Using EbSynth with DaVinci Resolve: Tutorial

hey guys cb super today i'm going to be going over absinthe and davinci resolve so if you haven't heard of ebsynth it is essentially exactly what you're seeing on the screen right now it takes a series of images which we know to be his video and it attempts to take some key frames that maybe you paint or have been altered in some way and it tries to superimpose all of that into the video footage and if that doesn't really make sense uh the best way i could probably explain it is it kind of does like a little bit of rotoscoping for you there are some limitations but i'm not gonna be going over too much about the limitations and more about the positives of epson so if you're looking to pick up absinthe it is free as of right now it is still in the beta so i don't know if it plans on being a paid service later on but as of right now you can go and download it for free and play around with it i'm going to show you how to do this all inside of davinci resolve but there are a couple other programs that would probably make your life a little bit easier programs like sketchbook or critta programs that are made to be used to you know do some digital painting or digital photoshop type work or even just use photoshop if you have photoshop available i have played around using photoshop it is a lot easier than using the fusion page inside of davinci resolve but i'm going to show you how to do this all for free only using davinci resolve so it's going to be a round trip of davinci to absinthe and then back to davinci and it's interesting but it is uh it is a little bit more difficult i will say so if you want to follow along i'm going to be using some free stock video footage from wolfgang langer you can find it over at pexels.com the link will be in the description down below feel free to follow or donate to him and again if you want to pick up ebsynth just go ahead and hit this download and you don't have to sign up your email address if you don't want you can always just say no thanks just start the download and you'll have absynth beta for free all right let's go ahead and jump over to davinci resolve and i've already had the video uploaded to davinci resolve all you have to do is import the video the normal way that you import things you are going to want to make sure that you do have the correct playback frame rate so you want your frame rate to match whatever the video is and this is very important because if you have a say 25 frames per second video and you're trying to do it in a different frame rate say 24 or 23 you may not have all of the frames that you need when you get over to ebsynth so just ensure that your playback frame rate and your frame rate in general for your project matches the actual video footage that you're using all right once you've done that let's go ahead and take a look at our footage we'll notice that it is just this female and she is moving around a little bit so this action right here where she moves to the side and she turns away from the camera that's going to be difficult for absinthe to handle now it can handle it but we would have to make more keyframes in order to do that so what i'm going to do is i'm only going to use all the way up until right about here and then i'm just going to go ahead and cut it and i think this will give you a good demonstration of the workflow for using absinthe and davinci resolve but it's not going to complicate and add too many problems to it because there are a lot of limitations to ebsynth but i'll show you some of the ways to get around all right so here's our video footage the first thing that we need to do is we need to export our video into a series of png sequences so in order to do that we unfortunately don't have a png option in the formats here you'll notice that there are tiffs there are exr's but there are there's no png option so what we're gonna have to do is we're actually gonna go over to the fusion page and we can do it here and it's a nice little work around i do wish that they add a png sequence for export in the future maybe we'll get that in 18. i don't know i'm working in 17 right now and uh we don't have it so in order to export pngs i'm going to go ahead and bring in a saver node behind my media endnode so with my media in node selected i'm just going to hit shift space and that's going to bring up the quick tool select i'm going to type in the word saver hit add and now i have a little saver node here now what the saver node is going to allow us to do is we're going to come over to the right here and we're going to be able to browse directly to our ebsynth folder you are absolutely going to want to make a folder for this project um you can call it whatever you want it doesn't have to be called absinthe i just titled the absinthe to make it a little bit easier i would suggest making two folders one for keys and then one for the video and i'm going to put this png sequence in the video folder so i'm just going to double click on the folder i'm going to title it woman and you'll notice that it says exr files don't worry about that as long as it says whatever the title you want plus dot png it's going to save it out as a png sequence go ahead and hit save and now you'll notice that nothing has actually happened but once we come up to fusion and hit render all savers it's going to go ahead and start working now this may take a little while this is probably only going to take maybe a minute on my computer but this might take i don't know upwards of 30 minutes an hour depending on your computer my computer works a little bit quicker because it's you know it's got a little bit more underneath the hood all right so render is complete we'll notice that the total render time was 57 seconds so just under a minute and the average render time was two frames per second which is not too bad i'm gonna go ahead and hit okay and i'm just gonna minimize this and go check out the folder so inside of my video folder where all my png sequences are you'll notice that it has the title and then it says zero zero zero so that is the very first frame and then one being the second frame and it goes all the way to the end which is 117. that's great