[flow_default] Transcription: 017_-_Fusion_Pt4_-_Sci-Fi_Muzzle_Flash.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "017_-_Fusion_Pt4_-_Sci-Fi_Muzzle_Flash.wav",
+  "text": "Alright, we've learned a ton about Fusion so far. Let's have a little bit of fun. We're going to composite a muzzle flash for some kind of sci-fi gun here inside of Fusion. So let's open up an Explorer window and I'm going to grab Space Gun and Smoke Puff. Drag those into our Media Pool. Once we have those in our Media Pool and our Edit page, I'm going to right click on Space Gun and say Create New Timeline using Selected Clips and hit Create. Now I can switch over to Fusion and we can work on our shot. And here we have it. And this is just a custom painted Nerf gun on kind of a grungy background. And what we're going to do is make this look like a real gun, you know, as real as a sci-fi gun can look by compositing a muzzle flash and some smoke and maybe even animating some parts of the gun inside of Fusion here. This is the kind of compositing I really like. It's fun. It's goofy. It doesn't have to be that realistic. And a muzzle flash is a really nice effect that's And the cool thing about a muzzle flash is there isn't much animation to it. It all happens in one frame. So you can really get pretty crazy and it just happened so fast that it's not even that much work to get a really nice result. Now we could use an actual picture of a muzzle flash, but we honestly just don't need to. We can make our own here inside of fusion pretty easily. I'm going to move my nodes down here and I'm just going to grab a background node, drag that in and I'm going to merge it over our original footage like that. Because this is an alien gun, we can make the muzzle flash any color that we'd want. Normally, if you're going to make like a muzzle flash like this, you'd pick something like orange and we'll just go with that for now. But we don't want this just to show up orange. We want a little shape around it that looks like a muzzle flash. So I'm going to click on our polygon mask here. I'm going to click on that. It will add a polygon mask to our background node. And now I can just draw a little shape like this literally just like a cartoon muzzle flash shape We're gonna make this nice and soft and it will actually look decent or we could leave it cartoony if you want to I guess it's the same workflow pretty much something like that. That's great I'm gonna go over to our inspector here where it says soft edge grab that and Drag it up and that'll start to just make this really soft again. This is all gonna happen over one frame So we don't even need to animate things we just need it to look pretty convincing for one frame. Once this is a little more soft, drag this out, make sure we have a good shape. I can double click anywhere in the node graph to get rid of that outline. So this looks really crappy right here and that's because we just have this solid color which isn't realistic. Anytime something is bright, it will have a core and it will have kind of the glow color around it. That's two parts to anything that's fancy and flashy. So we have the color, now we need to make the core. We're going to do that just by adding another to And again, we're going to soften that edge. You can see it already looks a lot better. Double click. And now it does kind of look cartoony, but it's a lot more realistic than it was. And again, I can just kind of adjust this, get everything looking a little better. Now we can take our merge nodes and instead of normal, I'm going to switch that to screen. What that's going to do is just make it act more like a light. It's going to get rid of the darker pixels and it's going to brighten things with the lighter pixels. So again, just on this frame, it doesn't look super realistic, but it's going to be so fast that the effect is going to work just fine. From here, you can go as crazy as you want. You can add more shapes. You can anything that happens when this gun shoots, you want to happen on this frame. But if we have this great big explosion coming out of the end of this barrel and this is supposed to be a bright light, there should be things that are brightening up in the environment. Things that would normally, if you pretend that you have like a light bulb right here, what would be lit by that light bulb? Probably the sides of the gun that are facing the flare, maybe something on the back wall, something here on his fingers. And so we can add lighting just by using the exact same technique. Again, I'm going to drag a background node here and merge it over everything and we'll make it whatever color we want. Should be a similar color to our flare, something like this. I'll grab a polygon node and this time instead of adding the flare, I'm going to add the lighting. So we definitely want lighting on his fingers right here and we'll just draw a really soft shape, soften it up. And again, on our merge, switch that to screen. Now this doesn't look super realistic right now. That's because it's just turned all the way up. We take this blend and turn that down to where it's just noticeable. See, we just want it a little bit so you can just see it on his fingers and now since this is kind