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For those who don’t know the tool: Krokodove is a procedural node set for Fusion and within DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic Design. It sits in compositing and motion graphics, beside Resolve’s edit, color and Fairlight pages, and now ships inside the host since version 21.
Let’s clear up one misunderstanding right away: Krokodove is not a template collection. It is a complete, smart and very large toolset of new nodes, developed for more than 20 years by Raf Schoenmaekers / Komkom Doorn Studio as a free Reactor plugin for Fusion, and now making its way into Fusion Studio and Resolve as an official component.
Krokodove adds a wide range of nodes, from small quality-of-life improvements to expanded 3D tools, modifiers, generators, pixel manipulation and distortion tools. It can quite reasonably be considered essential. Blackmagic primarily positions the toolset for motion graphics artists, but many of the nodes are also extremely useful for VFX work. It is a big deal, and you should be very happy right now. Wondering why? Then have a look.
Where is ..?
A small disclaimer first: Fusion veterans will notice that a few tools did not make the jump to version 21 and have been removed for compatibility reasons. Even though a few gems have been lost, hopefully only temporarily, there are still many, many useful nodes left, and more than enough reason to celebrate.
Usage
The new nodes are neatly structured in the Krokodove menu. General tip: if you drag a node from the Effects menu onto the Viewer, it is linked directly to the currently selected node. Below, we examine the top nodes in each category, ranked by the usefulness of the new features. Since this is objectively subjective, I warmly encourage you to try every new node yourself and combine them freely, because discovering what is possible is simply fun.
Image Tools
Rasterize
Rasterize does not simply create a nice raster effect. It uses luminance or colour-channel values as the basis for positioning and scaling raster elements. The raster effect can use the original colours, a single colour, or be driven by an external source. The same applies to the shape of the raster dots.
In addition to the built-in circle, rectangle and diamond shapes, you can, for example, map an image or shape onto each raster point. Houdini’s Copy to Points politely waves from the sidelines. Naturally, position jitter is also part of the package.
Pack
At first glance, Pack looks similar to Rasterize, but this node works in a much more complex way. It instances or packs shapes onto our input image or animation, controlled again, for example, by luminance or alpha. A bit like Cinema 4D’s Cloner or again Houdini’s Copy to Points, but in 2D, and of course fully animatable.
Dither
Gradients with banding? Get rid of them. At its core, this node calculates an extremely fine noise pattern over the image. Maybe not spectacular, but massively useful.
Painterly
Your trustworthy Kuwahara-like filter directly inside Fusion, sort of. What is especially interesting is that you can use your own (animated) custom brush, which can have a major impact on the final look.
Extend
A beautiful motion graphics effect. Extend stretches pixels outward from a central point in a vertical or horizontal direction. Naturally, it can also have very useful VFX applications.
Lets do something to Pixels
Noise
This is not film grain! It is my favourite node when it comes to giving paper-like surfaces a grainy structure, almost like a bump map or tactile texture.
But it can do much more. For example, it can generate the noise pattern based on the colour distribution, using luminance or separate channels. Or it can create the points for the Rasterize setup mentioned earlier, onto which shapes are then copied.
Bevel 2D
Rarely used sensibly, often feared. Handle with caution. Still, it is now native in Fusion, and thanks to shape control via curve, it is not quite as basic as it might first appear.
Seamless Loop
No keyframes or expressions required: this node takes an animation of a defined length and turns it into a loop. “Seamless” here means that the frames are blended over an adjustable range. Very useful for repeating background elements.
Extrude 2D
Extrude 2D takes any shape with alpha, very often typography, and extrudes it in 2D, either parallel or in perspective. A fake light can provide form details, or, when switched off, create purely graphical surfaces. Things get particularly interesting when we extrude an image using the original colours.
Once again: these tools are not finished effect presets. They are individual building blocks meant to be combined. The individual result can then be saved as a macro, allowing you to build your own preset library.
Let’s Warp
Bend 2D
Incredibly useful. It does exactly what its well-known 3D equivalent promises, but in 2D. We define a start and end point, then use three points to bend our object along a curve.
In “Center and Radius” mode, it can even perform a perfect 360-degree rotation.
