Working With Vectors and the Warper Tool in DaVinci Resolve 18

[Music] foreign hey there thanks for stopping by my name is Chris from sotero media if you're new to the channel I've been on something of a quest to figure out how to replace after effects with Fusion I personally think Fusion has a number of advantages over after effects so I'll be exploring even further in future videos consider subscribing if that interests you this video will serve as an introduction to working with vector graphics inside of fusion this will include best practices for preparing your vector graphics in software like illustrator it can also be done in programs like Affinity designer no sweat so without further Ado let's get started this tutorial is going to assume you have experience working both with vector graphics and inside of vector-based software like illustrator if you're new to it there are tons of excellent tutorials out there to get you up to speed if you're familiar with working with vector graphics inside of After Effects a lot of this will be familiar you can skip ahead to actually importing into Fusion if you'd like preparing your vector graphics properly is absolutely crucial when working with them in Fusion as you'll see later when Fusion Imports vectors the vectors themselves become masks for background nodes because of that things can get out of control kind of quickly if you're not prepared the best way to do this is to plan ahead you need to look at your vector scene and decide exactly which elements you want to animate in my case I plan to animate a lot of it this includes the main woman the people on her head the clouds and so on this particular image is from Adobe stock but you can always make your own I'd start smaller until you get the hang of it so once you've decided which elements you want to animate you'll need to separate them out into layers you also want to be mindful of smaller elements that you may need to separate for example I have the front and rear bike tires on their own layers so I can animate the wheels turning it's also helpful to figure out which elements might end up being static background images to save time later on you can export those as regular ping images and import them alongside your SVG files this will help to optimize your workflow a bit as Fusion can slow down when you're working with a lot of masks now because of the way Fusion handles SVG files I found that the best way to export them is exporting all of the layers as separate files to make this faster my handy AI assistant made a script that will save each layer as an SVG file for you to use it just download the script from the link in the description then you drag the script onto the illustrator window it'll confirm that you want to run the script go ahead with that and it should automatically export all those for you now once we've got our SVG files ready to go we just need to import them into Fusion to do this first make sure you're in the fusion page at the top bar go to Fusion import and then SVG this is where things will get tedious for a few moments they currently don't let you import more than one SVG at a time so yes you do need to import each of your SVG files one by one [Music] I did try to figure out a way to script this but it seems Fusion doesn't have a way to program importing svg's files as of yet once you have all of those imported you might find all these grouped nodes to be a bit overwhelming but once you break it down it's pretty simple Fusion Imports vectors as background nodes that are being masked by the shapes in your SVG as an aside if your SVG file has any gradients I've heard those may need to be recreated in Fusion so looking at these all Fusion is doing like I said is masking these background nodes with your vector shapes these are then being merged together to form the whole layer it seems like a lot but having this all out in front of us will be a good thing though I do wish Blackmagic would borrow nuke's way of handling mask shapes where nuke allows you to have all the masks contained in one node but that's okay in the interest of not having this take forever I've done a little work ahead of time I went ahead and created this I did leave just enough unfinished so you'll be able to learn my Approach if you've used the puppet warp tool in After Effects you'll certainly have a leg up but I'm going to assume you haven't used it so I think what we'll do is Begin by going over the warper tool and seeing how we can apply it to a scene like this I will say right off the bat that I believe that this is a studio only feature it's also a feature only available in DaVinci Resolve and not in Standalone Fusion much to my chagrin the warper tool is kinda like the puppet warp tool in After Effects however I find that it's not quite as nice but that could certainly change over time to give some little dashes of life to an image like this it's great these tools work by placing pins on the image we want to Warp these pins act as places that remain stationary you can then place other pins and animate them with keyframes we'll first Define how long we want the animation to be I'm currently working on a 4K timeline at 24 frames per second so we'll go with making it 72 seconds let's go ahead and animate this Branch here because we're working with vectors that are isolated on an alpha Channel we can switch the mode to manual since we'll be working on organic shapes throughout this we'll go with the rounded mode for the warp sharpness we can leave the edge Behavior to Black and I personally like the quality as better on a bigger project like this one you might want to adjust that quality setting based on your computer's performance the warp scale changes how much of the image is affected by any individual warp point and I found myself needing to adjust this up and down throughout making this an important thing to change is the effect follows selection I needed to change this to timeline frame in order to get the animation to work