so i have 117 frames now i think they're all here i haven't gone in and made sure that they're all here sequentially so i was working with some 25 fps footage earlier and it would constantly drop like one frame maybe two frames throughout the process and i would get an error with absence so if you're having that problem one thing you can do is let's say i don't have a frame 50 i can just duplicate this frame 40 and then i can retitle it as frame 50 and even though these two frames will be the exact same you probably won't notice it because it's only one frame difference and then that way absinthe will know that that is sequentially the next frame that it needs to work on and so it's kind of just a little tricky process now i've done this a few times and i know that one of the good frames that i want to use is probably this keyframe of 82. let me go ahead and click on this and show you you'll notice that yes she has a little bit of movement on her hands and so that's going to be a little bit difficult to deal with but her mouth is open and anytime you're using a talking subject you want to try and use a keyframe where the mouth is open this is going to make it a lot easier for absinthe to tell and it won't have to fill in data where if she was to open her mouth later on in the film absence won't know because it didn't use that as a key frame think of key frames as just as you would inside of real animation they are like the extreme movement of your animation so if the extreme movement is a talking piece and she is talking we would probably want her mouth to be open at that point so this is the frame that i'm going to use as a keyframe i'm just going to come over to this woman0082.png i'm going to copy it so i'm going to come down here copy and i'm going to come back to my root absinthe folder come over to the keys and now i'm just going to hit control command or control v to paste it and so now i've taken that picture and that is now going to be my key frame if i was to load this into ebsynth right now it wouldn't really change anything because we haven't done anything to this frame but what i'm going to do now is i'm going to make some changes to this frame and you'll see how those changes are emulated throughout the entire video so let's go back over to davinci resolve and i'm going to head back over here i don't really need this now that i'm done with that that's fine i am going to take this key though and i'm going to drop this right onto my media pool now i did that so that i have a nice frame a nice clean frame and anything that i do to this frame will be done and saved to this frame inside of the key folder so let's go ahead and take this and we're gonna drop this on our media pool we're going to drop this on our timeline and now we'll see that it's not really moving so and that's because it's just a still frame of frame 82. i'm going to go ahead and just make it a little bit smaller because it doesn't need to be so big i do want to be at the very beginning of the frame because i'm going to be doing a lot of painting and when i'm doing painting i'd like to start at the very beginning so we're going to go ahead and jump over to fusion now and i'm going to set a few things up first things first is this is going to be the base image i i don't want it to look like this when i'm done so i'm gonna do a bunch of things to it but before i do that i want a background i'm gonna just do some really quick animating here so please don't take this as like a indication that i am an expert on animation so i'm gonna go ahead and grab this background and this is how i'm going to start it for now i'm going to take this media and i'm going to drop it on the output of the background and then it's going to give me a merge node now if i was to take this merge node and plug it out nothing appears to have changed but in reality this media is now merged on top of this background and at some point we're going to draw on this background and then we're going to remove this media altogether i don't want a video that looks just like the video i had i'm actually going to be painting a new video and that will be superimposed throughout the entire video using epson let's just say we were to do a very simple thing so simple that it probably won't even make sense to do that let's go ahead and i'm just going to paint right on this background but the problem is this background is black and black isn't going to work very well so i'm actually going to change the color of this to white just for now and eventually i'll change it back to black and i will actually remove the alpha so that it's transparent because ebsynth actually handles transparency really well but for now we're going to leave it as white and then after this i'm going to add a paint node so let me go ahead and bring in a paint note now the first thing you always do with a paint node is you make sure that the stroke duration is however long you want it to last in this specific instance we have 27 frames we actually have 28 because the zero frame is an actual frame so i'm going to go ahead and take this stroke duration i'm going to turn it all the way up to 30. that'll cover us past 27 frames and the color so the color right now is white so white on white isn't going to show so i'm going to start with black for right now now we can see how big our stroke is let's go ahead and i put a stroke down you don't see anything and that's because right now the background is loaded and not the paint node but if i load the paint node you can see that we did in fact make a stroke i'm going to go ahead and command a control z just to undo that and i want to change some things about this brush just to make it look a little bit more like an outline let's go ahead i'm going to change it to something a little bit more solid i'm also going to size this down quite a bit now you can use a wacom tablet in fact i will use a wacom tablet later on when i'm doing more detailed work but for right now i'm just going to do a few things just so you can see it and then i'll show you the process and then you can go back and do a lot more work to it if you like i'm going to go ahead and make it just a little bit smaller and to get just a little