Instancer 2D OpenFX Plugin is here

Instancer 2D is an OpenFX plugin that lets you scatter, distribute, and animate thousands of 2D instances on the GPU. It runs in DaVinci Resolve, Fusion Studio, Nuke, and any other OFX-compatible host.

Inspired by 3D instancing workflows, this plugin brings full control over scattering and animating instances right into your compositing app.

Highlights:

12 distribution modes: grid, hex, circle, spiral, phyllotaxis, blue noise, scatter, and more
Runs natively on your GPU via CUDA, OpenCL, and Metal
Per-instance fields: drive scale, rotation, color, position, and defocus with any image
Texture Atlas and Variants: use sprite sheets or frame sequences to give each instance a unique look
Integrated motion blur and bokeh defocus with adaptive sampling for speed and quality
Look-At and Push effects for one-click tracking and explosion/implosion behaviors
Studio license allows rendering on unlimited render nodes with no license or internet needed on the render machines

Check out the product page for the full feature list. The demo is fully featured with no time limit, no email, no credit card. Just download the OFX and start building.

Instancer 2D running in DaVinci Resolve Studio:

This plugin was first conceived years ago. As someone who has been deep in the Fusion and DaVinci Resolve ecosystem for a long time, I wanted to share some of the background behind Instancer 2D and the decisions I made along the way.

I always gravitated towards building my own workflows and tools. That started with scripting tools using the Fusion and DaVinci Resolve APIs. Instancer 2D actually began as just that: a Fusion script based on the Probe modifier.

I needed to create controllable UIs for a TV show. Many compositors have probably had to design GUIs for screens in shows. They often feature random animations and bogus visualizations that still have to convey something from the story. Creating and iterating on these animations can be quite time consuming, especially once everything is keyframed. My idea was to use the Fusion Probe modifier so I could quickly iterate by simply changing a mask instead of keyframing each element individually.

This technically worked, but it was clunky, slow, and hard to keep track of every transform it created. It also caused crashes when you’re dealing with hundreds of Probe modifiers, each reading a mask over and over. To complete the show I eventually had to switch to Houdini and do these 2D animations in 3D. That was fine for the project, but round-tripping adds complexity, time, and possible errors. It validated my feeling that something running directly in Fusion would be a valuable tool.

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From Fuse to OFX

I started building a prototype Fuse. Thanks to the wonderful knowledge shared in the Fusion community, I was able to quickly get a working Fuse that could scatter, transform, and animate using a mask input. I very quickly realized how much fun this is and decided to port it to OpenFX so it could be used across a wider range of applications and not be limited by the Fuse API. OpenFX comes with its own limitations, but those could be worked around most of the time.

Many late nights followed, alongside actual VFX projects. I worked on the OFX for roughly a year until the release. And I can already say it’s production proven 😉 by myself. I used it on several projects during that year, both for motion graphics, UI animations, faking particles, and once to create a very fast rendering fake bokeh transition.

Performance

Fast is the keyword here. From the beginning I wanted Instancer 2D to be as fast as possible while delivering exceptional quality. I took everything I knew from 3D instancing, real-time workflows, and what I could learn about GPUs to optimize every aspect. And it paid off. On a Full HD background, rendering 10,000 animated instances is possible at 30 fps+ on both an RTX 4090 and an M1 Max. The instance count is often not even the deciding factor for speed. In many cases the plugin is waiting on the host to supply the field masks rather than spending time rendering instances.

In DaVinci Resolve Studio and Fusion Studio (21.0.3+), Instancer 2D detects the host’s GPU stream and uses it directly. No transfer between CPU and GPU needed. Pretty much everything stays on the GPU from start to finish. This is where the plugin really shines and where you’ll feel the full speed.

In other OFX hosts like Nuke, a direct GPU stream isn’t available through the API. There, the plugin creates its own GPU context and handles the data transfers itself. It’s still fast, and much faster than CPU rendering (which is also available as a fallback), but if you really want to feel the speed, trying it in Resolve or Fusion is the way to go.

Licensing

The next point I want to highlight is my attempt at creating a fair licensing system that is as frictionless as possible.

The Demo can be downloaded instantly and lets you fully test every mode, every parameter. Only a watermark is applied to the output. If you decide to buy a license, you keep the same install, just activate the plugin and everything you created stays. You start rendering watermark-free immediately.

There are two license types:

Indie is designed for individual artists and more affordable. You get 2 active seats. There are no separate licenses for different operating systems, so the same license works on your Windows workstation and your travel MacBook at the same time.

Studio is for studios or anyone with several machines for rendering. It comes with a feature I would personally love to see with other plugins. In addition to 3 active seats, you can render on an unlimited number of machines that do not have a license. This is achieved by saving a Studio Token in the project file. Once a machine without a license sees it, it renders watermark-free. The rendering doesn’t need to be on a headless machine. Even the GUI versions will render watermark-free. Controls will be locked, but that’s not something you’d notice when it’s being used for rendering.

Switching between machines is easy. When the license is activated on a new machine and the seat limit is reached, the oldest activation is removed automatically. Very similar to how the DaVinci Resolve licenses work. There are some safeguards to prevent misuse, but a normal user will never reach these limitations.

And all of this is perpetual. With the Studio license, you could open an archived project years from now and still render it watermark-free.

My credo was: ease of use before anti-piracy safeguards.