properly we'll first begin by setting a keyframe at the beginning of our animation without changing frames we'll then place our control points if you shift-click you'll create a limiter point that will tell resolve you don't want to warp this area these are helpful for making sure our image doesn't move unexpectedly in the case of this plant we'll want to place the limiter point at the base of the root I will say right up front that this will take a little bit of experimentation until you really understand how this particular warper does things you may need to go back and forth between the first keyframe and the last until you sort it out this is really a two-taste situation and there really isn't a wrong answer here [Music] down [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so at the end I've ended up with something like this for the plant let's pick another example in this case a person so we'll work the way we did before and get our settings right in the warper node we'll create a beginning keyframe and set our points without doing any warping I think what we'll do is have her Bend to the right I'm not sure if this is a real yoga pose but that's okay here it's important to think about where humans actually Bend if you've ever done any rigging in 2D or 3D this should be pretty familiar so I'm putting a limiter point at her hips again with shift click I'll put another limiter on our outstretched leg then we should be able to get away with a point at her chest and one at our hands then we repeat the same process making sure we've keyframed our start we'll go to our end frame and create another keyframe we can begin by slowly moving our hands if you find it warping in any crazy or unexpected ways you might need to adjust your warp scale I can slowly move her hands over and try to get it to look as natural as possible one of the most important things is observing proportions and making sure they're looking normal once we've done our warp we can go back and check the animation and things are looking good we're just looking for subtle motions here just enough to give our animation a little more character since we're done there we can collapse our group to hide that SVG layer next we'll look at an alternative way of animating our vector graphics this is one of those where making the art yourself or at least being able to prepare the file is so important this way simply involves animating The Mask shapes if you've ever downloaded stock vector graphics you'll know that some designers let's just say aren't as tidy with their files as others generally speaking and graphic design as a whole you want to use as few points as possible to create your vector images so before bringing your graphics in you want to make sure they're optimized for animating reduce the number of anchor points to make life easier so we'll start with this woman carrying the plant and use the imported masks to animate the big leaves since the leaves are two separate mask shapes we'll first pin the two nodes so we have access to them at all times we'll set keys for the shape animation at the bottom of both node windows then we'll go to the end of our animation in my case frame 72. after that we'll make our changes since we're keyframed already your changes will be saved automatically this is where a little bit of artistry comes in as you'll want to maintain the proportions of the shape adjusting it with the bezier handles of course you can also be artsy with it there are no rules except for the ones you set and the ones your clients set [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] finally we'll move on to a quick look at how I animated the bike it's pretty simple so what we'll want to do is Begin by making our bike person active in the viewer in order to rotate the bike wheels we'll need to make sure that the pivot point is centered on the axle of the bike tire I will admit this part of things is generally a little easier in After Effects generally so if anybody has a better way of doing this part please let me know in the comments here's how I did it which is basically eyeballing after the two Tire SVG files I created a transform node for each and here I basically adjusted the pivots until they were over the top of the axle this really is just a matter of eyeballing but you want to get as close as you possibly can to avoid the tires turning in odd ways one possibility to make things easier is to include a temporary cross in the SVG file that you can use to give yourself a reference to where Center is and those are basically the ingredients that make up this animation here it's just a matter of going in and making those small adjustments by using the warper tool if you're having any trouble with your own shapes just be sure to adjust the parameters especially the warp scale until things start behaving the way you'd like I also added simple translation animations to the clouds and some of those cool background elements you can also go further and have them scale up and in or do crazy things totally up to you as you can see animations like these are totally possible in Fusion some things may be a little easier elsewhere but doing things in Fusion can be a real Joy I really like the node-based way of working compared to layers it's nice having everything out in front in the open and accessible rather than hidden inside pre-comps on pre-comps if you're a freelancer and not required to submit AE files Fusion is a real option I'm currently in the early stages for an entire course that goes over how to replace after effects with Fusion so stay tuned for that and in the meantime please comment below and if there are specific techniques to use in After Effects that you'd like to see done in Fusion I'd love to hear about it consider subscribing if you like this and want to see more take care

Channel: Swatara Media

Views: 2,834

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Id: 4kVVAy8DTFg

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2023