For those who don’t know the tool: ReFill is a free macro distributed through Reactor for Blackmagic Design Fusion Studio. It helps create growing reveals, spreading imagery and write-on typography, with fills travelling through a picture rather than politely appearing on cue. Backseat Compositor presents it as a Fusion-side answer to AutoFill for After Effects. I had briefly hoped ReFill would also top up my supply of tasteful animation. Sadly, good taste remains a manual setting.
Plant a seed, then remember Save
ReFill starts with an image or text and a small patch of alpha showing where the growth begins. The walkthrough uses a Polygon mask. Before running the macro, save the Fusion composition, because its scripting controls need a saved project. An entirely reasonable requirement that I would, naturally, remember about three seconds after pressing the exciting button.
Auto Process first renders a blank sequence and then calculates how growth travels through the source. The result is a black-and-white progression map showing when the spreading front reaches each pixel. It is timing information for the reveal you build afterwards, not the finished composite. ReFill handles the clever part while I retain responsibility for taste, restraint and all the other things I had rather hoped to outsource.
Faster than my decision-making
Growth speed varies with the map: lighter regions propagate faster and darker regions slow things down. The demonstrated modes are Texture, Shape, Interior, Custom and Combined, with Combined blending the others. Overall speed and edge strength can be adjusted to make the spread finish within the intended frame range. The pixels, in other words, have a plan. I should probably try that sometime.
After the first Auto Process pass, changes use Process Growth without repeating the initial blank-frame setup. In the walkthrough, adjusting the map sends the reveal along the image’s contours instead of producing a uniform wipe. I could attempt something similar with far too many keyframes, several questionable decisions and a spreadsheet I would insist was part of the creative process. ReFill seems less interested in that particular adventure.
Render it, load it, stop poking it
Once the map behaves, Create Loader imports the generated result for use elsewhere in the composition. A Matte Control then uses it to reveal the original image. The presenter recommends disabling the ReFill generator afterwards: its internal Savers can keep consuming resources and may interfere with a final render. A tool that knows when to stop is genuinely inspiring. Personally, I am still working on that feature.
There is one major boundary. ReFill relies on Fusion Studio’s Saver and Loader workflow and does not work in the Fusion page of DaVinci Resolve, as the walkthrough makes clear. Reactor supports both environments, but that does not make every Reactor package interchangeable. My first instinct was to assume that two things called Fusion must behave identically. Fortunately, the video arrives before I can turn that into a support ticket.
Typography has islands. Of course it does.
Disconnected strokes and letters can become islands that the growing reveal never reaches. The tutorial adds tiny alpha bridges with a Polygon and Channel Booleans, then runs Process Growth again. The original text alpha masks those bridges out of the final treatment. If I left them visible, I would probably describe the result as experimental typography. The pixels would describe it more accurately as a mistake.
Multiple ReFill instances also need distinct map filenames, with matching names in their Savers and Loaders. Otherwise the second operation can overwrite the first map. This is where my instinct to name things final_final_2_really-final begins to look less like a workflow and more like a cry for help.
Follow the trail, question my taste
The package includes ReFill Trails, a companion macro that makes a travelling matte from the progression map. Controls adjust its position and the lengths of the leading and trailing sections. The video adds a Gradient Map for coloured edges, then demonstrates blur, turbulence and glow on the text. All optional, which is excellent news for anyone who has ever trusted my instinct to add just one more glow.
Those treatments are assembled with Fusion tools. ReFill supplies controllable growth and trail maps, not a fully finished look in one click. It also declines to intervene when I mistake five effects for a coherent design direction. A wise boundary, if an occasionally inconvenient one.
Free refill, some assembly required
ReFill is available free through the We Suck Less Reactor package manager, with a manual included in the download. The walkthrough does not establish separate licence terms, an exact version compatibility matrix or performance figures. I could fill those gaps with impressively confident numbers. That would be an excellent demonstration of my shortcomings, not of ReFill.
Our earlier Fridays for Fusion piece on Saver tools covers output housekeeping, while PROPAGATE applies edits across selected nodes. ReFill spreads an effect through an image. Three different jobs, one overworked vocabulary, and me still searching for a filename more descriptive than “test”. At least the software knows what it is called.
Before relying on ReFill in a production shot, test the growth maps, distinct output filenames and final renders on representative material in Fusion Studio. Discovering a missing alpha bridge before delivery would be a rare and welcome outbreak of foresight on my part.
https://gitlab.com/WeSuckLess/Reactor
| Product | ReFill |
| Creator / walkthrough | Backseat Compositor |
| Distribution | Reactor |
| Pricing | Free via Reactor, as stated in the creator walkthrough |
| Host | Blackmagic Design Fusion Studio only; not the Fusion page in DaVinci Resolve |
| Companion macro | ReFill Trails |
| Documentation | Manual included with Reactor download, as stated in the walkthrough |
About the author
Manuel Kotulla works as a freelance Creative Director, Motion Designer, and 3D / VFX Artist in Hamburg. Previously, he spent many years as Creative Director for Animation & VFX at the Serviceplan Group. He has a passion for Houdini, cinematic lighting, and his Fuji camera.
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