bit smaller we're going to go ahead and hold down command control and i'm going to size it down now it's just gotten a little bit smaller and i'm just going to draw in some of these features so i want to draw in these eyes perhaps and we can see it over here what it's doing i'm going to draw in maybe this eye okay that's starting to look like an eye let me just draw on some of those nostrils here maybe some of these lines and again it doesn't have to look amazing but it does need to somewhat resemble the shape of the face of the person that you're you know painting and the reason is because it can't create new shapes out of things that it doesn't have the data on right so it has the data on this woman talking and that's it so it can't put things that are not this woman talking so you are a little bit limited in that respect but that doesn't mean that you can't use your imagination and make all kinds of different things i'm going to go ahead and i'm just going to outline these lips a little bit because i want to see the talking and i know this looks amazing but i'm going to size this down even a little bit more i know this is just perfect and i might even just give her these teeth back a little bit and so we can see that we can kind of see the teeth there we can see the nose i'm not super happy with the nose let's go ahead and draw in these eyebrows a little bit and if you want to see what you're actually doing you can't actually do that what you could do is you can either take this merge node and you can merge it up here and then you can actually blend this down a bit and that'll let you see kind of what you're looking at you can also flip this so i hit command or control t and that'll flip it and then i can go ahead and blend this down a little bit you can even take this media and you can put it over here on the right and then if you just want to be able to see you can even work over here on the left so there's a lot of different ways that you can actually see a little bit better about what you're working on sometimes that helps sometimes it doesn't it just really depends on the project that you're working on and how you want to work on it we've got this going on we've got a little bit of the nose done let's go ahead and finish this up i'm just going to add this eyebrow over here and that looks pretty amazing super happy with the way that turned out let's just uh let's finish up with maybe this face jaw line and now that i think about it probably using the mouse not an amazing idea but you'll get a at least an idea of how this works i'm right now i'm just outlining the hair because i do want the hair and this is you know it's just one of those things like as detailed as you want to be is how detailed uh you're gonna get and you'll you know like i know this looks terrible but like you will be surprised at how well this program works um let's go ahead and let's i don't know let's just go ahead and trace her shirt as well like that and yeah yeah this is uh this is i may do this again but i will do it with the wacom tablet yeah and so this actually is working out pretty well for you know just uh we're just running through it kind of quick all right so that's pretty much everything outlined um if we take a look at what this looks like by itself we can see that uh doesn't look too amazing right but i think what you'll see is uh it'll be surprising um how this will animate this this itself is going to animate and um let's just go ahead and leave it white for right now and i'm just going to right click on this image right here and i'm going to save image i'm going to go to the absinthe to the key says it already exists do you want to replace it yes yes you do you want to replace it so now that that's done we have pretty much everything we need to start the ebsynth program so you downloaded ebsynth i happen to have it right here on my desktop and go ahead and double click it this is what it looks like this is all it looks like you can tap this advanced if you want i'm not going to mess with any of these things i've gone through a lot of tutorials and they pretty much say that this is how you want it set up so if yours doesn't look like this go ahead and get it set up like this the way this is how it came when i started it i'm not exporting it to ae i'm going to be working with it completely inside of davinci resolve so it's pretty easy so i have my keys and my video here i'm just going to take my key folder i'm going to drop it right on keys you'll notice it changed to women.png take this video folder drop it right onto video you'll notice it changed to video.png and take a look at what our project directory is it's already found mycbsuper.desktop.edsynth and you can see right here what it's going to output so it's going to output a folder and it already knows that frame 82 is my keyframe so it's going to synth to the left and it's going to synth to the right and it's essentially going to synth back and forth using one keyframe it's going to synth all the way to 0 and then up all the way to 117. now it's not always that you want to use something that's in the middle in fact you may want to use three or four or even more keyframes keyframes showing that extreme movement that's going to really help it out but then you're going to have to at some point take all of those and blend them together and i'm not going to go into how to do that today because i'm just going to be using the one key frame but it's essentially cutting and pasting or changing the opacity of those layers we can either hit synth or we can hit run all generally i hit run all usually you'll have more than one keyframe and so that kind of helps so i'm going to go ahead and hit run all right now and we'll let it do its thing you can see a little progress bar here it'll tell you when it's done and if you want to see ebsynth actually working all you have to do is double click on this folder that it's outputting to and you can actually see it work in real time so what it's doing is it's trying to figure out what each one of these frames should look like and you'll notice that it's not necessarily working starting out at the beginning it started off at 80 and it's moving either left or right