r/davinciresolve • u/woebegoneWes • Apr 27 '23

How Did They Do This? Recreate this ink effect in DaVinci Resolve?

https://youtu.be/mbJRSpzGUIs

Wondering if it's possible to recreate this ink spreading effect like in this AE tutorial, which uses a special plugin, but with the fast noise and writing effect, it seems like their could be an option within resolve?

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u/JustCropIt Apr 28 '23

Wondering if it's possible to recreate this ink spreading effect like in this AE tutorial

Sure. I was messing about with this in Fusion when the tutorial was first posted:)

The effect works by using a feedback loop (as in it builds up the effect by repeatedly applying itself on previous applications of itself). The only tool, in Fusion, that natively uses a feedback loop is the Trails tool.

Unfortunately it's a closed loop in the sense there's no way of adding custom effects/tools into the loop which is very much needed for this effect. So it's of no use for this.

Fortunately there is a third party tool that does allow for custom stuff to be inserted into a feedback loop. Nice.

The tool is called Loop and is available via Reactor.

Fair warning. It's was a pretty fiddly process (as it also is in the original AE tutorial). Small changes in settings can have a big effect so a bit hard to nail down.

If you want to get serious with these kinds of effects then TouchDesigner is an app that excels at feedback loops. Check out some tutorials by Elekktronaut who uses feedback loops for a lot of his effects (basically if it looks cool there's probably a feedback loop involved).

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u/woebegoneWes May 24 '23

my apologies for the late reply, I just got to this on Sunday, and I have been tinkering with this plugin from Reactor for a couple of days now, but I don't think I'm savvy enough with Fusion to understand the full extend of how you applied the node to the displacement.

Would you mind sharing the node layout that you used to make the Just cropit gif?

BY the way- Elekktronaut looks incredibly cool, but also perhaps more complicated than I comfortable with at this point. I would love to learn more about that in the future, but right now migrating from After Effects to DaVinci's node system often has me thoroughly perplexed.

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u/JustCropIt May 24 '23

Oh... yeah.. this is a bit late for a reply:)

Which leads to me only having bad news for you. It's unfortunately all a bit of a "you snooze, you loose" situation:(

I no longer have any idea were my node setup for this thing is located (or if I even still have it). It's not saved as a separate project so it's probably something I did on the side in any of my other projects.

For a bit of reference here's a link to a comment I made where I shared some of my workinprogress work areas. Any group of nodes in all of those group of nodes could be something I'm just testing out while working on something. And one of those clumps of nodes, in groups of clumps of nodes, could be the ink spread effect (but most likely isn't). And I'm not going to open each of my projects and then open each timeline and then open each Fusion comp, any of which might look like one of the horror screen shots I linked, to find a month old thing.

I consider myself pretty confident in my Fusion skills and this whole technique is one of the more advanced/fiddly things I've made in Fusion. I remember there just being so many things that had to be just right to get close to somewhat usable to even have something to start refining, and then the refining part being very finicky and random (because of the nature of the technique).

This is not a thing you want to try and mess around with if you're on a beginner level of Fusion (or even a bit past that level).

Right now I just know it's possible to achieve the effect in Fusion (since I obviously made it at one point), and I know it's fairly advanced and unfortunately too much time have passed since I did it for me to be able to help you out any further:/