20 hot tips for bmd fusion 9
Master the software and boost your productivity with these top expert tips
Get expert advice from Vito Lamanna on how to boost your productivity and creativity with Fusion
Vito is an Italian artist, born in Germany and now living in Japan. He has been in the CG industry since the pixel graphic era. Vito’s expertise ranges from modelling and animation to concept art, art direction, supervision and compositing. www.con-fusion.net C ompositing is a very powerful process that can really take your imagery to the next level, and is essential for the VFX pipeline. Tasks that may take days to accomplish in 3D can be achieved in only a matter of hours in post.
Although visual effects look incredibly creative, there is an even greater technical aspect to it that is not visible to the eye. This is why many users who come from After Effects will find Fusion to be technically daunting. Fusion is made for technical accuracy. It will not give you a one-button solution. The user has to take the tool as a technical foundation to build upon with their own creativity. Once understood, it will change the way you work and express yourself forever. It will cultivate your creative thinking like you have never imagined.
To help the new user get started, I have put together a large amount of tutorials. You can get all of this content by supporting me on my Patreon page (www.patreon.com/vito).
01 keep your Flow tidy
A nodal-based workflow is highly efficient and fast, but this really depends on you keeping your nodes organised. This is especially important when you continue working on a project weeks later, or when working in a team where someone else has to continue with your flow. Divide everything into logical sections, and assign colours. Hide the instance links with Right-click>show Instance Links. Use the Wireless nodes whenever you can.
04 utilise replicate 3D tool
You probably already know that you can use the Replicate 3D tool to replace particles with any object. But there is another very neat feature. You can actually replace particles with lights using Replicate 3D. Keep in mind that scattering a high amount of lights will cause the renderer to fail, or make processing extremely slow. When using Lights make sure to set the decay type to Quadric. Head to youtu.be/mce3zpg6oyy for extra help.
02 work in FLOAT AND Linear colour space
Fusion uses 16/32-bit colour depth and linear workflows. This is a very technical topic and needs further research from the user. Simply speaking, 16/32-bit float gives you more colours to work with. Working in linear colour space and float is essential as it gives more realistic results with certain effects like bokeh, glow, depth of field, motion blur and directional blur. Keep in mind that 32-bit float needs more processing power and is in most cases overkill.
03 save Versions AND keep clear naming conventions
Sometimes, when I work on a project for too long, it becomes much easier to make mistakes without even noticing, and I can start to make things worse. This is why I save many versions of my work with movie previews that have the same version number associated with the comp file it originates from. By doing so, you can watch the different versions to discover where you went wrong. The nice thing about Fusion is that you can then open that version alongside the newest version, and easily copy and paste nodes from earlier versions into the newest one. Not having a clear naming convention can make this easy step a total nightmare.
05 Double resolution
Render in double or even higher resolution than your final output. When resizing down your image, Fusion will perform sampling which can recover or make unwanted pixels disappear. With tools like Volume Fog, Volume Mask, Ambient Occlusion or even Relighting, this will give you inaccurate edge sampling. Resizing down can help fix those issues almost completely. It is not a technically accurate method, but it can save a lot of time.
06 Do breakouts instead of cache to Disk
A breakout means to save out a sequence from a logical point in your composition, preferably the parts that are render intensive. Saving them out as an EXR sequence will speed up your workflow. Tools like Trails are actually meant to be saved out.
I use the Cache to Disk option only for quick temporary tests as I don’t find it reliable enough. Once I have something I am satisfied with I will write out a sequence.
07 think out of the box, be technically creative
In Fusion, every tool has its purpose, and every tool has been developed for that purpose with technical accuracy. However, that does not mean you have to always stick to that. Sometimes you can achieve unique effects by utilising tools that were meant to be used for totally different purposes. Did you ever think of using Motion Blur to create Volume Rays? Experiment with other creative ways you can use the various tools.
08 Discover Alphamultiply AND ALPHADIVIDE
If you are coming from Adobe After Effects, you might know this as Premultiplication or Straight Alpha. It is essential to understand this at least on a basic level in order to avoid outlines or edge problems when it comes to colour correction. To divide the alpha, you can use the Boolean tool, the Alphadivide Tool, or check Predivide right inside the Color Corrector. To multiply the alpha back, use the Alphamultiply tool, the Boolean tool, or the Mattecontrol tool. You can find a recommended video for this over at: youtube.com/ watch?v=q9c-ulcuvk8.
