What Each Node Icon in Fusion Does - Fusion Nodes 101 Tutorial

[Music] hey everybody casey ferris here i make videos on davinci resolve if you want more of those make sure to hit that subscribe button today we're talking about this somebody suggested i do a little tour of these things and i think that's just a smashing idea close our menu here give us a little more room first things first what is this this is a bar of pretty commonly used nodes you can also find them up in the effects library under tools and there's a lot more stuff here you can also get to the same things by typing shift space bar and you can search by the tool's name so if you want to add a background you can type bg and hit enter and that'll add a background node and that's the exact same thing as dragging this far left icon down like this it's just a quick way to add nodes so each one of these is a different type of node let's go through them so we'll start from left to right this first one is a background node this is just a way to generate a solid background you have controls over the colors you can also do things like make it a gradient very very useful just throw this over here and you know what we'll do just to be fancy i'm going to lay these out over here and i'm just going to put these in the viewers as we go through them if you select a node and hit 1 on the keyboard it'll load it on the left viewer then i'll grab this next one this next one is called fast noise i'll hit two to bring it up here on the right fast noise is just a quick way to generate a noise pattern which is just fancy talk for clouds scale them down you can adjust the detail and everything this is a great way to make fog or smoke you can animate it these two are some of the most widely used and very very important nodes in fusion all right fast noise next is text plus text plus is just a way to generate text and over in the inspector you can adjust the size and font and all of that stuff and you can even get really detailed and stylize it in a bunch of different ways make a big outline all that stuff really powerful text generator all right next icon is paint this does need an input some kind of background so i'll just i'll just connect my background to it and hit two on the keyboard and paint is just a way to draw directly on the canvas so this is great if you want to make a really specific mask or even if you want to draw a specific shape this is really useful if you use this tool which is a polyline stroke you can make a custom little path here and then under stroke controls you can animate it on or off that's a nice way to make some fancy things especially like write on text to the right of our first divider we have color corrector and this node again needs an input so let's just put our footage through it here and this is just a simple way to do some basic color correction tint things you have your color wheels all kinds of color controls and even though it's not quite as powerful as say the color page this is a great way to color correct things individually inside of fusion comps next is curves which is pretty similar it's just like curves in photoshop or curves in the color page if you're familiar with that it should make a ton of sense next we have hue curves i'll put this on our footage few curves control the way specific colors act so if you want say these green trees to be more saturated you can pick the curve under the green part here and kind of boost it up and get those trees looking a little bit brighter so this is without it and this is with it that's a really nice subtle way to do some secondary color correction next is brightness and contrast which just like it sounds allows you to adjust a lot of the basic kind of exposure settings if you're familiar with color correction you have your lift and your gain your gamma and contrast settings if you don't know what any of this color correction stuff does if you're all confused about it there's a video right here that teaches you kind of the basic color correction and once you kind of know those basic controls these will all make a ton of sense move that into the left viewer and the last one on the second divider here is blur which as you can imagine blurs things so let's take a second to get organized here i'll kind of split these up based on the uh the dividers here just move those over and give us some room next one we have is merge and emerge node just puts something over something else so if i have our media and i want to put some text over it i have to connect the text to the merge to put text over stuff the merge also controls a lot about how this foreground layer looks like i can control the size and where it shows up the angle and even the opacity here with this blend slider all right next we have channel booleans channel booleans is really useful when it comes to stuff like 3d renders with a lot of embedded channels when you're trying to do like really specific kind of weird effects and really what it does is it does fancy math in between two images so let's grab our fast noise and attach that to our foreground and so you can combine the different channels of these two images to do certain things and i mean probably the easiest example is just kind of a strange effect so i could take let's say the red channel from our background and make that the red channel of our noise here and we get some really interesting effects there this is obviously really cool to do something like that but this can be really useful for say adjusting a mat in like a 3d render from an exr file if you go to the inspector on the second tab we have all these other channels that we can mess with this is kind of something that if you don't really know what these channels are and you've never heard of stuff like z buffer and everything you're probably not going to use this a whole lot so my advice would be don't worry about this node until you're doing something with channels and you have a really specific reason to copy one channel to another and that kind of thing after channel booleans we have mac control mac control is super useful actually so what i like to do this is really just a way to apply or adjust a mask on an image and you can do a ton of different stuff with mac control what i use this for most of the time is if i want to add a mask later down the line and i don't want to mask something in the source footage and i don't want to mask it like in a merge but i want to do something really specific with it like let's say i want to apply this circle mask in between a couple of other things like before i merge this node over something but i don't want to actually mask this original node i can connect this mask to the green input of mac control and if i switch combine to combine alpha and go down to post multiply image then i can actually apply this mask later this is super useful when you get into reusing one node for multiple things it kind of seems like it's extra and you wouldn't really need it but once you kind of get into some more compositing and keying and things like that matte control is super useful after that we have resize resize just takes an input and it changes the image size and this is different than transforming it it really just kind of makes fusion treat this as a different resolution image this is super important if you're wanting to map like a specific texture or if you're doing some kind of fancy transform later what i've used this for is if i have a texture that's like a square and then i load in another texture that isn't quite a square but i still want all of my other nodes that i have connected you know that's mapping things to 3d and all that stuff to work you can put this resize node before it and size it just right to work with all the fancy things later that's what i find this useful for if you're just trying to like scale something up or make it bigger or smaller i would recommend using transform which is our next node so transform again just takes an input and it gives you some transform controls so you can scale it change its center change its pivot change its angle these are things that you can change in a