Hey there good people, my name is Scott and you are watching Sword & Shield Studio. Right
now we are going to learn how to use the Perturb Modifier in DaVinci Resolve Fusion to get
some semi-randomized movement without using manual keyframes. Now this works similarly
to the Wiggle Expression in Adobe After Effects so if you're familiar with that you already
know how useful a tool like this can be. Let's see how we can use it. Okay, so here I am
on the Fusion page within Resolve where I built this Fusion Composition without any
kind of movement happening. We have two background nodes merged together, a white and a black.
And the white background node is masked out to the shape of a circle using the ellipse
node and merged to both backgrounds is a bat silhouette, because why not? I will include
a link to this project archive in the video description if you want to follow along using
this example. Say we want to use the perturb modifier to introduce some random movement
to the white circle to this composition to give it a sort of searching spotlight effect.
In order to do that, I will left click the ellipse node that is creating the mask for
the white background since that is the element that I want to move. Now we want to animate
the center value that determines the ellipse's position. So in order to do that go to your
inspector and right click the diamond keyframe to the right of the 'center' value and in
the drop down hit 'Modify with' and click 'perturb'. If we play this back you can see
what the default behavior of the perturb modifier looks like. It pushes the ellipse along the
x and y axis with an eased curving motion and ultimately gravitates at some point back
to the center. You can change how the modifier acts by left clicking the modifiers tab at
the top of the inspector here and make sure you still have that ellipse node still selected
for this to show up. Here we have a number of different options. First is the value for
the x and y axis. I'm going to pause this here. This determines the point at which the
perturb modifier gravitates towards. So since this is set at 0.5 for both X and Y the perturb
will gravitate towards the very center of this composition. That's what we want in this
case so I'm going to leave those values alone. The X and Y scale options will determine the
maximum range for the perturb modifier for that axis. If I set the Y scale to '0' for
instance, if I drag that all the way down and play this back you'll see there is no
movement along the Y axis anymore, it only moves horizontally across the X axis. If I
increase the scale of the X axis you will see there is more range of motion, the spotlight,
the circle goes further from the center then it would if the value were lower. I'm going
to reset these values to 1 each. Next we have the random seed which feeds random numbers
into the perturb modifier based on a seed number you place here. This is a great way
to introduce some variety if you have multiple perturb modifiers going on in your animation.
You can either input your own random seed manually here or hit the 'reseed' button until
you have an effect that you like. The last three options affect the behavior of the modifier
and are relatively self-explanitory. I will keep the animation playing back so you can
see these change in real time. Strength determines how strong the movement is with the modifier.
If I increase the strength you can see the ellipse deviates much further from the center.
The wobble value will add greater turbulence depending on the value you set here. If I
increase the wobble a good amount, you can see the animation becomes much more frantic
and random and wobbles around the curves more frequently. And last we have speed, which
determines the speed of the animation obviously. And you see if we increase that we can really
create a frantic searching spotlight. And of course if you were creating this specific
animation effect you wouldn't want that, you'd probably lower the speed here. But generally
the higher the value for the speed option, the quicker the motions. That does it for
this tutorial. As you can see the perturb modifier is a really useful tool within Fusion
that allows you to introduce some seemingly randomized movement to your animation without
using manual keyframes. Using this modifier you can also affect size, color, or any other
value that can be affected by an expression within Fusion. If you learned something watching
this video, please consider subscribing to the channel where I upload a video just like
this one every week. Keep in mind, however, my schedule may be impacted as I'm in the
middle of a large move, however I'll try to get back to streaming more and giving you
guys some more great DaVinci Resolve content. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.