Hey there!
On today’s post I will be pressenting a tutorial on how to animate Luz’s light glyph spell from The Owl House.
This post is dedicated to all the commenters asking how I made the video on YouTube. Also to a bunch of others pointing out that it’s fake, whose comments I will take as compliments of the video’s realism.
I will leave it here for you in case you have not seen it yet:
Try it yourself
All of the used assets are available at the bottom. The required tools are Blender to handle 3D graphics and Krita for image editing.
I’d love to see what you create with the help of this tutorial! If you make anything, please send it to me.
Making the glyph and the paper
The first thing we are going to need is a paper and a glyph to draw onto it. Lucky for you, I’ve already made them. The result is in the asset library at the end of the post, although I know you are capable of making them even better if you try.
I made the ripped paper texture with Krita. I took a texture that looked papery enough and applied a mask with the shape of ripped edges.
Making the glyph texture was way easier. I traced a frame from the scene in which Luz first discovers it on her phone. The frame had a perfect view of the glyph, with Luz’s phone perfectly parallel to the camera.
Once we have the two main textures, it’s time to make the sheet’s 3D model. For now we just need to open Blender, delete the default cube, and insert a plane. We will have to make some small changes later.
To mix the paper and the glyph textures we are going to make use of a MixRGB node. We will use the gliph texture’s transparency to do so. And remember to first set up the UV map’s scale and position so that the textures are placed correctly.
A tiny problem however, is that the plane’s edges are completely opaque. To fix that we will take advantage of the default Principled BSDF shader. This shader is so versatile, it’s the only one we will need to use. If we plug the paper texture’s alpha channel into the Alpha socket on the shader, the edges will turn transparent. The transparency will not render correctly until you activate Alpha Clip in the Blend Mode and Shadow Mode parameters of the material. It also will not look right on the edges if we use the paper image from the provided asset library by itself. A ColorRamp node to filter out the noise should fix it.
Wrapping the paper and making it float
This is where it gets interesting. It is time for the physics simulations, which sounds way harder than it is.
The paper plane is going to need a cloth simulation so that it may be wrapped. After the simulation is set, we will put it inside a sphere which will be animated shrinking and floating upwards. Then we will just make the sphere invisible so that it looks like the paper is wrapping by itself.
Step 1: Cloth simulation
When aplying the cloth simulation in the Physics Properties panel, some parameters need to be tuned to make it behave like paper would. The settings I found to best do the job where these:
Cloth Quality Steps 15
Physical Properties Vertex Mass 0.4
Stiffness Tension 80 Compression 80 Shear 80 Bending 50
Damping Tension 25 Compression 25 Shear 25
Collisions Self Collisions ON Friction 15
Field Weights Gravity 0Step 2: Shrinking the sphere and making it float
After tuning the cloth simulation we will create the invisible sphere. It should be big enough to contain the paper. The first keyframe will have the sphere surrounding the paper, and the next one will have the sphere much smaller and higher up.
The next steps are very important, otherwise, the sphere and the paper will not interact at all. We need to apply a Solidify modifier to the sphere, to make it hollow, and a Collision modifier after that, to tell Blender to take it into account in the simulations. In that order!.
Once done, the simulation will be ready. I highly recommend storing the animation to Cache so that your machine does not have to compute the animation each time you watch it.
Lighting the paper
Wrapping the paper into a perfect sphere of light is quite a challenge. Too big of a challenge maybe… But it’s okay. We can cheat a little to fake the effect. We’ll create a shader that lights the paper in whatever shape it comes out of the simulation. And in the meantime, we’ll add a small sphere with the same shader, that expands and follows the paper. Eventually the paper will end up inside the new sphere, which will be the only visible object.
Step 1: Lighting up the glyph and the paper’s surface
To create the aformentioned shader we’ll again use the ever so versatile Principled BSDF node. This time for the Emmision and Emission Strength parameters, which light up the material with the specified color and strength.
The emmision color in this case will be orange. The brightness parameter will not be that easy though. We could just plug in a high number, but that would look too homogenous. If we plug a noise texture instead, the emmission will have some imperfections, which looks slightly more realistic.
The same goes for iluminating the glyph. The only difference is that we need to set the effect only where the alpha value of the image is zero.
We just need to animate the light now, so that everything starts dark and lights up gradually. That is what the red nodes of the shader are for. They allow an input value which can be keyframed.
The first keyframe will have all lights off. The next one will only have the glyph lit up so that it looks like the spell is being activated. And the final keyframe will have the surface lit up too, such that it looks like the spell is fully finished.
Step 2: Making the light sphere
Making the light sphere is quite simple. The shader is the same as the paper’s but without the image textures.
And setting the movement is the same as with the invisible sphere: start small and slowly grow. The one difference in the process is that this sphere has to be visible eventually, so the visibility needs to be keyframed as well.
Final touches
For the end product to look realistic I suggest rendering with Cycles, Blender’s raytracer engine.
My video has some extra effects, but the essence is what we just did. To finish it up just add your favourite table and some lighting.
If you are interested in some tricks to make the video better, I recommend reading up on the following concepts:
- Bloom to add some extra brightness to the sphere.
- Parameters of the
Principled BSDFsuch as normals and roughness, that go a long way into making more realistic materials. - Color management to add some more contrast to the scene.
- Scene ilumination.
- Depth of field, which adds the ilusion of size to small or massive objects.
- Imperfections make the result much more realistic. Too much perfection looks uncanny.
- Audio makes your video more vivid.
I cannot wait to see who makes the three other glyphs from the show with the help of this tutorial.
See you later!