merge node but sometimes you might want to transform things before you merge it and that's why i would do that if you can do it in a merged node i would usually do this in a merge node i use this a lot if you're like tracking something to some footage and you don't want it stuck to the exact place that you tracked it you can offset it with this transform node before you put it into the the tracker to do the match move but i mean there's nothing wrong with transforming something in this node before you merge it and not not transforming it in the merge but it just uses less nodes to just do it in the merge most the time all right so that's the third section next we have the masks these are pretty easy to understand the first one is a rectangle mask you can adjust the width and the height you can even round the corners you can change the angle but you can't really change the shape circle mask similar width height angle can't change the shape then we have a polygon mask which you can draw a custom shape and you have a lot of control and you can even animate this over time and then similar to that we have the b-spline which is kind of just a different way to draw shapes instead of having sharp corners it kind of just averages out and smooths it this was kind of a more popular way to draw things kind of back in the day and it definitely has a lot of advantages gives you really kind of organic shapes kind of just dependent on your preference those are the masks that one went fast these next three are about particles the first one is an emitter this basically just generates particles and also decides what the particles look like how fast they go all that kind of stuff and it pretty much doesn't work until you skip this next icon and go to p render and connect it here and here we can see in 3d that we have our particle generator it's really hard to see so what i like to do usually is for this p render go up to the inspector where it says output mode turn that to 2d and i'm going to turn off our checkerboard by going to these three dots and unchecking checker underlay and i'll hold ctrl and mouse wheel in so we can see all these particles that are being generated and this circle here this is the emitter and i'm not going to go into full particles tutorial and everything but yeah emitter basically controls how many particles there are when they show up how they show up what they look like and what they do so you have controls over here to change the different types of colors and how big they are in this first tab here you can say how fast they go and yeah p emitter pretty much always has to be attached to p render for you to see it for you really to even mess with it now this middle icon here p merge what that does is just combine different emitters so if i drop this in here it's kind of like a merge node but for particles so if i can just copy and paste this emitter and this time for the color i'll go up here to the inspector and i'll turn that kind of a blue i can connect these both to p merge and now we have both of these particles being generated and being rendered they're all just kind of added together into the same world so that's how those all work kind of hard to show them individually because they all work together all right we're almost done this last section is all about the 3d this first icon is an image plane and this just makes a plane in 3d and you can map an image to it just by dragging it into the input and here we have our 2d image mapped in 3d space very useful if you want to do 3d transformations of 2d stuff if you want to animate photos things like that similar to that is our next icon which is shape 3d and that just makes a shape in 3d which you can make a plane so that might be a little confusing but normally you would use this probably to make a cube or a sphere or a cylinder if you go up here to the upper right where this kind of gray circle is there's a drop down and you can preview this with lights and see the shape of this a little bit easier switch to a cube we can really see kind of what's going on so you can do some basic 3d inside of fusion you can't really like do 3d modeling and some of the more advanced stuff that you would do and say like blender or maya but you can make a basic shape like this you can also apply different materials and everything to it it's pretty powerful actually okay similar thing is the next one it's text 3d and that just generates text in 3d by default it just makes kind of 2d text in a 3d space but if you scroll down in the inspector under extrusion you can pop up the extrusion depth and really make this look like 3d pretty cool the next icon over is merge 3d so just like p merge and a regular merge node this just combines multiple things into the same world so if i want to put our text and our cube into the same 3d world i'll hit 2 on the keyboard this will combine them into the same 3d world you need this if you're going to have any amount of 3d things in a scene if you want to light them all of that stuff any lights or cameras or anything that you make they all go into this merge 3d so that they all live in the same world so speaking of that next one is camera and this is just a 3d camera that you can move around in the 3d world and you have to attach it to merge 3d so now you can control where your camera goes and kind of set up your 3d scene that way and anything that's attached to this merge 3d is all in the same world next icon over is 3d light this is a spotlight and again you attach it to the merge 3d and you can light things pretty cool now all of this 3d stuff is not going to render unless you have this last node here the renderer 3d so i'll drag that into here and i can just connect the output of my merge into render a 3d and hit 2 on the keyboard and that will show what our scene actually looks like so what i'll usually do is load up render 3d into the second viewer and merge 3d into the first viewer and then i can select my camera and move that around so that we can actually see what the camera sees in the renderer and where our camera goes here in the merge 3d and i can move my lights and adjust how they look and stuff now it isn't going to look that great until you select render a 3d and go down to the very bottom and enable lighting and shadows and then you can actually start to see that 3d lighting in a way that makes any sense at all this last section is all about 3d these first three generate things in 3d merge 3d puts them together camera and light kind of also go into that merge 3d and then render actually makes it so you can see it so yeah that's every node here in our toolbar and if you'll notice these little dividers they're kind of broken up into sections this first section kind of generates things so generates a background generates noise generates text the next section adjusts images so there's color correction brightness and contrast blur it's stuff that you would apply directly to an image this third section is all about just how nodes interact with each other so whether they merge over one another doing fancy math with the channels working with mats transforming things resizing things the fourth section is all about masks the fifth section is particles and the sixth part here all about 3d and the good news is if you get familiar with just these things you can do quite a bit inside of fusion if you want some more basic stuff on fusion check out this video right here because it goes through a lot of that oh boy learn all about this fanciness hmm fanciness yeah nice

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 31,390

Keywords: blackmagic fusion tutorials, fusion, tutorial, blackmagic, compositing, davinci resolve, vfx, blackmagic fusion, 3d, motion graphics, animation, visual effects, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve tutorial, fusion tutorial, nuke, blackmagicdesign, fusion tab, davinci resolve fusion, resolve, expressions, after, adobe, amazing, nodes, nodes 101, about fusion nodes, merge nodes, how to use a merge node, fusion merge node, fusion nodes

Id: bG9rA7cUM5o

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020