of the lighting node I can actually add more Masks to the same background node just by selecting my polygon mask and adding a mask right there And that's just gonna stack those and so I'll make another mask there add another polygon node add a little mask here and Anywhere where I think that some light would be showing up I can just add another mask and really we're not gonna be animating this This is all gonna happen in one frame so I can just add another mask and really we're not going to be animating this. This is all going to happen in one frame. So I can go pretty crazy and I won't really have to do a lot more work other than just drawing this the first time. And I'll make sure that I soften things, select all of my edges and soften them. Make sure everything's nice and subtle and everything that happens with all of those masks. I can animate here in my merge with our blend so I can turn up and down our lighting. Again, I don't want to be right here. That's just crazy sauce. So I just want it to be just enough to look like this is interacting with the environment, something like maybe 0.15. And on this frame, I want this to be lit up, but all the other frames, I want it to be gone. So what I can do is just keyframe this by clicking on the keyframe for blend here in my merge node. And I'll just use my arrows on my keyboard to go one frame back, and I'll turn the blend all the way down. And then one frame forward, that's our frame where everything's lit and then the next frame it's completely down. So that just appears for one frame that lighting. I'm going to do the same thing with our flare here. Grab my merge node here on frame 23. I want that blend to be at one same thing for the other merge node blend it one move one frame back turn my blend off turn my blend off for my other one then this is the good frame and then the frame after it again we're going to blend it all the way down and all the way down. So now if I page through this, it only happens on that one frame, boom, like that, and then it's gone. So let's see this in motion. Yeah, it's a pretty cool effect for just literally just drawing shapes with background nodes. So let's make sure that we're staying organized here. I'm going to grab this merge and move it up so that we know what's going on. I'll add an underlay, UND, hold down Alt and select that F2 and we'll call this lighting. These two are going to be flare. Move this underlay over here, rename that. Now we can see we're kind of building our composite in these little groups here. Flare, lighting. Now we can really look at the shot and decide what else it needs. One thing that I think is missing is some smoke because if this explosion is happening in this gun, there's going to be some smoke, right? There's a bunch of different ways to do this. The easiest way is to find a smoke element and just composite it in there. We happen to have a smoke element that I shot. I'll grab this and just drag it down into our nodes here and I'll hit two on the keyboard just so we can look at it. If we play this back, we just have some smoke on a black background. This actually isn't real smoke. This is, I think it is, sprayable sunscreen that's backlit shot on a black background and color corrected to make it look nice. And even though that's not smoke, if we put it in the context where it would be smoke, it's going to be totally believable as smoke. So all we have to do is just composite this over our footage. So let's put that over everything else. I'm going to grab this media two, which is our smoke. Let's actually rename this smoke. I'm going to grab the output and drag it over the output of my last merge here. That's going to make another merge node. And now we can control how this merge treats this footage by going to the around. This looks like it sucks. So we have a couple problems here. The first one is that the smoke starts way before our actual shot. So we want that to start at frame 23 or maybe even before it or after it by like one frame but somewhere around there 23. So to delay this footage, I'm just going to hit shift spacebar with that node selected and type time and I'm going to want time speed. And here in time speed, we have a little attribute that says delay and I'm just going to delay that 22 frames. And now this whole thing is going to start right there at frame 22. Now we might want to start it a little before or a little bit after just to see how this works, but we can adjust that in a second. Right now what I'm looking for, in fact, let's start this one frame early. Let's start it at 21. And part of the reason is just so we can see this little puff right here and position it over the barrel. So I'm going to grab my merge, which controls where my composite happens. And in my inspector, I'm going to click this horizontal flip button that's going to flip that. And I'm going to position this, this little puff right here, right about where our muzzle is somewhere in there. Now there's so much going on. It's not really going to matter if I have this exactly over it or not. In fact, we might take some liberty in a second and adjust this back to screen mode just so we can see things a little easier. And now if we play this back, we have that