in this case it appears to be moving up so you'll notice that it found that there was no frame 62. because it doesn't have frame 62 we're gonna have to go in and we're gonna have to fix this let's go into the absinthe folder in the video out and let's take a look at what frame 62 is so we'll notice that we may have some type of resolution error or we may have some error for whatever reason we don't have frame 62. it goes from 61 to 63. in order to fix this all we have to do is click on 61 or 63 command or control c and then command or control v what that's going to do is that's going to duplicate that frame now i want to come over here and i want to change the name now i really only need to change the name up to 61. so i'm going to delete that i'm going to type in 62 and you'll notice that it moved women0062 just over to the right and so now it goes 60 61 and 62. so in order to fix it just come back over here hit run all again it's going to figure out everything that it needs to do it now knows that it has the correct hopefully the correct amount of frames and it's going to go through now it is going to reprocess all the frames that you just processed that's okay if you were working on a very large project that took a very long time to render you may want to only process the frames that it didn't get processed that's definitely an option in this instance this takes just a few minutes so i'm just going to go ahead and let it process all of the frames again let's go ahead and take a look here see how it's doing so we made it past 62. that's good it's a good sign so the interesting thing is it's processing different frames uh it's not processing a certain direction i mean i don't know if that's just how computers work i don't know how any of this ai functions so i can't say that it's doing something it's doing this or it's doing that i really don't know how it works i just know that it works and it's super interesting while it's doing its thing i'm going to go ahead and close that down for now and i'm going to just let it run it's almost done okay and it appears to be done that probably took about two minutes if that let's go ahead and where it says out 82 we see we've got zero and it goes all the way to frame 117. so i'm going to go ahead and hit command control a to select all of them i'm going to go back over to davinci resolve and i'm going to go back into the edit page i don't necessarily need this anymore so i'm going to go ahead and delete that for right now and i'm just going to bring this entire sequence in you'll notice it's 118 frames i'm going to drop it right on to the timeline now if i was to take this and just drop it right here you'll notice that we have an animation and it works pretty well we are missing a few things right we're missing a little bit of detail here you can see that it gets a little garbled a little bit messed up but look at the face it's talking we we didn't do we didn't do very much to get there right um this is an animation we just animated and it only took i don't know however long this video has gone on that's uh it's pretty impressive how can we make this look better tons of different ways right we could add layers we can add colors to it um let's show how we can do some of that so of course there's a ton more you probably saw the intro it was much more detailed than this this is this is a very powerful thing i mean this is like very quick animation i could really see using this for facial animations probably more than anything just because you can get really quick and cheap facial rigs and animations and you don't have to animate them it's essentially just live plates that are doing all the work i don't know i hope you guys see the benefit of this i know this was just a really silly demonstration and just a really quick workflow for it um i will show you a couple things if you want to hang out for just a couple more minutes i'll show you how you can do this a little bit more in depth and you can add a little bit more depth to the actual lines what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to do this again but this time i'm going to show you how to add some color and maybe do some masking okay let's go get a new frame 82. so i'm gonna go ahead and delete all those that was pretty cool i mean you know we did it that's nice let's do a different frame i'm gonna you know let's do two frames so i'm gonna go ahead and grab frame zero copy this bring it over to keys delete this one and ctrl v all right so we got woman00 and i'm also going to do we'll do frame 82. so we'll have two frames and i'll show you how to blend them together that's kind of fun all right so we'll use this one again actually let's go to frame 81 i think her hand moves a little bit less let's copy go into keys control v all right so we're going to use these two frames so if i go back over to davinci resolve i can go ahead and delete that because it's gone now it doesn't exist take these bring them over and then let's just drop them both over here they don't need to be very long because again we're not going to be you know doing much to them something like that jump over to fusion all right so the process doesn't change all that much this is the first frame so i'm gonna i'm gonna go about this uh pretty quick and easy and i'm actually going to save some of my work and i'm gonna bring it over to the next frame it's gonna make things just a little bit easier so i'm gonna go ahead and disconnect this for now and just like i did last time i'm going to bring in a background and let's just we'll leave this as a white actually no i promised you that we would turn this into an alpha so let's go ahead and do that and then this media end's going to come somewhere towards the end since uh maybe somewhere around there and i will still start with a outline because i do think that outlining it is is pretty easy now we could do an outline with a mask or we could do an outline with a with the pen again this time i'm going to show you how to do it with a polygon just using just a regular old polygon and a background and so it's just going to be a polygon stroke now let's go ahead we can probably start let's just let's just start right here with the the