The Ultimate Guide to Lasers in Davinci Resolve!

lasers are awesome it's just the fact of life so I'm going to show you two ways to add lasers to your shots in DaVinci Resolve the first way is super easy anyone can follow along the second way is a bit more advanced but it's definitely worth it for the result you get so I found the shot of a girl firing an actual gun on pixel.com and I thought it would work well since you got the actual recoil now obviously it won't always be possible to shoot a real gun so if that's the case that you can use something like a Nerf gun or finger gun [Music] if you do shoot your own footage I would recommend flashing a light on them that way when you add the laser it'll look like it's casting light on the person I wasn't able to do that for this shot so I'm going to show you a workaround you can do in post alright so I have my clip here in Fusion I'm just going to right click on it and click new Fusion tip so now I can go into Fusion all right I'm going to click this to make it one viewer just to make things easier alright so first I'm gonna scrub through my footage and find when it looks like she fires thinking that's frame 24 that's where the spark starts showing up so first I'm going to bring down a background node from right here I'm going to pull out from the square and drag it over this Square here so that'll make a merge node so if I bring that to the viewer by pressing two it's all black so I'm going to select my background change the color to white now I'm going to add a polygon node by clicking right here so I'm going to add some points and mask out the shape of my laser really simple shape so now I'm going to round out the edge of this by selecting these and hitting shift s and then I'll do that on the other side all right so now I want this to move so I'm going to select these move let's see maybe three frames later and then drag it off screen so now it's animated shooting app but if we go a few frames back our lasers are just hanging out there so what I'm gonna do is put a keyframe on the level right here then I'm going to go back one frame and bring it down all the way so now we have no laser and our laser shooting out just at the right time so you can see as it moves it looks kind of cartoony so one way we can fix that is we can go to the settings and click motion blur so I'm just going to crank up the quality all the way it's not has realistic motion blur it looks quite nice so now let's add a glow to it so I'm going to hold down shift in space and that'll bring up the tool menu so I'm going to search soft glow now that'll add a glow to the thing so I'm just going to make it red I'm going to bring down the green and blue now the trick to getting a realistic glow is having multiple versions of it getting bigger and bigger so I'm just going to bring down the glow size on this one pretty thin like that now I'm going to add another soft glow and this one I'm going to bring up the glow size and maybe bring down the gain a little bit and then finally I'm going to add one more soft glow and this one's going to be huge it's going to be like a hundred now we have a very realistic low I'm gonna add a color corrector node just so I can play with the colors a little bit I think I'm going to bring the saturation up a little bit so I'm going to bring up the gamma to make it even brighter and then make the red A Little Bit Stronger now that's looking very cool next let's add a muzzle flash so the one I'm using came from productioncrate.com where you can download tons of free muzzle flash Assets Now the one I'm using isn't actually a muzzle flash it's supposed to be a spell from Harry Potter but I like the way it looks so it's gonna be our little secret so I'm going to open the media pool and bring down the muzzle flash asset I can close the media pool so then I'm going to merge this over our footage bring that to the viewer and change the type to screen now we don't see anything if we go to the first frame we can see our asset so it's starting at the wrong time so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select our media into I'm going to grab this Gray Line right here and then drag it so that the first number starts at 24. so now it's starting at the right frame so let's move it into place so I'm going to add a transform node so I'm going to take this pivot X and drag it over until this green axis in the middle of our flash so now if I bring down the size it'll scale from that area so I'm going to make it the right size and drag it over to my gun that looks nice but obviously it's the wrong color so I'm going to add another color corrector and then just bring up the Hue until it's the right color now that's looking really dope I especially like the Sparks and the smoke that the Spell asset gives just gives it kind of a cool sci-fi look now you might notice that we have this huge bright thing in front of her but it's not actually casting any light on her so what I'm going to do fix that is I'm going to take the media in I'm going to copy it and then paste it up here just Ctrl C Ctrl V so now I'm going to merge this over and change the apply mode to screen well that made it a little bit brighter but it's the wrong color so I'm going to add a color corrector and bring it to Red then I'm also going to bring up the gain just a little bit so now the whole image is brighter but we don't want that so with my merge selected I'm going to add another polygon then I'm just going to mask out the part I want to be lit up all right so if you look at that that looks terrible what we can do to make it look better is just bring up the soft Edge a bunch that looks pretty good but if we move a couple frames back we can see that it's lighting up before the laser comes out so what we can do is in the merge put a keyframe on the blend go back one frame bring it down to zero then I'm gonna go a few frames forward as the laser gets out of sight and bring down the blend again so now it's nothing lights up and then Fades back down then you can add a bunch of different masks for the different parts of the body I'm just doing the head for the sake of the tutorial this method works well if you're adding a few lasers but what if you need tons of lasers or what if you need your lasers to react to a 3D camera that's where this next method comes in alright so in this method we're going to use particles to generate the lasers that way we can add a ton more so I'm going to bring down a p emitter and a p render and bring that to the scene all right so in the P emitter I'm going to take the region and bring the size all the way down to one we just want it