Some morphing action here. Download the templates below and check out the quick walk through.

 

 

(click the text rather than the download button)

Particle Text Morphing with Blackmagic Fusion – Free templates!

“SUITS INTRO”

THESE FREE TOOLS WILL HELP YOU CREATE IT!

The other day I watched the excellent series “Suits”. If you haven’t watched that yet….you’re missing out on something! Anyways, I was quite impressed with the intro to the series. At first sight it may seem deceptively simple, but when analyzing it, you will notice there’s a lot of clever stuff going on. I was inspired by it and tried to re-create some of it in Fusion. Unfortunately, as opposed to After Effects, a few basic tools are missing from the standard arsenal: a block resolve and a simple way to create a grid. Sure, there are ways to accomplish it (there always are!), but I thought it would be good to create something re-usable that works in a straightforward way.

So, here we are: I created 2 tools to help you with all types of cross dissolves and grid creations. Now, I’m not proficient in creating Fuses, so these are all created using standard nodes (but with a fairly heavy use of expressions), turned into easy-to-use macros. Downside is that the speed (especially the Block Dissolve) leaves a bit to be desired!

BLOCK RESOLVE TOOL

The block-y parts of the intro? That’d be a Block Dissolve type tool. I created something to make things easier.

The block resolve tool essentially creates a matte that you can pipe into a merge node (as the mask). Underneath the hood it actually uses a 2D Particle System (with some heavy use of the pCustom tool!). Whilst very flexible, the downside is that it can be slow at times. You can specify the number of rows and columns (i.e. “block size), duration, color and even direction. In the latter case, you can also specify a “spread”. Out of the box it works left-to-right, but by simply adding a transform you can of course mirror it. There are presets built-in (s1-s6, via the standard GUI).

GRID MAKER

Yeh, but, there’s this nice grid? So, there is: just pipe in an instance of the “Grid Maker” and you are on your way. 

The grid tool creates a…. grid. Funnily enough. You can specify image size, rows, columns, thickness, and various other things. Very straightforward to use. This macro actually makes use of a 3D Plane set to wireframe, an erode/dilate node and a camera. Note that this one requires OpenGL.

 

INSTALLING

Download the file from here (click the text below, not the download button)

 

Blackmagic Fusion/Davinci Resolve – Tools to re-create Suits intro (Block Resolve and Grid Maker)

 

Locate the ZIP File on our computer. It will contain 3 files:

• Block_Dissolve_V10.setting (the Block Resolve Macro)
• Grid_Maker_V4.setting (the Grid Maker Macro)
• example comp.comp (a simple example comp for Fusion or Davinci Resolve 15)

First install the macros as per below, then open the example comp in either Fusion (my recommendation) or in Resolve. I will tell you more about how to use it in Resolve in the upcoming tutorial!

You will need to copy these “settings” files (macros) to your macros folder. On my Windows 10 installation this is at:

For Fusion 9:

<DRIVE>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\Fusion\Macros

For Resolve 15:

<DRIVE:>\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Fusion\Macros

 

You may need to tick “Hidden Items” in the View tab of the Explorer to be able to access this folder.

I put together a little demo on something I’ve been working on: an easy or at least easier) way to animate cubes. Animate, as in: rolling cubes over a surface. You may have noticed that standard rotation doesn’t quite work out, and also that the rotation order becomes hugely important. My method doesn’t alleviate all issues, but does certainly make it easier to put some cool rolling cube animations together. If there’s enough interest (leave a comment here or on Youtube), I’ll make a template available and will do a short tutorial.