Resolve Fusion/Particles

One of the things that brought to me Davinci Resolve is the ability to do "Particles". I am exploring it now, having gained some quick familiarity with the general navigation and doing basic things on resolve.

I am always eager to pick and ride on other's learning and wisdom and so I am posting this for a specific exercise. I am trying to use Resolve and see whether I can recreate a Video that I already created using iPad/iMovie.

At the end is a video I uploaded recently (I created this for my 4 year old granddaughter, when the comet was here). It is called Symphonic Bihag: Sparking Dancing Comets.

Honestly, I have no hidden agenda to publicize it and get you to watch the video.

My interest is for you to focus only on how I used free iPad app called "ION" for creating the Particles and getting them to appear as if they are dancing to the music.

Any tips/thoughts on how I may create this on Resolve, and where will I reach cliffs, if any.

So far..

I have created a fusion composition with a Particle Emitter - generating blobs with variations in color, velocity, orientation etc. Works nicely.

I have installed Reactor set so I can use Music Audio to transform properties of some Fusion Object (so far I have done that to an image).

I do not see any Position Parameters for Emitters in the Inspector -- to be able to move and rotate the emitters across the space. Simple keyframing or Transforming Through Audio. Am I missing something?

What kind of particle nodes and physics does Resolve Support? (in Free Version and Pro Version)
In ION there are emitters, attractors [gravity] and repellers [magnetic fields] - are there any such building/behavioral blocks? and/or whether they can be built out of the basic ones?

Any tips, even hand waving, would be appreciated.
If there is a sample project -- nothing like it.

Thanks in advance

SR.

Here's a great video which will introduce you to the pCustom tool, with which you can get even more control over particles and do some really awesome things:

What kind of particle nodes and physics does Resolve Support? (in Free Version and Pro Version)
In ION there are emitters, attractors [gravity] and repellers [magnetic fields] - are there any such building/behavioral blocks? and/or whether they can be built out of the basic ones?

I have almost no experience on using particles, but from watching some tutorials I know there's tools such as pForce, pDirectionalForce, pTurbulence, pBounce and others which can be found in the Tools -> Particles section. As well as pCustom already mentioned, which is especially powerful.

Here's a couple of videos that do more advanced things with particles, using image-based and 3D-based particles:

There are a many more particle tutorials on YouTube, but I mention those two as I know they show more advanced techniques, such as using pDirectionalForce and pFriction, as well as image and 3D particles as mentioned.

Tom a la The Bloke

Quite exciting to see your notes and these links.
Puts me on a productive path to ramp up.
Thanks a Million for these.

br Sri.

I'm going to shamelessly plug my own video as I think you could profit from it, too.

These are all examples using the pCustom tools to create many different effects.
And they are explained (with comp files to download) here:
https://noahhaehnel.com/blog/pcustom-examples/

You can find several examples for particle systems right in Resolve. Open the Effects Library > Templates > Particles, and drag one of the templates into the Flow view.

They should come in as groups, so you can double-click the node that appears and see the tools used to construct the effect.

You can animate an emitter's location using the controls in the Region tab of the pEmitter node.

Noah thanks for the share. There is absolutely no shame in sharing your wisdom and insights through your creations. Welcome it wholeheartedly. br Sri.

Brian thanks for the additional pointers. I am already exploring them.
I just seem to be getting bogged down by "nasty" surprises which I do not yet know how to resolve.

The distinction between the Slow Rendering/Response and something amiss - seems to be very blurry.

While working on particles, Resolve Crashed. That was OK.
But I could not start it again at all - do not know why, and where/how it remembers and refuses to start.

I had to restart windows (losing a lot of other long running active context) and was relieved that it started. (and I did not have to uninstall and reinstall).

br Sri.

Sometimes when resolve crashes there is a background process still going. If that happens you can't start resolve. You can either restart the computer or in the Taskmanager search for the resolve task and kill it. Then it should start again without having to restart the whole computer.

When you're doing a lot of Fusion stuff, it might be easier to use Fusion 16 Standalone (the paid version) or the free Fusion 9 Standalone. You won't miss out on much (and nothing particle related) while getting a software that is much more stable.

Edit: Adding to that. With VFX connect it's pretty easy to roundtrip from resolve to Fusion if you're worried about missing the comfort of having everything in one software.

