Transcripts
1. Neon Light Effect Course Intro: Hi, I'm Devin charge.
My profession. I'm an engineer, but I've
been using DaVinci Resolve extensively for
editing purposes, for projects like these. Lately, I've also been using those same skills for
prediction mapping, where you take your
video editing skills and applied to holiday card and
achieve projects like this. You know, the safety follower you join along on this journey and we learned a
bunch of cool stuff. Let's explore the effect
we are going to learn. Now, prediction mapping
is pretty cool and fancy, but in case you're missing your regular or
Christmas lights, that's a fun way
you can achieve it. In fact, in the past, I were to Christmas lights using images I found on
a Best Buy site. They've worked out
decently well. Actually. I'll be attaching those images as
part of the lesson. So in case you wanted
to do the same, feel free to do so. But in case you
wanted to achieve some advanced effects
and animations, these images get pretty tiresome and you
might hate your life. So it's more efficient to
create this light things completely in software
rather than using pictures. To learn this fun effects, come on over and
jump into the code. See you there.
2. Neon Course 1: To create the effect
that we saw with the lighting, first
and foremost, what we need is the mask
of the house. Here it is. This is the mask of my house. And as usual, for
advanced effects, we'll jump into fusion. Next, what we wanna
do is we want to mask out the shape that
we want the light to travel and make sure that none
of the nodes are selected, hit a blank space and
then hit polygon. In this case, you don't
want to hit B spline curve. B spline will give
you a curved edges. Polygon will give
you straight edges easily match your house. So let me start
drawing the mask. I'm just going to draw it over this particular
house right here. Make sure you draw
the polygon in the exact sequence that you
want the light to travel. Because the way you're
going to draw it is the exact part that the light is going to
follow. So let's start. For the sake of the tutorial, I'm not going to go into all
these details and fences, but essentially, I'm going to cover the major
areas of the house. And in order to give
a better illusion, do make sure to go into the inner surfaces
of the house too, so that lighting has
some depth to it rather than just doing the windows
or the front surfaces. And yeah, you can create multiple different
combinations as you wish. So as you see, I'm going
on the inner surfaces. I'm just going to close my mask. At this particular point. I had the shape in which I
want the light to travel. I've got this. Next. I want to give a color. So the easiest way to do it, It's just use background. He has a background node. I'm going to use
this mass that I created applied to our
background master, always apply to the
blue colored input. Now, I kinda don't
need the media. And as of now, so let me
see what this looks like. I'm going to disconnect
the media and just take the background
and put it on here. So this is what it looks
like at the moment. What I need is I don't
need the mass to be solid. All I need is the line. I'm going to uncheck solid. So that way I have a line and next I'm going to increase
the width of the mask. This width would define how thick your light
ray is going to be. And you can see that all
it is doing is showing the black background
through the mask. Now you want to change the
black color to something like a blue only do is change
the color right here. And I hit Okay, so essentially
you have blue light. And just for
illustration purposes, you don't have to do
this and just doing this for the tutorial so you have a better grasp on
what's going on. I'm just going to get a
merge node and put media in, which is our actual
mass on the background. And then I'm going to so
you don't have to do this. The only reason I'm doing
this is so that you guys have a reference as to what the
light is going to look like. This is it, this is what
our light looks like. As of now. It looks
like glow color. It does not really
look like light. So we want to give it an effect. Control Space. Soft glow. This is what we need. This node adds the glow that
we are looking for. An easy way to add nodes to the node tree is click
your node, hit Shift. And once you hover,
you'll see that the wires change color. That's when you let go. That's it. So now that you see the light has some
sort of glow to it. There's a bunch of
settings you can do here. You can change the gain, it's going to look different. So this is what it was. Now with the soft glow, you get a bit of a light. And to be honest,
I think I need to change the color.
