Lessons
Class Introduction
01:14 2Hardware
01:27 3What Is Compositing
01:29 4Interface
03:17 5Nodes Introduction
06:01 6Your First Composite Blur
05:47 7Effects
10:30 8Merge Nodes
07:53Lesson Info
Adding Steam To Coffee
Now let's have a look at creating one of my favorite effects in the Fusion page and that is adding steam, adding smoke to things, adding kind of these like little particle things. This is something that seems like it'd be really complicated, but it's really easy. Check this out. So we have this shot of stirring coffee, right? And it looks okay, but it would be really nice if there was kind of this nice kind of fluffy steam coming off of it, so that we know it's nice and hot. Well, we can actually generate steam, kind of smoke clouds, that kind of looking thing, using a generator here in the Fusion page. Right next to our background, we have this node called fast noise. I'll grab that and drag that down. And if I hit 1 on the keyboard, we can see that this makes clouds. So it's like a little cloud machine. It's really neat. So if I select this and go over to our inspector, we can adjust a couple things. One thing that I like to adjust is the detail I can push that up, and that just kind...
of makes these clouds allows a little more realistic. It's kinda hard to tell right now because we're zoomed really far in. So let's take the scale and ironically you wanna push the scale up to make it kinda push down. And now we have these detailed kinda little clouds. This is great for adding over anything that you want to add fog, or clouds, or smoke, or any kind of texture over things. This is a very commonly used and very versatile node inside of the Fusion page. So we have our clouds. Let's merge them over our media in, and perfect. It's done. Let's go. Yeah, see? Look. You wanted steam. There it is. Thank you so much. No. let's adjust this to be a little bit more realistic. Let's take this fast noise and I actually zoomed way too far out. So let's take the scale up a little bit, something more like that. And a really cool thing about fast noise is that you can animate it. Not only can you animate everything like you normally would, like the center, or the detail, or whatever, or anything that we've been adjusting, but you can tell it to seethe. And seething is just basically changing over time when it comes to kind of particles and stuff like that. So if we take this seethe and move it back and forth, we can see it moves. And we can animate that if we want to or I can double click and reset that. I can just push up the seethe rate, and we just need to push it up a little bit and look what happens when we play this back. This actually changes a little bit. So we have this kind of animated cloud texture that we're putting over things. And of course it still doesn't look super great, but you can tell we're kind of getting there. Okay? So, now that we have our clouds over, what other things are wrong here? Well, I think that we really need to only have this happen kind of over the cup. So let's limit this fast noise to just be over the cup. We can either draw a mask right over the fast noise itself or the merge. In this case, it's not gonna matter a whole lot. I generally like to put the mask on the merge. And so let's select the merge, and this time I'm gonna use the B-spline. Because again, that gives us a nice kind of soft organic shape that's always kinda round, and Move this down. And I'll just draw this little shape like this. And now we have this limited to only be inside of this B-spline Let's soften the edges a little bit. Let's make them really soft. And now we're definitely getting there. See where it's almost believable now That looks good. And we have this animated a little bit. And it's looking okay. Let's adjust the fast noise and push that scale up just a little bit. And now we have it animating, and it's only in that place, and it looks okay. But generally, if you have steam, or smoke, or anything, it's kind of moving, it's moving up usually. So we're gonna kind of simulate that by adjusting the center of our fast noise. Now, fast noise is really cool because when you move the center, it actually has kind of an infinite canvas here. It's not like if you were to use a transform node and move it around and it has the edges just like the edges of the screen. So we can take this center and we can kind of constantly move it up, and it will look like this is kind of smoking, right? It look like the steam is kind of rising up. So let's just start with the center down here, and I'll start at the beginning of our shot, and we'll go over to this little keyframe diamond. Click on that. And then towards the end of our shot, we'll move this center up like this. I have no idea if this is the right amount or not, but we gotta start somewhere. So we'll start like that And let's see how that looks. Okay, that's definitely looking a lot better. It's maybe just a little bit fast. So because that's fast, I'll just go to the end here, select our fast noise, and I won't move this quite as much. Move it up just a little bit. Let's see how it looks. Okay. Here we go. So now we have our steam rising up, and it's looking pretty good. I'd say it's just a little bit strong here, and so I think what we'll do is just take our B-spline and kind of mess with it a little bit. And I kinda did this accidentally, but it's actually gonna be fine because this... Anytime that you draw a mask, by default, it's kind of animated over time. So I wasn't really paying attention to where I stopped, and we're at 63 right now. And we actually started drawing our mask on frame 44. And now this is gonna kind of animate over time, which might not be exactly what we want, but this kind of idea is actually really cool. So I think what we'll do is go to frame 44, and the animation for your mask shape actually happens down here at the bottom of our mask. And I'll just unclick that, that little keyframe, and that'll get rid of that keyframe, and we'll just have the start in kind of a shape like this. We'll just adjust it a little bit here, and that will change over time. Okay? And then we'll just add another keyframe at the end, and switch over to this middle keyframe, and click it to get rid of it. So now from the very beginning to the end, it's kind of changing this shape, which if we don't have a constant shape the whole time, it's going to look a lot more realistic. And because it's so soft, we aren't really going to see the shape changing. It's just going to look a little bit more real. Okay. So this is looking pretty good. I'd say the only thing is that it looks a little bit strong. So if we want to turn down an effect, like turn down the opacity of a foreground, we can select this merge, and there's this property called blend. Blend is like the opacity of the foreground of whatever you're merging over things. So I can take this blend all the way down, and that turns off the merge basically, or I can blend it up and just kind of split the difference here. So let's do like .5. And generally, when you're talking about visual effects, you want something to be just noticeable, but not so strong that it's distracting. Right? And let's play this back. And now we have kind of before on the left and after on the right, and we have that nice little steamy feeling. That's pretty nice, right? Really easy effect to do inside of Fusion. So if you need to add smoke, or steam, or clouds, or anything, use that fast noise. Pretty cool.
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Ratings and Reviews
WayDownSouth
This is a great course. I'm an absolute beginner to Fusion (although I know a bit about the editing within Resolve). The course walks its students through the basics in a very easy-to-understand process. I feel confident that I can now use Fusion effectively for my videos. Highly recommended.