arm here and i'm just going to follow this along like so and actually let's take this merge over here and that way at some point we'll actually be able to see and so this is really easy because what i'm doing is i'm just using my mouse and i'm just clicking along this cloth line and we use this in the same way that we would make pretty much any mask and i'm just masking here i can get as close to this as i want i can even get all of the little intricate details all of the little ruffles here if i want it it's just more points on my mask and because i'm not moving this i'm not having to animate this it doesn't really matter how many points i use it's pretty much like foolproof really it's it's a really powerful thing that is really cool now here you you will have to decide do i want to maintain just the overall outline you could or do i want to just outline the shirt you know you have that option i'm just going to stick with the hair i'm just going to do a simple hair outline here you'll see where this comes into play a little bit later it'll it'll make a little bit more sense we'll actually use and reuse some of these polygon lines and it'll make a little bit more sense here in a few minutes all right so that's pretty much the entire sweatshirt i'm going to just do this right here and so what we have here is just a basic outline now it's essentially like a mask right so we have this mask but we're going to create additional masks inside so i'm gonna probably want a mask for her hair i'm gonna want a mask for her sweater there's a lot of this i could use and there's a lot of this i can reuse let's just say i was to command c command v this polygon line and maybe i want to get rid of all of these i can just come up and hit delete that gets rid of all of those polygons now i can come in here i can get a little closer and i can just start adding some lines for this uh and don't worry about the the shape of this line i'll show you how to fix it real easily here in just a minute yeah that looks a little wonky but if we go ahead and take this shift s it's going to go ahead and smooth those out i'm going to have to take this tangent right here and fix it and take this tangent right here fix it but there we go so now we have essentially just the sweater right but it's not completely sweater because what do we have here we are missing some arm portions so the nice thing though is that these will match up perfect with the rest of it so now we have to do is we can just kind of start tailoring this just a little bit and we can kind of fix it and there's a bunch of different ways you can do this it doesn't have to be this way this is just the way that i'm doing it you could you could make a simple outline we can do all kinds of things the neat thing about doing it this way is you'll see that we'll have a lot of options later on with uh outlining and what dot all right so i don't necessarily want this polygon to be a part of this right and instead of it being a solid polygon let's click off solid and let's give it just a little bit of border with and now we have an outline of our person now we still have um some of this polygon here that we will use we'll go ahead and bring in a another instance of a background and we'll put this on top let's see what this looks like but i don't necessarily want it to be this color let's say maybe i want it to be the color of her original shirt i can go ahead and steal that color that looks pretty good now it is a complete animation i could add texture to this there's any number of things that i could do to make this look a little bit nicer let's say we want the the skin of her arm i don't have to go back and reuse these polygons i can actually just come in and create new polygons on a background and let me show you what that looks like so let's take this background here and let's just make it the color of her skin and then let me add some polygons here so let's start here and i'll just trace this line right here really quick and dirty doesn't have to be amazing again this is as good as you want it to be so there's one we don't actually see it so let's go ahead and bring it back in and you can see it probably needs a little bit of texture but just as for what it is it doesn't look too terrible let me just straighten these up a little bit so they look a little nicer and let's just move this over some now anytime you're working with this same color i find it's easier just to add another polygon so let me go ahead and add one more polygon into that same color but this time we're going to do this arm over here and because all we're doing is we're looking at the arm closer we're not actually changing the shape of it right in reality it's gonna be the right correct size let me take let me take some of these and let's smooth them out just so they don't look so crazy and maybe get rid of this one all you gotta do is hit delete and it's gonna remove that keyframe and you can smooth out some of these keyframes so they look a little nicer now in any time um you can keep back coming back here and checking it out you'll notice that there are some gaps here so you get to decide do you want to fix that here in the polygon or do you want to fix that here in the shirt and in this instance it looks like the shirt might be the place to fix it here so let's just bring it a little bit closer uh we're just doing a sketch so it probably doesn't need to look perfect we also are missing some of the blue shirt there so it's real simple thing just gotta add in another polygon here and we can add it right here so we can see what we're dealing with and then now we have that triangle for the shirt and i just did a little twisty loop there which i don't like and it's off i like that and again as good as you want to make it is how good it will be and now you can see we have the shirt now we have a little bit of gaps here we have a little bit of gaps there and some gaps are okay to keep and maintain an actual gap so you can see through her arm and it would be a little bit more realistic so we're missing uh a bunch of other stuff like her hair let's go ahead and do her hair next or we can just do her face let's let's let's go ahead and work on the face so if