Professional Nuke Artist Tries FUSION 👀

hello my name's Alfie I'm a professional nuke artist and in this video I'm going to be trying out DaVinci resolves Fusion I've quite literally lost count of all the times I've been asked about using Fusion in my recent videos especially in the video where I covered my workflow using blender nuke and DaVinci Resolve usually when a YouTuber says they've been asked loads of questions it actually means about two but in this case I really do mean it this is a screen recording of all the comments on my YouTube videos that are relating to using Fusion so like I said my day job is I am a compositor I work professionally as a new artist I've worked at a couple of different VFX studios in London and I've been doing it for six years I didn't intend to do this for the video but I've just had an idea let's do some quick maths I'm contracted to work 40 hours a week I think and I would say over my VFX career I've probably averaged more like 50. a lot of the weeks have been sort of 60 to 90 when it gets busy obviously you have quieter weeks as well so let's say uh 50 hours a week times four is 200 hours a month times 12 is 2400 hours a year and then times that by six for the amount of years I've been working VFX as a rough average I've got 14 400 hours of nuke experience and that's not including all the stuff that I do in my spare time for this YouTube channel and freelance work as well there's that classic saying that the threshold to become an expert at something is you have to do 10 000 hours whether that actually means I'm any good or not is something else to be debated entirely my point being I have a very good grasp of how to use nuke these days I know my way around it very well and pretty much anything that I want to do with my brain I can put that into nuke into its node graph and make some magic happen so the question for today's video is can DaVinci resolves Fusion do the same thing let's have a look okay so now we're in voice over land this is the raw footage of a plate that I went out and shot and my intention is to comp it in Nuke and then do the same thing in fusion and see how long it takes me how close I can get the two together what the tools are like first up I'm doing this in Nuke I started off by doing the sky replacement and I essentially did two different Luma keys for the sky to try and get a good mat for the difference between the buildings and the sky and then I just did a rotor shape to clean up the mat a bit as well I did a two-point track that gives me translation scale and rotation and I can use this on the single frame of Roto that I've done so I don't have to animate it and I'll also be using it to track in the spaceship later then I jumped onto textures.com and found a couple of images that I thought would work well for the sky once it was reformatted and just transformed into place I did a little bit of color correction just to get it to match the plate a bit better and then also to help mix it in and also alleviate some of the hard work with the keying and Roto on the edge of the buildings I used a ramp node and basically softened the original plate back in at the bottom so the sky replacement doesn't go all the way down to the buildings and the cranes it actually kind of gradients in as it goes up into the sky I use this trick quite a lot at work as well it's great if you're trying to mix the sky replacement with stuff like trees that are a real nightmare to key this whole process in Nuke took me about an hour and that's also including this part which was me doing the CG so the actual comp work in Nuke was probably only about 10-15 minutes I did a quick camera track of the scene and then jumped into blender and bought in a 3D model that I found online of a spaceship from Star Wars I didn't worry too much about making it look amazing I just got the textures dropped in and then lit it with an hdri that was fairly similar to the environment and rendered it out so like a competent nuke there's a bit of tweaking the colors just to get it to sit into the sky color a bit better I bought the black point up a fair bit as it's obviously really far in the distance so that simulates the atmosphere then I put some light wrap on it just to bed it into the bright Sky a bit better and then finally I also made a kind of hazing effect you can do this by taking the background and then cutting out the alpha of the spaceship from it and then adding multiple instances of blur where you turn up the size but then decrease the mix on each one kind of makes like a really nice soft feathered fall off you can then put this back over the top of the CG and pre-mold tip and then turn the mix down really fast nice and subtle so that's the nuke side of it now onto Fusion the first thing I wanted to do immediately just to make it feel a bit more comfortable and familiar was try and set up Fusion to work a bit more like Nuke so the first thing I Googled was how to change the node draft to be vertical instead of horizontal I thought that would just make it a bit easier on my brain I started out like this but I kind of abandoned the vertical thing in the end anyway and did a bit of a mix of both I realized that depending on where the nodes are it actually changes where the outputs are this is me basically just going through the interface pressing all the buttons and working out what they do the first thing I Googled was a tracking tutorial one of the immediate shortcomings I found of fusion is there aren't that many good tutorials and I actually struggled to find one specifically about the problem that I was having a lot of them seem to be on very outdated versions of fusion or they were using the planar tracker but eventually I found one and I worked out how to do the tracking I was expecting the tracker to work like Nuke so you do your track and then you can either use that node for the transform or you can spit out like a baked transform essentially from the tutorials that I watched I kind of gathered that actually the tracker node is also sort of a built-in merge so instead of using the tracker and then merging it over your background you plug the background and the foreground into the tracker node and it does the tracking and the merge all in one process so anyway I dragged in the sky eventually figured out how to resize it to be the size of the composition and then use a transform node