Ms. Marvel Wall Animations | Tutorial | DaVinci Resolve 17 *Free* Edition

In this tutorial, we'll look at one way to pull off the wall animations from episode 1 of Ms. Marvel inside of DaVinci Resolve, for free! Below you’ll find an auto-generated transcript of this tutorial.

hey guy

this is chris from swatara media i was

recently watching the first episode of

miss marvel

and as i was watching them bike around

jersey city with those cool animations

on the walls i thought to myself

i know how to do at least half of that

effect i can get things to stick to all

sorts of surfaces

but i'm not very good at 2d comic book

animation so instead i grabbed some

stock animation and decided to make this

tutorial

today we'll be making this

[Music]

you may be thinking to yourself i bet

you use davinci resolve studio or mocha

or nuke or flame or something paid to do

that no no

i used only the free features of resolve

and fusion if you're interested in

knowing how keep watching and as always

subscribe if you want but also feel free

to comment below with any ideas i might

have missed for this particular video i

did end up using an element from an

unnamed stock video site that is not

sponsoring this video

but i've left a link in the description

below to a list of old cartoons that

have entered the public domain i've also

included a link to the base video clip

you see here which i'm pretty sure i got

from pexels

let's hope so so first of all let's put

on our vfx detective hats and figure out

[Music]

more than likely their approach would

have involved a 3d camera solve

they would have first made garbage mats

around kamala and her friend whose name

i can't remember in addition to anyone

and anything that has motion

when you use a 3d camera tracker

anything that's not stationary can mess

with the math used to recreate how the

camera was moving in 3d space

the scene is then covered in tracking

markers which are then used to figure

out the camera's motion

a 360 degree high dynamic range image of

the scene would have also been captured

in order to realistically light the

environment

and their murals the swede animations

themselves would then be projected onto

geometry in the scene probably planes

and placed where the walls are finally

the 3d assets would be composited into

the scene with anything including the

animation painstakingly rotoscoped out

by a team of brave individuals that

sounds like a lot what about a simpler

way here is

the planar tracker we're going to do a

planar track on the wall where we'd like

to place our cool animation and then

rotoscope anything that occludes it no

fuss

all of this is being done with the free

version of davinci resolve

[Music]