this is the the skin color let's bring out another one you can rename these if you want really simply just hit f2 on it and this could be uh right arm this one could be f2 left arm and this one here could be face uh and that just kind of keeps it in line so that you'll know exactly what is what so let's go ahead and any place we see skin we'll just go ahead and we're not gonna worry too much about her ears we can always come back if we feel like we need ears we can always come back and work on that this you can also just superimpose where you think her face is because we can still cover it with hair later that might be more realistic so there we have her face uh we can add in all the facial features here in a little bit we'll just leave this as like a skin layer and then we can work on actual facial details in a little bit let's go ahead and finish out with the hair before we work on some of the face deets so let's bring in another background let's go ahead and plug this background in here and i'm just going to take the the darkest hair color maybe something like that and i'm just going to add in polygon and we we will add some of these we'll come back and we'll work on like getting the actual uh hair detail a little bit later so for right now i'm just going to and this doesn't even have to really match because again like uh some of this we're going to be recreating and some of it is going to be kind of uh newly created right so if that makes sense and we can come back in and we can add some of this detail a little bit later i just want to get like the bulk of the hair because i'm going to come back and i'm going to add some swooping details using some different colors in just a bit but i do want to if like her hair comes swings out wide here i do kind of want that because i feel like that is going to be moving in the animation and this is an animation so you know you do have some creative freedom and some liberty to uh do it the way you want all right so now we've got hair she has hair doesn't look amazing you can see we're definitely missing some places uh it might be beneficial to have some of it swoop in just a little bit and then some of it come out a little bit here just so we can fill in those spots uh that looks pretty good i think i'm going to leave it like that and again i'll come back in here in a little bit and we'll do some detail work all right so we still need the facial details now to do the facial details um i could use paint like i did on the last time but in this specific instance i think i'm going to continue with the color theme so i'm just going to continue making colors so let's go ahead and bring in another color and this time the color will be let's go with pink and we'll do her lips real quick so let's get real close and we'll just get some nice lips here and we will definitely have to come back in and smooth this out just a little bit and then we'll also uh work on doing the mouth uh the teeth and all that and shift s we'll smooth those out maybe we don't want to move them all down maybe just move this down just a little bit maybe this up a little bit we do want to follow the curvature of our mouth because our mouth is what's going to move all right so every time you mess this up you'll notice that it pushes everything to the left uh we could kind of clean some of this up by just uh grouping so ctrl g command or control g will group these all together and that'll just make it a little bit easier to deal with all right so there we go let's go ahead and see what we're dealing with here and i want to do this uh teeth so let's bring in another one and i know what you're thinking like this is a lot of work right it's a lot of work um you're essentially just creating your character so if we're only creating the character now uh imagine how much harder this would be if we had to redo this for every frame so there's definitely some things that we can do to kind of speed this up right um we could have already made the character like we could have a character sheet already that would make this process probably go a lot quicker you'll notice that i'm just doing individual polygons for teeth i mean we could also use shapes we could even do some roto tracing we could use some other programs that would probably make this a lot faster as well like pritta photoshop stuff like that um there's a lot of different things that we could do so don't feel like you have to pigeonhole yourself into doing things the way that i did them um you know you can use all different manner of different techniques this is just the way that i'm doing it today and so i'm just creating teeth and then i will create like a darker backdrop that will be behind the teeth and so one thing i just realized is that that actually will have to go in front of this layer right because um that way i don't have to really recreate this so that's a great thing about fusion so i got these teeth ready i'm going to go ahead and command ctrl g that just to group it together and the wonderful thing about this is it's so non-linear i can go ahead and just move this merge over instead of having to like do a bunch of things inside of adobe after effects you know where i would have to like recomp it and move it around i could just bring in a backdrop here or background node just plug it in we'll make it simple we'll do another polygon node right and i can just have this follow the ellipse line here it comes out and then that way i at least just have a dark uh backdrop here and here's a great thing look soft edge maybe not that much maybe just a little bit of soft edge and now we have it's just dark in those teeth yeah do they look a little weird yeah sure they do but again it's cartoonish right we're just we're just working here let's not let's not dwell on it too much okay my my my degree is not in art it's in um computer animations so eyebrows eyes and a nose maybe some wrinkle lines i'm going to probably speed through this a little bit i think you guys kind of already get the idea of how to do this and so the rest of it's just going to be kind of like speedily done that's a word speedily should be so let's go ahead and let's just finish off with the jawline let's go ahead and