Plastic

In Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve 21 Krokodove list, Plastic is an Image Pixel Tool. Blackmagic describes it as a filter that creates a synthetic bevel and simulates a plastic film/sheen over the source image. Its fundamental boundary is therefore 2D image in → 2D image out.

Plastic does not create a Fusion 3D material, geometry, scene normals or a Light3D setup. Merge3D and Renderer3D are not required. If you later want the processed image on 3D geometry, Plastic first produces a 2D texture and a separate 3D tool consumes that texture downstream.

The Plastic tab starts with Bump Channel. This control chooses which channel of the incoming image becomes the basis for the pseudo-relief. The verified Resolve UI menu contains Red, Green, Blue, Alpha and Luminance; Luminance is also the selected value in the public Krokodove reference capture.

Channel choice matters. Alpha is especially useful for Text+ and logos on transparency, Luminance for photographic or procedural brightness structure, and individual RGB channels when useful height-like information is packed into a specific channel.

Bump Channel is not a second image input. Plastic derives it from the same source image connected to the primary Input. If you need a completely separate bump source, prepare or pack that information upstream before it reaches Plastic.

Lock X/Y links the spatial blur dimensions used to smooth the relief. Leave it linked for symmetric smoothing; unlink it only when the bevel response needs to stretch differently along X and Y.

Blur Size smooths the selected bump channel before the sheen is calculated. Larger blur creates a broader, softer raised response; very small blur on noisy footage turns the highlight structure into brittle micro-detail.

Low and High define the active bump-response range. Treat them as a pair: narrowing the range makes the response more contrasty and reaches its extremes faster, while a broader range preserves more midtone gradation.

Color controls the Plastic shading contribution. The Inspector exposes a color swatch plus separate Red, Green, Blue and Alpha controls. Those RGBA fields are real controls in the UI, not invented submodes.

Combine defines how the calculated Plastic result is combined with the source. The verified Resolve UI contains Merge, Add and Highlights. These are values of one Combine dropdown, not three separate Inspector parameters.

Merge is the straightforward processed result. Add increases the summed light contribution and can clip bright regions quickly. Highlights is useful when the goal is to retain more of the source while emphasizing the bright sheen/bevel contribution.

The Shape tab contains a remap curve that changes the profile of the pseudo-relief after channel extraction/smoothing. It can redistribute midtones, harden or soften the transition and change how much of the source channel becomes a raised-looking edge.

Shape In and Out are the exact coordinates for the selected curve point. In is the input coordinate and Out is the remapped output coordinate. They do not refer to timeline Global In/Out.

The Light tab provides the virtual lighting used to reveal the pseudo-relief. Position X and Position Y move this internal light relative to the image, while Height changes the light height. This is a 2D shading model inside Plastic, not Light3D.

Changing Position X/Y reverses or redirects the bright and dark sides of the synthetic bevel. A poor light direction can make a raised shape look recessed, so test the relief on a simple high-contrast source before judging a complex shot.

Height changes the lighting relationship to the calculated pseudo-surface. Do not use Height as a substitute for Blur Size: Height belongs to virtual lighting, while Blur Size changes the spatial profile from which the relief is derived.

The public Inspector captures also show KD and Settings tabs alongside Plastic, Shape and Light. The available Plastic reference does not document a unique node-specific KD algorithm, so this article does not invent controls for that tab. Settings remains the shared Fusion tool-control layer.

An Effect Mask, when used, gates where the finished 2D effect is applied. It does not replace Bump Channel and is not a second texture input. Use Rectangle, Ellipse or Polygon here when only part of the frame should receive the sheen.

For titles, a clean workflow is Text+ → Plastic → Glow/Color Corrector → Merge. Text+ supplies useful alpha, Plastic can read Alpha as its Bump Channel, and the entire branch stays in normal 2D RGBA space.

For footage, Luminance is often a useful starting point. If the relief starts reproducing sensor noise, compression or skin texture too aggressively, smooth the bump response with Blur Size or prepare a cleaner upstream channel instead of trying to solve everything with Light or Combine.

Plastic and Bevel overlap in purpose but are not identical. Blackmagic describes Plastic specifically as synthetic bevel plus plastic-film sheen, while Krokodove Bevel is framed as an internal bevel around the image. Compare them on the same source rather than treating them as interchangeable.

Plastic became part of the built-in Krokodove toolset in Resolve 21. Older third-party Krokodove documentation remains useful for Inspector structure, but it should not be used as evidence that the built-in node exists in older Resolve releases.