just to get it into place this is the point where I actually figured out how to use the tracker node and so you can see that I've plugged my background into it and then also the foreground and it merges it and does the track at the same time then I moved on to keying the sky I didn't watch a tutorial for this and actually I found the keying was really intuitive it works pretty much exactly the same as nuke I just plugged it into my footage and then I mucked about with the controls and looked at the alpha Channel and it was very logical worked pretty much exactly how I expected so I adjusted the key until I got a decent key of the sky and then just like new car ended up doing a second one and combining them with a rotor shape again they took a little bit of figuring out I was trying to do it the same way I do it in Nuke where you'd use a merge node and then a rotor shape and then the merge combines them and uses the mask to determine which bits should be which input it doesn't work quite the same way in Fusion at least not from what I was trying to do it was really annoying because I could tell that I was really close you can see here where I want the bill audience to be all black it's combining the white rotor over the top of the black buildings so I started just pressing every button in the node trying to invert the mat and do all sorts of stuff to combine them in the correct operations I pretty much just brute forced it by pressing every combination of buttons and plugging nodes into each other until it worked I think after about five minutes I did get there in the end at this point I plugged the key that I had made into the tracker and it put the new sky over everything except for the sky and the plate which was the opposite of what I wanted so in Nuke what I would do is use an invert node and just by chance Fusion happens to have the same thing it's called invert color and so I just put one of those underneath the mat for the key and it did exactly what I was expecting which worked flipped the key around and now the sky was actually in the sky then just like a nuke I tried to tweak the color of the sky a little bit I just searched all the nodes for something called color and color correct and the color curves were the only two that I could find that seemed to be what I was looking for so I dropped on a color correct node and just used it to just do a bit of an adjustment on the colors of the sky next up I brought in the render of the CG spaceship again I basically just started out trying to do exactly what I would do in Nuke and then I went to do the unpremolt pre-mold process before you do any color correction and I found that there's an alpha divide and an alpha multiply nodes which I assumed are the same thing and from what I gather they are but they don't work exactly the same way as they do in Nuke so when I dropped them on and then did my color correction it was adjusting the color on the whole image I suppose it just what was inside the alpha of the CG spaceship in theory the unpremolds and then pre-mold or the alpha divide and multiply is supposed to stop that from happening but for whatever reason it just wasn't working in Fusion I was plugging nodes in at different points in the node tree and then swapping some out for other ones eventually I caved in and Googled it and I watched a good video on the whole process which explained it nicely I think there's a few ways of doing it but basically in this case what worked for me is there's basically a tick box inside of the color correct node that does a pre-mult effect once I turn that on it fixed the whole problem I don't really like doing it this way I'd much rather have the pre-mold has a separate process like I was saying before with the tracker and the merge once I got it working I did the same sort of thing as nuke I lifted the Black Point a little bit and then also tweaked the colors just to get it to be a similar color to the sky Fusion doesn't have a light wrap node built in so I couldn't add that but I use my comp brain and essentially replicated it by doing the haze technique that I showed in Nuke this worked pretty much exactly the same way as I did it in Nuke so I was grateful that it actually worked again I used a merge node and cut out the alpha of the ship from the background and then did multiple instances of blur where I turned up the size and turned down the blend or the mix they merged that over the ship and pre-molt it again the pre-molding process infusion was a bit more confusing than I thought it was going to be it seemed like the alpha multiply node which I would assume would do the job actually wasn't working so in the end what I did is I used a channel Boolean node which from what I can work out is basically the same as a copy or a shuffle and nuke and I copied the alpha in from above and then used an alpha multiply node after that and that seemed to do the job I would usually do a bit more tweaking but to be honest it took me so long to get to this stage that this was as far as I got this is what the whole script looks like it's pretty small again this is the plate that I started off with this is the sky replacement and then this is putting the CG ship on top and these are the two side by side for comparison the end results are really similar because I just I matched what I did in Nuke when I was comping it in Fusion so I had them next to each other as a reference okay so conclusion time a lot of the questions that I was talking about at the start of the video were relating to why I choose to use nuke over Fusion I think a lot of that stemmed from the fact that in my workflow video I showed that I use resolve for all of my editing and Grading and then I spit out stuff from resolve to Newcomb blender for compositing and CG work and so lots of people were basically saying well if resolve has a built-in compositor why don't you just use that and skip the stepper going back and forth the main reason for that like I said at the beginning is I work professionally as a new artist in case you're not aware these days nuke by quite a long distance is the industry leader for compositing it's the most widely used software at pretty much all the biggest studios in the world it's used on Blockbuster films it's used on commercials it's used on music videos I've worked on all three of those things as a new artist and it's used for loads of other