Puppet Pin Tool for DaVinci Resolve & Fusion Studio
[v 1.1.5]

This plugin is a Puppet Warp / Mesh Deformation Tool for DaVinci Resolve’s Fusion Page and stand-alone Fusion Studio. Instantly installed by 'drag-and-dropping' the included files, it becomes a tool in your Fusion page.

Bring still graphics, characters, and design elements to life with fast, art‑directable deformation. It automatically builds a mesh from your image or mask, after which you can place pins and animate their destination and rotation to warp the mesh.

Unlike simpler grid warps or morph tricks, we generate a mesh around visible pixels and keep it stable while animating using a robust rigid deformation solver. You focus on animation, not wrestling with distortion.

Overview and Tutorial:

After you’ve placed and animated a few key pins, the optional Follower and Wave systems let you easily animate remaining pins without hand‑keying the same but slightly different animations over and over again. They turn a small set of “driver” pins into a layered, interacting and organic animation. The follower system can let the hips of your character follow the shoulders with a slight delay and overshoot to make them dance. While the Wave system can let you control the curling of a strand of hair in the wind.

Want smoother motion? Enable the Elastic Solver to automatically add subtle jiggle and spring-like settling to your animated mesh, perfect for cloth, capes, and other flexible materials or characters.

Need to animate several independent layers (body, hair, cape, limbs) and afterwards join them together onto your subject? In this example we've simply duplicated the dancing Puppet Pin node and reused it for the animated hair. The secret lies in the secondary image input that lets you build the mesh from one image and warp another. For more complex animations puppet pin works great with instance nodes where all instances share the same state and pins. We also offer Locator Pins which can track position and rotation of individual vertices in the warped mesh to be used in other tools or Puppet Pin instances.

Ideal Use Cases

• Character animation or posing, limb articulation & facial tweaks.
• Animating illustrations, digital art or anime.
• Animating cloth, hair, flags, foliage or adding organic “breathing” motions.
• Perspective correction or stabilization.
• Stylized and creative print warping for motion graphics and text.

Key Features

Mesh Generation

• Automatic mesh triangulation from non-transparent pixel regions.
• Control density of interior points and contour points.
• Optional secondary mask input, if active it will use this input when creating the mesh instead of main input.
• Mesh contour expansion to cover your entire subject.
• Automatically rebuild mesh on every new frame to warp video input!

Pin System

• Expressive setups with up to 48 animatable pins.
• Per‑pin Position, Rotation, Expansion (expands vertices around pin), Render Layer (control overlapping triangles)
• Pin Position can be set in relative or absolute coordinates, relative coordinates are great for copy-pasting animated keyframes as no per-pin adjustments are needed. Absolute coordinates give you an on screen control to set the exact position you want.
• Influence radius slider to control how much a pin should warp nearby vertices.

Follower System

• Follow movement of another pin with independent X, Y, and Rotation amplitudes & frame delays. Also includes optional automatic rotation towards followed pin.
• Animations feel more natural when pins move as one and this system does exactly that!
• Followers stack, a pin can follow a pin which is following another pin.

Wave System

• Rotate one or several pins around a base pin, for wavy hair, cloth, tentacles or foliage.
• Control stretching to extend or compress pins in relation to base pin.
• Built in oscillator to animate pins back and forth perpendicular to the pins bend.

Locators

• Track the position and rotation of a vertice as it gets warped, and use the data with other tools.
• Use the tracking data to attach assets onto your animated subject outside the Puppet Pin tool, or as drivers for other Puppet Pin instances!

Elastic Layer

• Optional secondary motion pass (stiffness & damping) operating directly on solver output.
• Smooths or adds subtle springy settling to your animation.

Rendering & Depth

• Per-triangle depth bias via per-pin Render Layer slider, useful for controlling overlapping deformations.
• Optional Motion Blur giving you smooth, high-fidelity blur for your animation.

Compatibility, Support & Refund

• Download includes a PuppetPin.fuse file to be installed in your DaVinci Resolve or Fusion Studio .fuse directory. Installation instructions and a small user guide are included in a ReadMe.txt file to get you started.
• Tested on DaVinci Resolve 20.2.3 & Fusion Studio 20.2.3
• Tested in both free and studio version of Davinci Resolve.
• Tested on Windows, Mac and Linux. With NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
• Lifetime Updates!
• License
  One license (“seat”) is valid for a single named individual.
  You may purchase multiple seats and assign them to your team. Seats may be reassigned due to staffing changes; when reassigned, the previous user must stop using and uninstall the plugin. You can tune how many seat licenses you want to own by changing quanity at checkout. You can add more seats later by purchasing additional seats; seats stack.
  A licensed user may install and use the plugin on any number of computers at the same time.
  Redistribution, resale, or sharing of the plugin is not permitted.
• DaVinci Resolve and Fusion are trademarks of Blackmagic Design Pty Ltd. This product is an independent third-party tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blackmagic Design.
• For questions or support: visit tangenten.gumroad.com or email tangenten@pm.me

Add intuitive animation, character posing and many other effects to your Fusion workflow!

Bring your art to life — download now and start warping today!