alright so let's go ahead and get

started now i don't suspect this is

going to be a very long

tutorial as you can probably see by the

node tree down here there isn't a whole

lot going on to make this happen now of

course

if you decided to be a little bit more

adventurous

and kind of add

multiple murals or

more complex elements and things like

that

it could end up being you know a little

bit more complicated but

honestly this is very hard to set up

so let's go ahead and learn how to do it

so first we'll go kind of go through all

these nodes here now of course we have

our media in coming in this is funneling

into a planar tracker that's using the

corner pin operation you see if i

move this here

kind of throws it all out of whack we

don't want to do that though so we'll

undo

and then this footage here

this is the original footage

i have it masked with a rectangle just

so that way it's got an alpha on the

background that there's nothing else

sticking out

as you can see there's a

very thin

border between

this wall and the outside i also wasn't

crazy about how fast it was originally

so i went ahead and decided to slow it

down a bit

i think it was by

yeah 0.3

but that's obviously

uh very optional

we also have a motion blur here that may

or may not be doing anything i just

wanted a little bit of a

almost like a fade effect between

the different animation frames but i

don't think that's actually doing much

and then to kind of blend it into the

scene

it was a little bit more washed out so

you always want to make sure that your

elements that you're

integrating into your scenes match the

uh the tone and hue and all that of the

scene that you're putting it in in this

case it's just a bunch of random paint

so

i i didn't take a whole lot of time to

do that i think i just

let's see

i turned down the saturation and

raise the lift a little so you know

minor minor transformations and one of

the things that always sells effects

is you want to kind of zoom in and see

okay how in focus is this because you

don't have something that you're putting

in that's super super sharp and super in

focus so i went ahead and blurred

the edges a little bit

uh just to make sure that

this looks like it belongs in the scene

all right and then of course that's like

i said funneling into a plane into a

planer tracker where it's being

projected into this

rectangle here

now this is where the real fun happens

so

up here are all the masks

oops i'm actually disconnecting them

there we go

so these masks here

all they do are simple

roto shapes

that cut out the parts that we don't

want

this mural to be on and that's the part

i was talking about where they

painstakingly went through and rotated

everything

that is that step i'm not going to bore

you with that i have a video on it that

i just made actually

and i'll put it in the little like

thingy that pops up up here in this area

or so so if you want to

learn how i am

rotoing in here i'm actually using the

same

technique as i talked about in that

video where i've

attached all these masks to a planar

transform node that i got from here so

that way those masks are kind of moving

along with

the with the video so that way you don't

have to spend as much time rotating it's

a little bit faster and luckily these

for the most part are all like flat

shapes

and they have just a little slight uh

soft edge on it

just to make everything blend real nice

then of course that's being merged these

two things are being merged this

uh collection of masks here is being

used as the mask for this merge node

so that way

they come together everything's cut out

and just the right way

that's an overview of how we did it so

let's do it let's do it again

let's do it

just like that look at that we're right

back at the beginning so the first thing

that i like to do of course is let's

look at this footage and

for the most part

the wall

remains

completely visible

so we don't have to worry too much about

where we put our

planar track so let's create and add a

planar tracker

and we'll funnel that in i'm actually

going to put that up here this time

and we want to make sure that

perspective is turned on because we it's

slight but we do have a little bit of a

perspective shift in here

and really any frame will do so i'm

going to use let's see around frame 67

and set that as the reference frame and

then we're going to make like i said

make sure perspective is

checked let's just draw ourselves

a square

in here where it won't become occluded

or go out of frame

and we'll just track

that's looking solid

and we'll we can

either go to the reference frame or just

hit go and then we'll track the other

direction

so let's see how that's looking

you always want to review the track make

sure it's looking good

i can kind of get in close

there might be a little

tiny bit of drift

but i think we're okay

you can always do it again try different

spots

but i think in this case we should be

good

so now we'll bring in our footage and

actually this time i'm going to use the

the rejected animation

the one that i decided not to go with

let's take a look here

that's actually pretty nifty i didn't

like how it kind of uh

it's a little too jittery it made it

look like i had done something wrong

now fusion tends to like it when you um

work on things all in the same

resolution so i'm just going to grab a

quick resize node

and make sure that that's the same

resolution

as the rest of our video cool

now what we want to do

there's other stuff that we can do to

our footage like color correcting it and

all that but we'll go ahead and

connect it to our

corner pin image this green button up

here

and while we're at it we'll go ahead and

add our merge node

we're going to plug the output of the

planar tracker into the foreground and

now we'll switch from track

to our corner pin

now of course

that is just not gonna do

so what we can do is grab these

sides here

and we want to try to line them up

to the perspective

of the rest of the video

now one of the things that i like to do

to make this a little easier is just go

to the

merge node and turn down the blend

so what i'll do is line it up to very

obvious

points

of perspective

and let's go ahead and scrub through and

see how that's looking

track wise it's holding on quite nicely

cool

and as far as like the

core

competencies of um doing this sort of

like planar track

and putting on the mural this is like

the

like 90 90 of it

so that is tracked to where it needs to

be and the only thing that's left is

actually to

uh mask it out properly

now just like on those like cooking

shows they're not going to wait around

for the cake to bake they already have

the cake ready to go

right here where is it there we go i've

copied the scene masks now

for

now since those scene masks were um

animated based on the previous

track that i had done i'm going to copy

my planner track down here

now

what you'd want to do of course and like

i said i mentioned in the other video

but we want to grab our planer tracker

switch over to track for a second create

a plane or transform

[Music]