stuff as well I didn't really see nuke and choose to start learning it I used to know after effects and then when I decided I wanted to get a job in the VFX industry I got an apprenticeship out of vfa studio called The Mill and when I started there to become a compositor I was trained to use nuke because that's what everybody else is using so for me it wasn't really a choice of like I'm going to use nuke over Fusion it was just a necessity because I wanted to work as a compositor and like I said all the big studios use nuke so that kind of answers that question over why I personally use it but I think the broader question I want to answer in this video is is Fusion any good I do just want to start by saying that obviously I'm slightly biased I know how to use nuke very well like I've said a few times I don't know how to use Fusion at all it was very frustrating when I got in and basically couldn't do the stuff I normally know how to do I found that as soon as I started diving in with the nodes in Fusion they were all named quite similarly to Nuke so I thought oh well I'll just add the node and plug it in and it'll do the same thing and evidently as you've seen from the video that wasn't always the case as you might have seen about halfway through the video it started to click a little bit and I started to get the hang of what you have to plug into what input and stuff on the nodes and I moved away from that step of having to Google every single process that I was trying to do like tracking for example beyond that I do think Fusion is pretty good I definitely think if I gave it a few weeks then the kind of initial teething problems would melt away once you get the hang of the buttons to press it actually does feel like a very similar software one of the things that I found annoying about it quite early on is it's not as arrangeable as nuke and I also found that going from Adobe Premiere Pro to editing and resolve as well Premiere Pro and nuke have the like dockable Windows where you can drag them around and arrange the layouts how you like so that was one of my initial problems was I just felt that the interface was quite clunky in the way it was laid out and the second tool that I felt was a bit lacking was actually the color correction tools if you use nuke you'll know that there's a grade node which is probably the one that I use the most that has controls for stuff like black and white Point gamma lift offset multiply gain I think that's all of them and then on top of that you also have a color correct mode you also have saturation and contrast and then it also splits them out into shadows mid-tones and highlights they don't use it so much for CG but for grading 2D plates you can get really stuck into what colors you're putting into what areas of the shot Fusion's color correct nodes seem to be kind of going in that direction but I found it a little bit clunky to use the fact that you had to go to a different tab just to change the red green and blue I found was quite difficult when I was just trying to do stuff quickly nuke's one is nice because it has them all laid out vertically and they're all on top of each other so it's quite user friendly just to adjust them all at the same time having to like dive through menus just to change the color I thought was a bit of an oversight in the design of the interface again take everything I'm saying with a pinch of salt because I'm very used to nukes tools so using anything different is always going to be quite frustrating and then I think outside of that Newt just has a much more comprehensive tool set granted I didn't look that hard but I couldn't find anything that was like a built-in light wrap effect so I had to build it myself whereas nuke has a built-in light wrap node the nuke also has the advantage of having leukopedia and other third-party websites which you can basically download tools that other people have made so in addition to the already fairly comprehensive range of tools that it already has you also end up with this really good collection of tools that other people have made I've got a few that I use religiously there's exponential glow which I think originally someone at frame store made and it's now all over the Internet and pretty much everyone I've met uses it in Nuke the color Edge Gizmo that I use for Edge extensions on Roto and green screen stuff is also really good so to summarize all of that I think Fusion is pretty good and like I said I think if I gave it a bit more time I could get used to it however from what I've seen and from the perspective of a professional and again granted this is entirely my own opinion and you're more than welcome to disagree I first personally don't feel like it's quite good enough to be able to compete with nuke sometimes when you have software that have loads of stuff built in you'll have like one feature or two features that are really really good for example resolves color grading and editing is fantastic similarly blender is pretty much an all-in-one built-in software package you can do editing in it it's got 2D compositing it's got obviously the 3D side of it it's very well known for being used for games and VFX and stuff now but you don't really ever hear about people editing videos in blender and that's because blend's editor is not particularly good just because the software has this thing built in doesn't necessarily mean that everything about it is fantastic so there we go that's my two cents on the subject I hope that answers the questions of all the people that were asking why I've chosen to use nuke over Fusion I'd love to hear what people have to say about my thoughts if you're someone that uses Fusion feel free to leave a comment below I read all of them and I reply and I'd love to have some discussions about some of the features so if you think I'm wrong drop a comment and we can chat about it but in the meantime thanks very much for watching this video again the assets are on patreon if you're interested and I guess I will see you in the next one goodbye [Music] thank you

Channel: Alfie Vaughan

Views: 59,350

Keywords: davinci, resolve, fusion, compositing, vfx, visual, effects, artist, tries, tutorial, test, demo, challenge, keying, roto, CG, animation, space, ship, nuke, foundry, black, magic, tracking, beginner, noob

Id: c7BwmESMOQ0

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023