Creating a glow effect for my sword design in After Effects...

 While I was researching ways for animating the background of the Keith Haring mural I came across a tutorial for several different ways to create a glow effect in After Effects and thought it would be fun to see if I could use this with my sword design. Here was the unsuccessful initial result...



 Not at all what I wanted to create so I tried a second time following along with the tutorial. The problem I had with the attempt above was the sword itself was being affected by the process used to create the glow, whereas I wanted my original design to still be visible. Then I thought, 'why don't I just drop another sword on a layer above and see what that looks like...



This worked and was certainly more like what I was hoping to achieve however I prefered the blue from the first attempt so adjusted that and tried again. Below is a description of the steps taken to create the glow...

You start by importing your design into After Effects and dropping it on the time line, then go to Layer/Precompose and name the new layer 'placeholder'. This enables you to keep all your settings in one place. Then to start the process go to Effects/Perspective and select Drop Shadow. This will open up some options on the left of the screen. Select the colour you'd like your glow to be then set the Distance to 0 and Softness to 20.

Then duplicate this Drop Shadow by going to Edit. Change these settings to Softness: 80 then go to Effects/Stylize and select Glow. Then in the following options change the Glow colours to A + B Colours and the Colour Looping to Sawdust B > A. Then scroll down and select Colour A (same as your choice of colour for the drop shadow) and change the Colour Intensity to 2. Then select Glow and go to Effects and Duplicate. 

Increase the Glow Threshold slightly and change the Glow Radius to 90 then go to Effects/ Blur Sharpen and choose CC Radial Blur and go to Type and choose Centred Zoom. 

This gave me the following visual...


  I then added another layer above with a PNG of my sword design which looked like this...


This was closer to what I had in mind but it still wasn't quite there and I wasn't sure why, then I watched the tutorial again and realised he was using a black background so I created one in Procreate and saved it as a JPEG then brought it into After Effects and dropped it underneath both sword layers. The result was much stronger...



This what pretty much exactly what I'd set out to achieve but I also wanted to make the glow pulsate, I'll talk through how I went on to do this as well as add a textured boil in a future post.

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