Let's say orange. Let me do orange. Personally, I feel this
light is way too thick. So I'm going to come
back to Polygon and reduce the border width
to something more realistic. There we go. I think this
looks pretty decent. Now you can play with
the threshold and the gain settings
to your optimum like tiny pet peeves and
mistakes that I see here is, for example, when I cross
this line right here, it's kinda going
through the front. And I want to make it seem like this particular light
stream is on the back. So I'm going to cut
this right off. In order to do that, I'm going to need
another polygon. I'll make sure
nothing selected hit polygon mask right here. Okay, so now that we
have this new polygon, that is this portion, what I'm gonna do is just insert this in-between our existing
polygon and the background. And then in case this is
not selected, hit Subtract. So basically what I'm doing is this is being
subtracted from here. And I don't want it to
subtract all the way. So I'm just going to tweak
this a little bit right here. So that way I have
exactly what I need. That's the first polygon. I'm going to reduce the
width even further, so it looks even more realistic. There we go. So we have a house
with glowing lights. Plus we're not done yet. Ideally, we'd be removing this background
because we don't want a projector to be protecting white light all over the place. All we want is the
border, not the house. So ideally when we project, we won't have this
thing right here. We won't have the merge
node. Give me a second. So ideally what we'd
have is just this. So this is what will have, will, I'll take out the
media in and the merge because we don't want to
project our house on a house. We don't want white
light to be protected. So everything else
will be black. And this is the only
light that will be protected now as to
create a motion. So this can be created
by our polygon. So this polygon right
here has the shape. What we are going to be playing with is position and length. So give you a quick just length determines how much of the
polygon is going to be late. Now the length is
one. That means the entire thing is
going to be lit. If I change the length to 0.55
of it is going to be lit. So essentially, this defines how long the glowing channels and position defines where
the channel should be. Let's say I just want like 30 per cent of the
polygon to be late. If I change the position, you're essentially moving that 30% at a different
spot in the polygon. So what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to start with 0. And you can have a
uniform length go around. And that looks pretty cool to the effect that
I did in the video. Make sure to be at frame 0, add a keyframe so that
V is the length is 0. And I always like to make sure that the keyframe
has accepted. My polygon length
is 0 at the start. And as I moved
through at the end, I want the polygon to be completely glowing so
that it fills out. So essentially, if all I do is this from frame 0 to frame six, it will fill up the whole thing. But I want to give it a little
more dynamic characters. So that's why I want to change both the length
and the position. So at frame 0, I'm going to have a keyframe
for the position as well. It'll give a more dynamic look. So it's not just like
it's filling up light, it'll feel like it's
moving around as well. So my position is 0 and I'll come all the
way to the very end, have the position updated
all the way to one. So let's check out what this effect looks
like. Right now. You see a ray of light just moving along
as it goes around, the length of the array
increases as well. So we'll jump back to
Edit page and check out what the effect looks
like at the moment. If you see the length of the glowing part is
increasing as it moves along. At finally, at the last frame, it pretty much covers
the entire house. You can render this clip and
then once you rendered it, you can make this longer and shorter if that's what you like, because I feel it's
easier to play with timings once the
clip is rendered, rather than having to deal with frame rate
and all that stuff. Now, if you want to
have more fancy colors, all you need to do is go to background and change the type, let's say from solid
colors to gradient. So here you have to call
us from black to white. Let's say we change our black, select the arrow on the left. We change our black
to orange again. We have orange to white. Then we choose the
ad on the left. And let's make it green. So essentially we have a
gradient going around. So now your light
ray is going to change color as it
moves along the house. And you can have
other patterns too. You can have four corners where you pick four
different colors. I'm just going to be
random right here. And just pick on blue. Because green, I
like green always. Now picker, red, I guess. So essentially, now what
is going to look like? It starts off as orange. There's some green
changes color. And once the whole thing glows, you have different
colors. There you go. So it is pretty straightforward. All you need is a couple of notes to create
this entire effect. And your lighting can
be pretty dynamic. Do let me know for any
questions or concern. Also, if you're looking
for something in particular and just put it in the discussions tab
and I'll make sure to address them as
soon as possible. Thanks guys. Best wishes.
Telwin George