smoke coming out. Now it looks a little weird, even though it's probably accurate, it looks kind of weird for the smoke to be coming out straight. So what we might want to do is just again, maybe have that smoke come out a little earlier. So I'll grab time speed and maybe bring this back to like 20. And I might even grab this merge and rotate it a little bit and just kind of cheat this around a little bit until it looks good because it doesn't really matter if it's accurate or not if it looks weird because that's you know visual effects you want things to look good so that it looks like it's coming out of the actual gun the only problem is that that smoke is actually coming out of the gun right before this boom which again is probably fine probably nobody will notice and it's probably accurate that you'd see a little bit of smoke there but let's just have it start right here again I can just key frame the blend of this merge so I'll hit it one right, move one frame to the left and turn that blend down, something like that. And there we have our composite with our smoke and everything. Now our smoke might just be a little bit crazy, a little bit too much. And so I'll go to my second key frame here just by clicking this little arrow. This is how you can kind of jump in between the two key frames. And here instead of framing it at one, let's do about half, like 0.5 or so. And now let's look at our composite. And we always want to keep things subtle and tasteful. As subtle as you can, basically, if you notice it, it might just be a little bit too strong. Boom. There we go. We just want it to sell that effect. We don't want it to be crazy smoke all the time. So boom, there we go. So that's pretty much our effect, but we can actually even make this a little better, a little bit more believable by animating parts of the gun because this is just one frame. We can do things pretty easily and it makes it look like we did a lot of work. Really all we have to do is just change this one frame. So I really like this part of the gun, which completely does not do this, but this is an alien gun. So we can kind of make up however we want. I like this part and maybe we'll have this slide back here. Like it's some part of action of the gun that just moves back and forth. But how do we do that? It didn't move in real life, but we can kind of fake it with movie magic. Here's the workflow. Basically, we need to cut this thing out and move it back here and then clone it out. So it looks like it doesn't exist over here. So it looks like it moved, right? We can do this a bunch of different ways. Probably the simplest way is just to add it on to the end of our node tree like this. Probably not the cleanest way. What we should probably do, take our original plate and comp that onto itself, but there's nothing really going on here in our composite. So it's not going to matter if we do this before or after things. So I'm going to select this merge node and hit shift space and just type MRG to make a merge node because we're going to merge this over itself and that's just kind of a cleaner way to do it. Grab the output of our merge and drag it into the foreground of the merge. So all we're doing right now is merging this footage over itself. In fact, I can hold down alt and make a little elbow there so we can see that a little better. Now what we got to do is cut this out and we're actually going to set ourselves up for success here because there's going to be two parts to this. There's going to be the cloned background of the gun and then this little piece that moves. So we're actually just going to go ahead and make another merge node just by selecting this little elbow again, shift spacebar, MRG. And right before our merge node, we're going to add a paint node. So I'll grab this fourth icon over, drag this onto that yellow line and paint is where you do things like clone things out and kind of just adjust images, things that you would do in Photoshop pretty much happen in this paint node. So what we're going to do is clone this so that it just goes away. Over in my inspector, I'm going to click on the second icon under apply mode, which is called clone. And here in my viewer, I'm going to select the fourth icon over called stroke. And now I have this little widget that's kind of hard to see under my highlight. But if I hold down control and drag, you can see I have, I have my little brush preview here. And if I hold down Alt and click, that leaves an X. That's going to be the place that I copy pixels from. And then wherever I click next is where those pixels are going to go. So I can kind of clone things just like you would in Photoshop, like Ctrl Z and get rid of that stuff. And now I'm going to click on Alt. Now I'm going to click and drag with Ctrl and make a little bit smaller brush. Hold down Alt and I'm just going to click right there at the bottom of that little bar and I'm going to position my mouse so that it kind of clones out this little section here and it takes a little work and really it doesn't even have to be that accurate. It just has to be pretty good because it's just going to be one frame. Just make it look like that thing isn't there. Look at this. It's just a terrible hack