group this together move this out and we haven't done like a really great job of going through and saying what all of these pieces are so this would be very difficult to replicate later on you would definitely want to use underlays you can use underlays like this just go ahead and select those shift space type in underlay and then this will give you like just a easier visual thing maybe you want to come in here and you want to even just change the color of this underlay you can you can set color let's go ahead and set it to yellow and let's say that all yellow things are facial elements so if it's part of the face i could go ahead and group it together i could even use a sticky note to say face or something of that nature so shift space sticky note and then we can just double click on it face let's this isn't the face but let's just say it was right so you can use a bunch of things to give you a little bit more organization in your animation and i know that you're probably thinking wow this really hard and a lot of work and it is it's not the easiest thing on earth but you can get like a really interesting animation from here and it's gonna be different than most of the things that you're seeing on the web so that's kind of neat in its own respect so let's just go ahead and give her a jaw line here and this will need to match up this outline out here so let's go ahead and give it some border with like that let's do one final thing let's give her some highlights not so much uh for lighting because we could we could actually do that late one more one more little thing let's just use a paint node should make it real simple size the brush down a bit down way small and i am going to use my wacom tablet for this just because of the type of movement i'm not very good at with my mouse i'm actually not very good at it with without my mouse either but i think it'll be a little bit i do this so probably need to see what i'm doing so in here and that looks like way too much so let's go ahead we'll size this down quite a bit soften this down a little bit stroke duration still needs to go up to 30 and especially because i'm at this weird frame number actually instead of 30 let's just do 90 just to make sure that the stroke numbers will match and instead of white let's do let's which i mean i get it the lightest color is probably like a white-ish color but uh we'll just do something like that and um i know that this is not amazing this is probably a little bit wavier and i'll have to probably come up and fix a little bit of this but right like if you're a real artist like this would be way better but i'm not i'm a pretend artist something like this right it just gives us a little bit of definition of hair and so that might be a bit strong the nice thing is we can come into this paint and go into the opacity and we can't turn it down right and the reason we can't turn it down is because we've already painted on this frame and that's okay one thing we can do is i can bring in a background right and i can take this and then this can go into the paint and now we see that we have this and then i can just drive this back into that merge node and then like so and so now this is what we have but if we take this background and we turn that alpha down now we have the ability to control the blend and how much of that opacity will show through so that's pretty cool right um so now we just have these lines and i just uh like kind of help out that probably looks a little weird maybe if i can because we don't really want to mess too much with the actual outline itself we want those outlines to be visible that's going to help the absinthe program do what it needs to do so we can erase some of these lines just to make it a little bit easier on it okay so i don't know that looks fine i mean it you know it definitely looks like an animation right like the mouth still haunts my dreams but that's okay that's okay we can we can deal with this all right so there is our rendered image um one thing we can do is let's i want to show you how it handles transparency but in in the future we could add in cool backgrounds and all kinds of things let's go ahead and command g that just to group it so it looks a little bit nicer everything matches the one thing we don't really need is we don't need this anymore right because we could just delete it or i can move it out altogether it's not really necessary because all i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here and i'm going to right click and i'm going to save this image and i want to save all right great so that's seems like we're done we're not because we have a second frame to do so let's go over here and let's jump over to the next frame and we look at it we're like oh my god we have so much work to do well not really because let's come over here and let's just go ahead and take all of this control or command control c and jump over here and we can just command a control v to paste it all just to make it a little bit easier on ourselves let's go ahead and take this media in so let's go ahead and take this background node to black background remember and we will turn the alpha down and let's take this media in let's put it in the same spot so it's going to go way over here towards the end look over here and we're we're going to have to change some things right like not everything is going to match up and that's okay we know that but let's see how far off it is so we're going to want to maybe turn down the blend a little bit and we can kind of see that these things don't match up very well do they so it's going to be a matter of fixing this in the easiest way possible so let's go ahead and start off just like if we were cleaning up something for animation let's go and start with the this first okay approximately 10 hours later and i know that was a lot of work right but again this still saves us a huge amount of time so it matches up pretty well with this so let's go ahead and save this image it'll be the woman 81 all files make sure it says dot png yes we want to replace it just go ahead and get out of this it's looking pretty neat okay uh now we have our keys these are our two keys and we have our video which is all of these