How to Add Logos To Warped Surfaces in DaVinci Resolve
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How to Add Logos To Warped Surfaces in DaVinci Resolve - In this video, Will teaches you how to use DaVinci Resolve to track and add logos or images to warped surfaces such as adding a design logo to a shirt that is not perfectly flat.
In this DaVinci Resolve tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to add graphics to warped surfaces. Most of the time, you have flat surfaces like the side of a building, but every now and then, you need to figure out how to put something on like a t-shirt or a flag. So, this Resolve feature will likely come in handy and help make your composites look more realistic. If you're new here, we have over 200 videography-related videos, lots of content for you to learn from, and if you want to know any of the music or the equipment we use to make our videos, all links are in the description. Let's jump in.
With DaVinci Resolve open, I have a clip loaded in the timeline. We're going to head over to the color page. Up here, where it says effects, we'll make sure that is open, and we will scroll down all the way to the bottom to the Resolve effects transform area. In here, you will see the surface tracker. Let's grab and drag that right to the line until we see the plus symbol. That will connect our in and out points properly. Then, from there, we want to scrub through our footage and pick a good spot to do our tracking, and I think for this clip, the first frame works the best because I'm going to be putting a logo on the shirt, and the first frame has it the most toward the camera or most open to camera. So, with the node highlighted for the surface tracker, we will start to draw some points on our shirt.
And just as a general guide, if you're working on something that has a lot of bends, like clothing or some other non-flat surface, it's better to go with quite a few points, but if you're working on just like a flat wall, you might be able to get away with just like the four points. All right, with that selected, let's go over to mesh. The default setting is set to 50, and for something like what I'm doing, that's probably even overkill, so we will lower it a bit. Somewhere around 30 or 40 is probably good for what I'm working with, but depending on the footage you're working with, you might find that a higher number works better for you. Once that's done, we can go over to track. On this tab, the only thing that we need to worry about is the quality. Keeping it on faster will, of course, do the tracking faster, but I would highly suggest keeping this on better, as it doesn't take that much longer, and again, it will give you a far better result. And since we're on the first frame, we can just go to track forwards, and if you're on the last frame, you can go to track reverse, but if you're somewhere in the middle, then you'd want to hit track forward, then reverse.
This will go through our footage and do its thing. From there, we'll go to result, and then we need to bring in the logo that we're going to be applying to the tracking data. So, we'll go up to media pool, and I already have the DaVinci logo since we're working in DaVinci. I thought it'd be appropriate. We'll bring that in, and if you're wondering what these colored squares are, each one represents a different color channel plus the alpha. So, I think the top one is alpha, yeah, so the top is alpha, and then red, green, and blue, and then the green, of course, represents your RGB, which is the full colors of your image. So, we will click on that one and drag it to the green arrow up here to connect it to our tracking data. You'll see that we have the black background; that's because we haven't connected the alpha channel, which is the top one, so we'll connect that right there, and the alpha channel will give us that transparent background. And we'll go ahead and scrub through our footage and see what we got so far.
And now, we'll make sure that the tracker node is selected and that we're on the result tab. We'll go down to overlay placement, and in order to get some positioning parameters, we'll have to go to positioning and change this to sliders, and then we will scale it down, move it to the left a little bit, and if you find it's moving too quick, you can always just go to the numbers themselves and scrub it that way, which will move it slower. And then, we will go up, we'll add some rotation and some pitch, and then we also need to rotate it so it's facing more to the front of the t-shirt, as right now, the perspective is facing us directly at camera. And you may think that rotate will solve that, but all that does is sort of like a 2D rotate, where we need a 3D perspective change, and then at the bottom, we can use the yaw to rotate it a bit. And then, now that we've set that up properly, now we can go back to the rotate and adjust it as we'd like.
Now that we have the angle or perspective set up, the next thing we want to do is try to blend this better into the shirt or into the footage. And if we go at the bottom, you can see there's an area for compositing, so you can change your opacity if you'd like. That can help bring some texture in. You can bring it down just a bit, and then you might want to play around with the compositing type and change the blend mode. Sometimes, this is too harsh, so we will have a look and see what it does. We can try overlay, and if you like that, you can stick to it. I find that's still a little too dark. Try like hard light; that's not too bad. Soft light shows a bit of the texture, but we're losing a lot of the definition of the logo. Difference is not too bad, so maybe we'll stick with that one. Think we can lower the opacity a bit to help it blend in. Lastly, if you find that this doesn't give you enough options, you may try to, you know, add a corrector node and try to make some connections and somehow make some adjustments like this, but find out that you've disconnected, and the corrector node doesn't really work. So, you may try doing different connections, but then your entire footage is messed up. So, this is actually not the correct way to do it in this scenario where you're working with like an image file.
The way to get around only affecting the logo and not your footage is by right-clicking on the actual image node and then adding a serial node, and you can do that by going add node serial. And this is the proper connection in that order. Doing it this way, with the serial node selected, you can go down here and change any settings you like, and then it will only affect the logo. So, let's say we can go with the contrast, we can bring down the saturation, and maybe bring down the shadows a bit. I think that looks pretty good. If you want to compare it on and off, you can hit command D or control D on the PC with the serial node selected. So, that's before we did color correction, and that's with the serial node. As you can see, there's way more texture that bleeds through into the logo, and overall, the composite looks much better.
All right, that's how you can add graphics to warped surfaces inside DaVinci Resolve. I hope the video was helpful. If it was, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more videos from us. We have over 200 videography-related videos, lots of content for you to learn from, and if you want to know any of the music or the equipment we use to make our videos, all links are in the description. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.
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