djthed
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Unicorn Magic Animation Render Test
🕑 Added 2019-10-02 16:50:43 +0000 UTCSo the time has finally come. A few months ago I made a lot of progress with Pegasus wing models and rigs, and while they still do have some improvements that can be made at some point, I do have some progress to show off for another race of ponies, being the Unicorns and their magic aura and glow that emit from their horns.
Believe it or not, but I only just started working on this magic effect and horns just at the start of yesterday. I've been thinking about how to do this effect for a couple months now, but I had an idea very recently, and decided to sit down and work on it all day yesterday. It was essentially a 14 hour work day for me just working on the magic aura, particles, and the horn model itself.
There are a few elements to this I would like to describe on how they work. The first major part I worked on first was the aura itself, which is the big blob of magic that has a glowing outline surrounding the horn. That is actually just a mesh object that is animated in a pretty fancy way, and also has a pretty fancy material setup that allows it to glow only from the outline using fresnel, and has an emissive volumetric shader alongside the main outline glow material. This mesh object, which is fundamentally shaped like a screw, rotates on a single axis to make it appear the magic waves are moving upwards towards the tip, as it does canonically. Then there are a couple lattices and wave modifiers to distort the mesh quite heavily to make it not look solid and makes it look very unstable and wobbly. I lastly rigged this mesh and give it some wiggle bones, which basically gives it automated follow through animation when the aura moves around.
The magic dust is fairly simple. It's a particle system, and there's not much deviation from how it's set up by default. It emits from the glow mesh, and each particle has an average lifetime of 36 frames (which effects how long the dust lingers around, which is especially visible when the aura moves). Each particle is two tris, and has a material applied that gives each particle slight color variation from the base color that's used for the aura itself. The material also is set up so that the glow that the magic dust emits gets weaker and less bright the closer each particle reaches the end of their lifespan, which helps make it not look jarring when the particles reach their end and vanish instantaneously. The particle system itself also gives slight variations to each particles lifespan, size, velocity, etc. Variation is key here, even if it's subtle. It really, really helps make it feel more real.
Lastly, the horn itself. The horn's model is simple. It's modeled like a screw fundamentally, like the aura. I literally use something called a "screw modifier" to make the base model which I then further build off of to shape it like how it is from the MLP show and movie. The horn is attached to the forehead, and not much else. The mesh is done. But the horn also glows along the creases, which helps convey that the magic aura is coming from the horn itself.
That's basically it for all of the stuff within the 3D space, but there is also the compositing phase, which is probably at its most important when pulling off this effect. I'm using post processing to give both a bloom effect, which helps make the glow outline especially look more convincing, and also a glare streak effect that really helps the magic dust feel more sparkly and magical.
And yes, like I said I did all of this horn and magic stuff in a 14 hour work day. The animation you see here was actually done mostly today, the day I'm posting this. The base model is plain and has no mane or tail, but as you can probably assume from the colors, it will soon become Rarity. But it's still in the early stages. No special eyelashes yet, no Cutie Mark. I have made some adjustments to the eye shape for Rarity, but that's about it, and that's still incomplete too. The animation was done in a day, so it's also a bit rough around the edges. The eyelashes especially have some clipping issues, but as it was not my priority at the moment, and this is essentially just a test animation and is not meant to be treated as a final product, I didn't fix them. The animation is meant to show off the visual effects work I did yesterday, and I would love to hear feedback about this.
