Restricting the glow to just the blade...




Once I finished creating an animated glow and textured boil for my sword design I thought it would be interesting to see what this looked like with a glow on just the blade. So I went back to my Procreate file, duplicated the sword layer twice and renamed each layer Blade and Handle respectively. Then on the one layer erased the blade and on the other erased the handle. I then saved a PNG of each layer, they are shown below...









I then imported both files into After Effects and followed the steps discussed in my last two blog posts except this time I only used the Blade PNG to duplicate and turn into a drop shadow to create the glow. I then dropped the Handle PNG on to the timeline, seeing as I created both PNG's from the same image the blade and handle lined up perfectly. Here is the test of the animated glow...



 

Once I had animated the glow I added a white textured boil to the handle like in the previous sword test as well as a blue textured boil on the part of the handle next to the blade, this was to try and imitate a reflection from the glow...




I didn't spend too much time on this test but I'm happy with the result. There's definitely lots that can be developed as far as the timing of the textured boils, the roughened edges of the boils and the graininess but first I want to take what I've learned so far and use it in some different designs such as my Robo Samurai and Merlin character designs. I also want to experiment with creating similar effects for both still imagery and animated clips in Procreate and compare these with the above in a future post.

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