coming from this one point here so then I'm going to bring up the velocity all the way so if I press play we just have a little line of dots so to break that out I'm going to bring up the velocity variance just a little bit I'm also going to add a tiny little bit of angle variant so two and two in the Z so I'm going to bring the number down to something really small like 0.7 so now we're going to turn each of these little particles into lasers so to do that I'm going to go to the style change it to line so now I have these tiny little lines so what I can do to fix that is change the size to Velocity to 0.1 now if we press play that looks really bad but we can do to fix that is under the controls go to rotation uncheck always Face camera and make the rotation relative to motion now it's looking much better it's looking kind of like a machine gun of lasers so now looking at them I think I want them to be a bit faster so I'm going to change the velocity to 1.5 that looks nice all right so now I'm going to add a camera 3D open the Dual viewer so on this one I'm going to click perspective and change it to camera 3D one so now we're seeing what the camera's seeing in this viewer I'm going to plug the media into the camera so it'll show our footage as a background then in the camera's transform settings I'm going to pick use Target I'm gonna right click Turn Off the Grid just so I can see the lasers a little bit better so I'm just going to play around with the camera until it lines up with the angle of the footage all right that looks pretty good so I'm going to bring out the footage from the camera now I'm going to add a render or 3D so I'm going to change the type to opengl render now I'm not really seeing anything so what I can do is right click change the options to Checker underlay now we can see these faint little lines so let's make them a little bit easier to see by adding a brightness contrast and bringing the gain up all the way that's better alright so before we add a glow or anything I want to track the tip of our gun so the footage I'm using has a little bit of camera motion so what I'm going to do is add a tracker for the first frame then I'm just going to track the tip of the gun right here change the mode to best match and just track that forward alright that finished tracking I'm going to drag out the tracker from our footage I'm going to bring down a background and plug that into the background of it and just change the alpha to zero then I'm going to plug our lasers into the green input of this so nothing's happening so I'm going to change the operation to match move then I'm going to merge that over our footage change the type to screen so now the lasers are moving with our gun but they're not coming from the right point so before our tracker I'm going to add a transform and then just move it to the tip of the gun so now let's make these look like lasers so you could could do it the same way as the first method adding soft glows and stacking those or you can do what I prefer to do and add xglow this is a plug-in that you can get on Reactor it's free and it's my favorite way of adding glow so I'm just going to change the color to I think green this time yeah that looks nice and then to tweak things a little bit I'm going to add another plugin called intensity both of these are free you can get them on Reactor so with intensity I'm just going to bring up the gamma bunch and the saturation of course I can change the Hue to see if I like a different color I'm happy with my green maybe just boost the gauge to tighten a little bit so for the muzzle flash you might be thinking oh no do I have to add an asset for every single laser that comes out and I mean you could if you want to but there's a way easier way to do it so I'm just going to copy all of these nodes here and then paste them over here so now we have a duplicate of our laser setup so what we're going to do is we're going to use these particles to automate the muzzle flash alright so I'm going to go into the particles and let's change a few settings all right so first I'm going to bring down the velocity and the velocity variance all the way down to zero so if we press play we should see nothing then the rotation I'm going to check always face camera so in the style I'm Gonna Change it to bitmap then I'm going to bring down a fast noise open that in the other viewer under the image tab I'm going to uncheck Auto resolution and change it to 100 by 100. all right so in the noise settings I'm going to bring up the detail all the way then the color I'm going to change it to gradient change the type to radial and drag the Black Point somewhere in the middle here and play around to the white so it's not going off the screen then I'm going to swap them I'm going to bring the white end to this side of the gradient and the black to the other then with the black selected I'm going to bring down the alpha all the way now I'm going to bring the C3 to something huge like 10 and change the type to discontinuous then I'm going to add a transform node and just bring down the aspect a little bit so it looks more like a muzzle flash so now I'm going to take that I'm going to drag it into the P emitter all right so let's play around with that I'm going to change the size to Velocity back to zero I'm going to change the animate from over time to particle birth time then under the controls I'm going to change the lifespan bring that down to two then back in the style I'm going to bring up the fade controls and then bring the out Point all the way in so now it'll fade in a little bit look more like it's flashing all right so now if we merge this whole thing over our footage we take a look at that I want to change the type to screen now that is way too bright so in the X glow I'm going to bring the gain to 0.5 then the intensity I'm going to bring everything down to zero except for the gamma now it's still a little bright so I'm going to delete this brightness contrast and yeah I think that looks pretty good then for adding the lighter it was the same processor the last time let me know what you think of this new format of combining a beginner and advanced tutorial in one if you like it or should I just stick with one or the other and if you want to make more Star Wars VFX then check out this video right here where I show you how to make a spaceship scene inside of fusion

Channel: Nomad R Productions

Views: 10,887

Keywords: Davinci Resolve, Fusion, VFX, Lasers, VFX tutorial, Beginner tutorial, Advanced tutorial, Star Wars, Blaster effect, Sci-Fi

Id: 4J2WFlTaMCI

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023