09 use A Digital pen
Although it is possible to work with the mouse, using a digital pen lets you not only work faster but also to navigate more comfortably. The problem with the mouse is that navigating involves middle and left-click, which is not only hard on your wrists but can lead to accidental node disconnection. Just make sure your pen has two customisable buttons. Additionally, if you are left-handed, you can move and dock your UI control panel to the left side.
10 100 per cent Fusion
Give yourself a challenge by creating something entirely inside Fusion. Create your own render passes using Fusion’s sophisticated 3D system. This will improve your understanding of what to tweak to improve the look. Furthermore, due to Fusion’s 3D limitations, you will find that a simple approach can create great results. Whenever you face a limitation in Fusion, try to figure out how to fake it. Remember these four words: limitation leads to innovation.
11 bitmap Masks
One thing that separates Fusion from other applications is the way it handles masking. Combined with a nodal-based approach, masking in Fusion becomes incredibly powerful. You can derive masks at any point, and combine it with other masks while staying non-destructive. You may notice that sometimes masks are being clipped at the borders – to avoid that, swing over to the Image tab of the Bitmap Mask tool and set the clipping mode to Frame.
12 work with Volume Fog
With the Volume Fog tool, you can create realistic fog inside Fusion in real time. All you need is a World Position pass in 32-bit float, and the original camera. Keep in mind that imported data might need axis conversion due to the different world up axes. Things become really fancy once used with light. Need clouds? Simply hook a Merge3d tool with lights and camera into the Volume Fog tool, add noise, then switch on Lighting.
13 convert perspective to camera
There are two ways to set your camera to match the perspective view. One is to drag and drop the camera directly from the tool panel into the main viewer. This will create a new camera matching the current perspective view. If you already have a camera, but you want to match it to a perspective view, simply rightclick inside the viewer and then choose Camera>copy POV to> Camera. In order for this to work it is necessary to be in a Merge3d which has the Camera already introduced.
14 Link AND Align to objects
In Fusion you can perform an align and link by simply piping your child object to the parent object. As you can see in the screenshot above, I am aligning a sphere to the spotlight. The sphere will then follow the spotlight.
It is important that you keep the sphere’s position offsets to zero. This can be useful if you want to have a light disc at the light’s position for example.
15 colour banding REMOVAL
Every digital artist at some point or another has had a beautiful encounter with banding artefacts. For example, bandings are the individual steps you see in a gradient. It is a miss-assumption that this is due to a low bit depth, as it even occurs when working in 32-bit in linear colour space. It could just be the result of a display phenomenon, or a real colour accuracy issue. Either way, these bandings can be eliminated by introducing a fine noise or dithering.
16 speed up rendering
So you’ve built your own monster workstation, and now you’re waiting for your first Fusion test render. But, despite all that heavenly potential power, your CPU usage is stuck at 30%, while Fusion is struggling to get that bloody frame rendered. You can increase CPU usage by activating Simultaneous branching and increasing the ‘frames at once’ count. Setting it to 10 will render ten frames at once and therefore tickle out most of the CPU.
17 cache on Dedicated ssd
Fusion automatically caches your images and sequences to disk. This happens on the fly. Therefore, the first time you play your sequence, it is slower. Cached frames are indicated by a green line inside the timeline.
In order to speed up caching and your footage loading times, set your cache path to a dedicated SSD drive, from the Path Map menu in Global and Default Settings.
18 speed up preview For Animation Feedback
Sometimes you just want to see the rhythm and timing of the animation, but caching takes a lot of time. You can speed things up substantially by using the Prx (Proxy) button next to the play controls. Deactivating HIQ will speed up the preview even more. As the quality drops drastically, this option is obviously only to be used for animation previews.
Make sure to also keep in mind that some tools like the Directional Blur will look very rough if not in HIQ mode.
19 install reactor
Recently the WSL (We Suck Less) forum members (steakunderwater.com) released a Fusion tool called Reactor. Reactor enables you to install all available tools, fuses and even comp files, sort of like a Content Browser. As a result, searching for tools online becomes a thing of the past. With Reactor, you can also sync your installed fuses and tools across several machines. Head to their website to install it.
20 chromatic Aberration
Computer-generated images can often look artificial. It is very common to use a Chromatic Aberration tool to make an image look more natural and realistic. However, there is the tendency to overuse it. So keep in mind, subtlety goes a long way. The Chromatic effect is also very nice for creating stars or flares.
A recommended tool for Fusion is the Xfchroma Fuse by Stefan Ihringer (available through Reactor). •