frames that we what do we got to do well we got to do the exact same thing that we did last time so let's go ahead and start fire up ebsynth i'm going to take the keys drop it on the keys folder here and i'm going to take the video drop it on the video and you'll notice that we have two sets of these keyframes now so it knows that keyframe 0 is the first keyframe so it's probably not going to go backwards it's only going to go forwards but it's telling it to only go to frame 81 and we have it set so frame 81 is gonna go all the way back to zero but it's also going to go up to 117. so you kind of need to decide do you want it to continue going all the way to 117 and just duplicate frames or do you want it to only stop at 81. and i'm actually going to have it go all the way to 117 because sometimes it may be able to handle certain frames better than if you weren't to do that so let's go ahead we're going to go ahead and just run all it's going to each if these are going to have their own folders i'm not going to go into the folders i'm just going to let it do its thing while i go do other stuff and then i'm going to come back when it's done and hopefully we'll have two options to choose from to see which one has better frames all right so not sure how long that took because i had to go do other things but let's take a look at what we have here so if i jump in here we can see frame zero okay yeah it's the animation so i mean this might not be perfect but it is it's it is done and that's really what matters so let's jump over to davinci resolve and i'm going to delete i'm just going to leave these keyframes in case i want to go back in and make more keyframes of it i'm going to take this 0 out i'm going to rename it i'm going to just call it uh i don't know 1 maybe and then i'm going to go to the out 81 control a and i'm going to drop this over here as well and i'm going to call this 2. very originally named two now this one goes from 81 out and the other one goes from uh zero all the way through so i'm just gonna make a separate timeline i feel like sometimes just making another timeline cleans things up and i don't have to worry about all those i'm going to take one and two and i'm going to drop them both onto this timeline we'll see how it looks now these are on black right so the reason they're on black is because there's just nothing behind it but what we can do is we can come into the effects library and i'm just going to grab a solid color it doesn't really matter what the color is it probably shouldn't be black but it doesn't necessarily need to be like a specific background color let's go ahead and change the color to like a blue or something blue and then turn up the opacity a little bit okay and then let's take number one and let's just kind of take a look at number one i can already see i'm having some problems with the hands here but look at that talking so the talking turned out pretty good let's see what the number two looks like so number two looks a little bit better actually so it maintains the hand the entire time so maybe the mouth is better on one or the other yeah like so i have more teeth here i could see that i probably would need more keyframes and i might even have to fix this up a little bit but look at how easy that animation was um there's certain things about this one that are better than the other one it's lost all of the hand detail uh whereas this one has all of the hand details and i think it's because there was more hand in this so if we jump over to this timeline we look at how much hand we had in this one versus how much hand we had in this one we didn't have any of the hands and so this is probably not looking back this wouldn't have been a good frame to use because it was missing her entire hand whereas this one had much more of the hand so anytime that you do not have it it's going to streak downward if it's touching the edge of the frame what would be nice when you're filming if you're filming your own stuff is that your entire subject will be in frame and there'll be enough contrast to where absinthe can easily determine the lines that it needs to in order to rotoscope itself out this might have seemed like it took a long time but i mean once i had the character all worked out like this this was really easy to do so if i was to choose ideally what i would do is i would blend some of this one with some of this one uh some of one with some of two i would take the best parts of one and i would take the best parts of two i could either mask out let's just say that the mouth turned out really well here for all of the talking i might mask that out and put it on number two and vice versa because essentially the the all of the lines should be roughly in about the same place as long as they are relatively similar um so that's just one of the techniques uh there's a bunch of different techniques if you just type in absinthe and tutorials you'll see some by joel haver you'll see a lot of other tutorials where they go into much more in depth into how to make a very good absinthe this is just my process and the way that i do absynth and i've only this is this is a new thing for me i've only discovered this just a few days ago so i'm really still playing around with it but i do think that this could be a new avenue for creating original animations using either stock footage or even i don't know shows i've seen a lot of people take like episodes of the simpsons or rick and morty and essentially recreate it using absinthe videos kind of interesting uh that's pretty much it for me i hope you guys got something out of this i know this is a really long video and i apologize if you made it all the way to the end congratulations if you guys got something out of this video make sure to like subscribe hit that bell notification and i'll see you guys in the next one thanks you

Channel: CB Super

Views: 18,199

Keywords: video editing, Tutorial, free video editor, cb super, free video software, edit video, vfx, visual effects, tips, tricks, computer animation, davinci resolve, blender3d, blender, 3d, joelhaver, ebsynth, animations

Id: AONVy_O86J4

Length: 48min 32sec (2912 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021