Relative Transform
Unlike the regular Transform node, which initially works from the general centre of the working area, Relative Transform detects the pixel mass and transforms directly from the centre of the object using the default settings. In other words, it behaves like a local transform. This saves the manual pivot adjustment, making it a very useful helper node.
Spherize
Soft enlargement effects or hard magnifying-glass looks are the speciality of this deformer. It can be controlled with an additional area mask.
Direction Scale
Almost a shape- or path-deform tool if you feed a custom polygon mask into the warp mask input.
Lets Create Images
Shapes
Anyone looking for concentric circles or rectangles for effects such as audio visualisations or displacement will be happy with the Shapes node. The circles can be adjusted and animated in many ways. Again, the idea is that the node result is primarily intended as a mask for further nodes.
Pattern
Need a pixel grid for a screen insert? Interesting shapes for motion graphics? In addition to a square pattern, the Pattern node can also create triangle and honeycomb patterns, with deep control over the result. As always, the good stuff happens through layering multiple effects and/or patterns.
Blob
A kind of 2D metaball. You define the desired number of starting points, their size and other parameters such as “blobbiness”, and the points merge together. Useful for organic effect masks.
Contour
“Start from a seriously blurred image to see what it does,” says the Krokodove manual. More on that later. That is the route to an interesting look. If you leave out the blur, you naturally also get RGB channel-dependent outlines and useful contour lines.
Let’s play with Color
Invert
Who would have thought that an Invert node was not part of the basic arsenal? Thanks to this Krokodove tool, you can now invert colour, luminance or hue without stress.
Threshold
You know this one from Photoshop. Thanks to Krokodove, Fusion now has it too. It immediately generates an alpha channel and can be used, among other things, for toon effects, masks or displacements. Whatever you need. Another node that really should have been in vanilla Fusion ages ago.
Replace Color
This lets you replace a specific colour. Since the effect is fairly hard and, apart from softness, does not offer a range selection, it is primarily useful for motion graphics.
Krokodove goes 3D
There is exactly one addition here, but it is a substantial one.
Mapped Duplicate 3D
For Cinema 4D users: think MoGraph Instancer, or was it called Cloner? We feed geometry into the node and get any number of duplicates, which can be randomly scaled, rotated or moved. The key point here, and this is where the “mapped” part comes in, is that we can use other nodes as drivers for these transforms or for existence probabilities. These can be loaded image sequences or animations created directly inside Fusion.
This makes it possible to manipulate not only transformations, but also time itself. As soon as the incoming 3D mesh has its own animation, that animation can again be varied per instance via a mapped image channel. Although the node lives in classic Fusion 3D, it integrates cleanly into the new USD world via uMerge. A Background node set to Gradient controls scaling along the Y axis.
Modifier
For those who do not know them yet: by right-clicking on an animatable parameter, you can influence it with a modifier. Vanilla Fusion already includes many good ones, and Krokodove adds a few more equally useful options. Modifiers can also be stacked, so you can influence the values of one modifier with another modifier. Naturally. Because why stop at one layer of procedural madness.
Random
Random variation of the selected parameter within defined minimum and maximum values. Sometimes it really is that simple. And fundamentally useful.
Beat
Changes the lucky selected parameter with an adjustable beat, including frequency, attack and decay time. Great for all kinds of light and glow effects that need to follow a specific rhythm or behaviour.
Juggle Text
Thoroughly scrambles your carefully chosen wording.
Example Files and Manual
Through Reactor, you can download 35 example comps, and they are exceptionally well made.
We have dug up the only real existing manual, which provides good information on all nodes. Warning: it is slightly outdated, probably older than half the readers of this sentence. As mentioned at the beginning, not all nodes covered in this document still exist.
Apart from that, there is a rough, purely text-based overview in the Resolve/Fusion 21 What’s New PDF.
Pricing, Free and Studio
As before, Fusion including Krokodove remains free inside Resolve. For just under €300, however, you get the perpetual Studio version of Resolve, including expanded AI and OFX tools, and, most importantly, the standalone version of Fusion Studio.
Why is that so useful? The standalone version is significantly faster without the Resolve overhead. The difference is enormous: night and day, coal and gold, insert obvious comparison here. On top of that, Fusion Studio also offers network rendering.
NOW GO AND PLAY!
