense like this light on her face is maybe a little bit bright but the other brightnesses are pretty good so let's find the mask that controls her face there we go polygon three and we can actually change the strength of each mask with it selected here in the inspector with this little level so we can bring this down and bring it up till we start to notice it somewhere in there now this mask is about half strength compared to the other masks and if we grab the merge we can adjust all of these all at once and the overall strength of the lighting so again let's take this all the way down and then just boost it up looking at our footage until we start to notice it somewhere in there that's probably about what we want maybe just a little beyond it something like that and again all of this happens on one frame so we're going to select this merge 5 and at frame 19 we're going to have blend wherever we like it and then at frame 18 it's at 0 and frame 19 is at 0 again let's see how this comp looks all right so there's our muzzle flash looks pretty good i'd say it's still maybe even a little strong on her face so again we can adjust that just take this level down a little bit there we go so there we go there's our muzzle flash and of course we can take our lut off and we'll see everything comp without that lut on and it's interesting because the types of brightnesses and everything that you would do with this in log you certainly might feel like they're too much or too little without the lut on but when we go into color and we add whatever look we're going for everything will act and look like it's supposed to without standing out or being too crazy right so there we go love gun effects don't you worry there's plenty more where this came from in fact there's some uh some ideas kind of brewing up in here resolve 17 videos right here there's some ideas brewing and uh pretty soon if you like this kind of thing yeah tasty

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 47,046

Keywords: muzzle flash gun effects in resolve 17, gun effects, davinci resolve 17, fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, fusion tutorial davinci resolve, fusion tutorial compositing, visual effects, blackmagic fusion, how to, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, davinci resolve fusion, muzzle flash, muzzle flash effect, making good gun effects, gun shot tutorial, vfx tutorial, davinci resolve effects

Id: a6zkzu-FUD8

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020