job. But you know what? Nobody's going to care. Nobody's ever going to notice or care. So now that that little piece has basically disappeared, we're going to merge that over itself and mask it so we can move that piece around by itself. Let's take a look at our nodes. What we're doing is we made our cloned background here. That's going into this merge six. Again, I'll grab our little elbow here, grab the output. This is our footage and I'll drag that onto the green input. And now we're pretty much just putting the original footage back over itself. But now I want to cut this part out. And there's a bunch of different ways that you can do this. With our setup right here, I'm going to use something called a mat control. I'll just double click in empty space, hit shift spacebar and type matte. There we go. Mat control. And I'm going to run this footage through that mat control before it gets to the merge. The reason for that is I want to cut this little piece out, but I want to be able to move it around. Whereas if I made a mask just on this merge, I wouldn't be able to move it around. This is just kind of a way to add a mask to something without actually adding a mask to the source. It's like running it through a mask before you merge it. So to this mat control, I'm going to add a polygon mask and I'm just going to draw a shape around this little part and we'll just adjust this so that it actually looks decent. And I'll hit number two on the keyboard. Now this isn't really doing what we wanted to this mat control. It seems like if you add a mask to the mat control, you should put it on this blue arrow, but you actually want it on the green arrow because what that's doing is taking the mat from this mask and applying it to the yellow input. So I'm gonna select this. I also have to change a couple of settings here in the matte control. I'm gonna click on post multiply image and under combine, I'll say combine alpha. What that's gonna do is cut this out based on that mask. Again, there's a bunch of different ways to do this, but this is just a way that will give you a little bit more control later. You could also make a merge and merge it over an empty background layer and kind of add a mask like that. It would be similar, but this is a nice way to do it. So now we have this piece over our painted background. And if I grab this merge node, I can grab just this one piece and move it around separate from our gun. And so I can just place this maybe back here, wherever it looks like it just slides back. And that looks cool. But maybe if this is moving, we want to blur this like it has motion blur. And we're really just having this appear for one frame. So we don't need to add any kind of real motion blur to this. We can just fake it by adding a directional blur. So what I'll do is right after our mat control, I'll select our mat control and hit shift space and type DIR and that'll come up with directional blur, d RBL. And now if I adjust the length here in my inspector and the angle, I can make this make a lot of sense for if this were a slide that was moving back and forth and we'll dial this in kind of keep it tasteful, something maybe like that. So it just looks like there's some movement here. So at frame 23, that's what we want to appear. And all of this, we want to just happen for one frame, which remember pretty much all of this stuff, this is all to make that slide work. So let's just clean things up a little bit. We have a mat control and I'll add an underlay, rename this slide action. And for this merge, we're going to do the same thing that we did with the muzzle flashes and just have full blend at frame 23. And the frame before it will turn it off and the frame after it will turn it off. So we'll make sure we have media out selected in our second viewer here. And if we page through, we have nothing happening. And then boom, that slide comes back. Our lighting comes in. Our muzzle flash comes in and our smoke. And because we're merging everything that's happened so far kind of over itself for that one frame, there isn't really any problem, but it's a little bit cleaner to limit the things that are happening up here with a mask in this merge here. So I'm just going to maybe grab a polygon mask for our merge that's going to apply here and I'll just draw a little shape around our action there. And that just ensures that if we're wanting to do something else crazy with this, we aren't merging everything over itself for no good reason. So there's our composite. I think that slide looks really cool. Looks really convincing. Like things are actually moving in that gun. That's pretty cool. And you could animate a bunch of different stuff on this gun using the exact same method, but I love stuff like this, man. That's the fun side of compositing. Boom. Yeah. Then if we switch back over to our edit page, we can let this cache for a minute and we can look at it full speed. Yeah, looks awesome. It's just cool, man. So there we go. That's our finished composite. Pretty awesome. Fusion is a really, really fun part of Resolve, where you can kind of start to get your head around the nodes pretty much anything's possible.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 1091.59
+}