Hey there good people, my name is Scott and you are watching Sword & Shield Studio. Right now
we are going to learn about the Animation Curves Modifier in DaVinci Resolve 17, or Anim Curves for
short, which allows you to adjust the timing, intensity and acceleration of your animations
without having to utilize or manually adjust Splines or Keyframes. This means
you can make one animation that is fully adjustable and works across every frame rate.
This is one of my favorite new features in DaVinci Resolve 17 so let's see how we can
get to it and then I will show you a few ways you can use it in your own animations.
Okay, as an example for this tutorial I have prepared a simple Fusion composition with a
blue background node masked with an ellipse here,
laid over a black background node with a merge. Say I want this blue ellipse to scale up over the
entire time of the composition until it reaches the size it is now which is 0.5 by 0.5 . This type
of animation is simple enough to achieve on its own with a few keyframes. However, if you know you
are going to adjust something later or bring this into another project with a different frame rate
you might save yourself some time by utilizing the Anim Curves modifier instead.
Okay, so let us see how we can get to and use the Anim Curves Modifier. Since we are modifying the
scale of the ellipse mask for the blue background node I will left click the ellipse mask in my
node tree to select it. I will go up to the top right to my inspector, left click to expand that
and I will right click the Keyframe icon to the right of my 'Width' value and in the drop down
go to 'Modify with' and hit 'Anim Curves' and I will do the same thing with the Height. As
you can see at the very end of the animation we have a value of '2.0'. If I play this back
you see that the ellipse expands to 2.0 over the entire time of the composition. Why is that?
That is the default value in our modifier. So to get to the Anim Curves modifier at
the top of your inspector left click your 'Modifiers' tab here.
And you see we have 'Anim Curves' for both Width and Height which I will go ahead and
pin by left clicking the pin icon for both and double click width to expand it.
Under our scaling options the default value for 'Scale' is 2.0 so I want to change that to '0.5'
for both. And at this point you do have the option if you want your animation to begin
at another point other than 0 you can change the 'Offset' value. You can see that is changing the
'Width' value at the beginning of the animation. I am going to leave it at 0 for our example here.
Next, we have our Timing options. Time Scale will adjust the quickness of the animation. Basically,
the higher the number the quicker the animation. So if I increase the Time Scale for the Width
you can see that the Width is increasing faster than the height until it reaches 0.5.
If I decrease it below 1 the Width will increase slower than the Height.
I am just going to keep it at 1.0. If you want your animation to begin at another
time other than 0, Time Offset will allow you quicken or delay the beginning of an animation.
A higher number will delay it, a negative number or fraction will begin the animation sooner. Last,
we will adjust our curve controls. If you are creating a standalone animation you want to select
'Duration' for your source. If you are creating a Transition you want to choose 'Transition' here.
Since this is a standalone animation I will choose 'Duration'. Where it says 'Curve'
our default curve is linear meaning the values change equally in a straight line so-to-speak
over the course of the entire composition as we are seeing this ellipse expand here.
If we want this to ease at a certain point we can either create our own custom spline by choosing
'Custom' here or choosing from a variety of preset easing option which I will do here by
selecting 'Easing' in both Width and Height. I am just going to select a smooth Sine wave curve
for both of these values. As you can see, as the ellipse expands it slows down in the beginning and
end and kind of smooths out our transition. If we want to mirror our animation we just
have to select the Mirror option for both Width and Height and you can see at the very center
of the composition is when the Scale reaches its peak and then it mirrors back to 0 towards the
end. We can invert this simply by checking the 'Invert' option and it does the exact opposite.
But I am going to uncheck these so we can get our original concept of expanding the ellipse
over the entire time of the composition here. Okay good, so the ellipse does what we want it to do
and it did not take much effort. If we want we can bring this composition into a timeline on
the edit page as I have done here and adjust the clip. So right now you see it expands
to its full size over about 2.5 seconds. I can expand this clip to about 4 seconds
and you see the animation has adjusted to expand. You see I got a weird little flashing error there
which you may have. If your animation experiences problems when you stretch it on the timeline,
simply open it in the Fusion Page again, go into your ellipse node. Uncheck
and Re-Check 'Solid' and go back to the Edit Page and you can see it's been fixed. This is probably
an early glitch with the Anim Curves modifier, if you know more about it please let me know in
the comments. Well that does it for this tutorial. As you can see, the Anim Curves modifier is a very
flexible way to animate if you know you are going to modify anything with your animation composition
at a later time. It takes all the guess work out of changing between different frame rates
and it is especially useful for utilizing the new Fusion FX templates for creating transition like
I did in the video up here. But that does it for me. As always, thank you for watching this video.
I hope you found it helpful. If you did, please consider subscribing to the channel
where I upload weekly DaVinci Resolve videos. Thanks for watching, I will see you next time.