Over the past three months or so, there have been quite a few very encouraging and exciting developments in the Fusion community. Just in case any of them have been overlooked, I thought I’d take a few minutes out of your day to tell you about them.
The first thing I’d like to point out is the release of Reactor, a package manager for Fusion. Reactor makes it dead easy to find, download and install new tools. My own Glitch Tools are available there, as are several other offerings from Muse VFX.
Some of the items I’m going to talk about through the rest of this post are available through Reactor. It’s a crucial addition to your Fusion install. It’s also been designed with professional networked pipelines in mind, so you can point the repository to a shared location, enabling you to easily manage packages for your entire team. You can set up a private repository hosted locally or make your own branch on Gitlab to add another layer of vetting to the available tools.
Reactor requires Fusion 9.0.2+. For earlier versions of Fusion, you can still download individual Atoms (individual packages) directly from Gitlab.
Krokodove 7.2 at last adds Linux support. The free Krokodove plug-in suite contains over 100 tools mostly geared toward motion graphics production. They’re still useful for visual effects, however. I used the KKD Shape tools recently on an episode of Legion (premiering April 3 on FX—look for a compass needle). Raf continues to add new features to Krokodove and releases them to the Fusion community as an act of love. Since it is a plug-in, it does require Fusion Studio.
Raf also rereleased an older tool called Vlam, which is a Fusion implementation of the Fractal Flame algorithm. I haven’t tried it out yet, but it looks like it produces some cool imagery.
Maxim Seredkin has joined Patreon, offering up some fantastic mograph example comps. He goes by the user name mseredkin on the We Suck Less forums. Check out his work there to see the kinds of things he’s capable of.
And speaking of Patreon, Vito LaManna continues to create some fantastic tutorials and examples on his own page. If you’re not already one of his patrons, I urge you to consider it. Between Maxim and Vito, you’ll can get tons of great advice and inspiration for look development and shading with Fusion’s 3d system.
June Yu has plugged a hole in Fusion’s toolset with the release of a Fractal Noise Fuse with no less than 28 new noise algorithms. He’s asking only $20 on Gumroad for this amazing tool. It’s designed for Fusion 9, but it works in 8 too (except for the About page pop-up window). It is an OpenCL tool, so you’ll need to be sure your graphics card works in OpenCL mode in Fusion. Check it by going to the Preferences > Globals > OpenCL. But as a Fuse, it does work in Fusion Free!
Andrew Hazelden has revived several of the Easter eggs from previous versions of Fusion, including the Magic 8 Ball and Fuzionmonger, and he also uncovered and restored at least one that had apparently either never been activated or nobody had found it before. Those, among some other gems, are available under the Fun category in Reactor.
Andrew has also been thoroughly exploring Fusion’s new UI Manager API and has provided numerous examples for GUI design. Most are simple proof-of-concept widgets, but some are genuinely useful on their own, such as the Fusion Diagnostic Tool and the OFX Blacklist Generator. Those can all be found in Reactor under UI Manager Lua Examples.
Psyop’s Cryptomatte has come to Fusion. Cryptomatte allows you to easily generate mattes for objects in your 3d scene by simply selecting them in the Viewer. Several renderers can create Cryptomatte-compliant renders, including VRay, Houdini’s Mantra, and Arnold.
Once again, Cryptomatte is available in Reactor, and the Reactor installation is much easier than the previous install procedure.
This is just a small sample of the many contributions the community is making to Fusion. More is coming, and the pool of Fusion users is growing every day. I know there’s a lot of complaining out there in forums and on Facebook. The people who are happy and having a good time with Fusion have been a little quieter because we’re all busy making things. I’m looking forward to whatever announcements Blackmagic has in store for us at NAB next week, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Fusion users world-wide produce the rest of this year. 2018 has started with a bang; I think it’s only going to get better from here.
If we’re lucky, maybe I’ll finally finish that book!