+1 to using standalone Fusion 9.0.2 or Fusion Studio 16.2.4.

The benefits are significant:
1. Generally more stable, as Noah said

2. Can access more system RAM, both because you don't have Resolve open using up some, and because Fusion's preferences let you allocate up to 100% of system RAM, where Resolve's preferences bizarrely limit you to allocating no more than 75% in total to Resolve, and only 56% to Fusion.

I have 48GB RAM. My Fusion Studio settings allocate 43GB to Fusion, and I could go to 48GB if I wanted:


Resolve settings only allow me to allocate 36GB to Resolve, 27GB of which goes to Fusion:


This is really stupid and really annoys me. I don't understand why they set such low limits for Resolve as a whole. It's especially frustrating on macOS, which has the ability to compress system RAM that's not being actively used, meaning it's OK to give an app like Fusion nearly 100% of system RAM, because the OS will compress the RAM of background and less-important foreground tasks.

3. Much more flexible UI. Especially in Fusion 9.0.2 which has a fantastic, fully-customisable UI. Fusion Studio 16 sadly lost a number of great customisation features, or at least they're not longer fully supported. But it is still possible to customise the Fusion Studio 16 UI to some extent, and even more if you hack about a bit.

Here's my UI in Fusion Studio 16 (click for larger)


I've got rid of the Inspector on the far right, and put resizeable panes for Tools and Modifiers in the bottom left, where it's much easier for me to read and use them (my monitor is 4K and 40", and I sit closer to the left edge of it, so I don't like having important info on the far right of the screen.)

Then my left viewer and main flow view are both tabbed, with the option to have a Spline Editor in either, and/or a second Flow in the top left if I want, and view a Timeline in place of the main flow. I also have a second Tools pane in case I want to pin a control and view two side-by-side, and that's tabbed with my Console. Below that is a small extra Modifiers pane, again so I can pin a particular modifier there. All those panes can be maximised with F4 if I need to see them larger.

I like this layout so much more than the layout in Resolve, or the default Fusion Studio layout. In Resolve's Fusion page you can't even expand the size of the Inspector beyond a certain size!

For more info on how to make more advanced Fusion Studio 16 UI layouts like that, see this thread on We Suck Less: Creating layout presets for Fusion 16. Unfortunately as I mentioned this is not fully supported, and there are bugs with using a layout like this in Fusion Studio 16. The main result of this is that I have to re-apply the layout every time I re-open a comp. But with a hotkey assigned this only takes 10 seconds.

4. Network rendering. If you get a Fusion Studio license dongle (which incidentally also allows use of Resolve Studio, giving you two software for the price of one), you can then run unlimited Fusion Render Nodes on other machines on the same network.

The 3D comp I'm currently working on renders at 3.2 seconds a frame, and I have 36,000 frames to render. It would take 32 hours using my aging main workstation alone. But when I render it on my main workstation + my secondary (lower spec) workstation + a Virtual Machine on my home server, this time is reduced to 10 hours, which is far more acceptable. The server doesn't even have a GPU, but as I'm using the software renderer it still performs quite well, as it has more RAM and CPU cores than my main workstation.

Network rendering requires that you render to an image sequence like EXR, but that's quite a good practice anyway because it allows you to easily re-render small portions of it, and to resume from where you left off if/when you get a crash. I wasted so much time rendering MOV files in Resolve, only to find that it had crashed after 8 hours and I had to start again from the beginning. So I always use EXR with Fusion now, both standalone and in Resolve.

I really love this feature, and while DaVinci Resolve does have network rendering too, which is a nice feature, it does not support simultaneous rendering of the same timeline/composition.

TLDR: Fusion standalone is a big step up from Resolve's Fusion page in many respects. Even if you want to make use of timeline material in Resolve, eg using Adjustment Clips and Fusion Clips (which are great features), it can still save you a lot of time to design your comp in Fusion standalone, then copy it back to Resolve only for the final rendering.

Noah i watched your particles video. Excellent. I do not have them running in my environment yet. But ideas you have demonstrated are exciting and just what I needed to get going. Br Sri.

I'm happy they inspire you! Feel free to use the comments on my website if you encounter any issues. And if you get the chance to upload something you've made, I would love to see it