and then switch it back to corner pin

and that planar transform will transform

these masks and make it a lot faster to

actually

rotate these shapes here so

you would want to of course

and

artistic flair and stuff but i went

around

anything that wasn't on this plane here

anything that like this ladder i think

it's a ladder looks like a ladder for a

giant

and then of course

down here and the person's face

and body and all that

so if i go in here and i

once i have all my masks

let me go ahead and put that in the

input of the planar transform

and funnel that into the mask of the

merge

oh my god oh my god oh my god no it's

okay all we need to do

is come in here

where was it where was it

oh yeah in the merge node we just apply

mask inverted

and look at that

we'll go ahead and

put this blend up now that is crazy

because what we haven't done is the

secret sauce

is just the uh overlay blend mode

and drop the opacity a little bit now it

kind of takes on the texture

of the wall

now one thing to keep in mind when

you're looking for animations to use in

this one of the things that

really sold those is they're all 2d

and the animations in the show were just

very well done

it's obvious that

the artists who created those animations

were working off of this footage and

they were integrating it beautifully

into

uh the environment

but it's the same concept we're just

projecting

some sort of animation onto the wall

now of course

um

i feel like it looks a little too it's

definitely a little too saturated

probably won't look right once we color

correct it because all of these

colors will get a whole lot more boosted

so as i had done before

and this is kind of to taste

we want to also look at shadows and

things and make sure that the shadows on

the

image that we're putting in match the

shadows of the ground

this can't be any darker than these

darkest shadows here

and especially if we zoom out and we

blur our eyes a little bit

it's looking pretty decent

but as you can see because of the

planar track that we did

i have very few keyframes here

now that is also helped by the fact that

the camera itself doesn't move very much

but

doing that

planar track first and then rotoscoping

definitely saves you a whole bunch of

time

so i'll just kind of leave this where it

is and we'll hop over to the color page

where

um

so this is still using the media out for

my other one but it's a very simple

grade there's not a whole

oops

it's not very impressive um it only took

like five minutes to like

uh you know

add contrast give it that kind of like

blue look

desaturate the shadows a bit

i also did a

a power window track on the

window there just to bring down

get some more of the detail back

in the clouds

that is how i almost feel like i'm

missing something but honestly that is

it we use the corner pin and adjust it

appropriately so it matches the

perspective of whatever surface we're

trying to put

our

image on and honestly the uh

the the part that takes the most time is

the roto

which is

oh so often the case

and of course you know i'm not going to

make you sit through all the rotoscoping

but luckily i actually lucked out i

didn't try to pick somebody who's

wearing a beanie

but it did and you know what that just

helps out

so much when it comes to rotoscoping

everybody should always be wearing hats

and life just becomes so much easier

so yeah like i said i knew this would be

kind of a quick one

i'm pretty sure you guys have gotten the

gist of this so yeah if there's any

details

i might have missed that you wished i

had gone over just leave a comment

but it is a very simple process and

of course

on the actual show

it is very likely that they're using a

much uh

more intense process

using that 3d camera solve rather than a

planar tracker which

planar trackers do an excellent job

um it might have just been

it might have just been

planar tracks

but

but i don't see marvel you know taking

the easy way out but i could be wrong

they could have actually used just

plainer tracks just kind of like how we

did it but a little bit more

intense because they have like a million

things you need to roto the only thing

that makes me suspicious is at the end

of that scene there's a part where one

of the

uh

one of the animations on the wall kind

of falls off and hits a van

and it really did look like

like a piece of geometry some 3d

geometry that actually like they did

like a

like a cloth simulation or something

like that on or just hand animated it

because it was pretty simple

so i don't know um that part in

particular makes me think it was a 3d

camera soft because

if you needed to integrate anything any

actual 3d elements into it you would

have already have that 3d camera saw

from the match movers they would have

already had that

so you know

i guess we'll have to just wait for the

vfx pretense

miss marvel

but anywho you know take this

information and go out and impress your

friends and get lots of likes and stuff

on instagram go conquer the world with

your cool vfx and if there's any other

techniques that you'd like me to stumble

through or even see if there's a way to

do

certain things inside of the free

version of resolve just let me know but

until next time be good to each other

and take care

[Music]

you