Today we’ve got something special for you all in the form of a guest tutorial from none
other than Axel Wilkinson., who has a great new technique for creating Kylo Ren’s signature
lightsaber.
We recently looked at how to create standard Lightsword effects in HitFilm 3 Express.
Today we are going to look at a non-standard Lightsword effect, which calls for a different
approach.
I’m Axel Wilkinson, for HitFilm.com, here to show you some techniques for creating a
more flamey, malfunctiony lightsword effect in HitFilm 4 Pro.
If you open the Tutorial Starting Point composite in the project file that accompanies this
tutorial, you will notice that there are several points set up to mark the ends of the three
blades, and tracked to the movement of the hilt.
This rotoscoping is a necessary part of any scene involving lightswords, but I want to
focus on the creation of the effects in this tutorial, so I’ve finished the rotoscoping
for you already.
The Hilt Point contains all the position, rotation, and scale data, then all the other
points are parented to it, so all three blades can be driven by this single point.
The finished effect involves several layers: three particle simulators creating the main
blades, each with a glow effect applied to it, three Lightning effects on a single layer,
and a Gunfire effect to create the flaminess around the blades.
Due to the use of the Particle Effect, this tutorial requires either HitFilm Pro, or the
Particle Simulator add-on Pack for HitFilm 3 Express.
Once the points were in place, I added a Gunfire effect to the timeline, parented it to the
Hilt point, and zeroed out its Transform properties so it lines up with the point.
I used two side flares to represent the quillons, then adjusted the shape of the flash to be
long and narrow, like our blades will be.
I then went through the footage, using this effect for reference, to fine-tune the position
and rotation of the Hilt Point.
This serves as a stand-in for the blades, since we have no prop blades present during
this Lightsword ignition.
In most cases you will have practical blades for direct reference, so this step may not
be necessary.
Let’s turn off the gunfire layer for now, and get started on creating the main blade
effects.
To do this, we will use a Particle Simulator.
Note that it creates a new layer when we drag it to the timeline, and by default, it has
particles shooting out in all directions.
To make the particles fly in a single direction, change the Emitter Trajectory to Cone.
Then in the trajectory settings, set the radius to 0, to tighten them up into a straight line.
To adjust the width of the stream of particles, first we need to select the texture we wish
to use.
In the Appearance, we will use the built-in textures, and select Fire Ferocity 4.
Enable Align To Motion, so the particles travel down the blade, change the blend mode to Add,
then set the color to light orange.
255, 146, 70 are the values I used, but I decided on that color by trying different
options and repeatedly adjusting the color until it looked the way I wanted.
You can, of course, use whatever color you prefer.
Now with our texture set up, we can open the Movement controls and adjust the actual scale,
to 10%.
Since this scale is a percentage of the texture’s original size, if you use a different texture,
you might need to change this value as well.
To fill the effect out, open the General controls and increase the Particles per second, to
4000.
To determine the Speed of the effect, start by trimming the layer to begin at 4:12.
I want the ignition sequence to last five frames, so I’ll advance five frames, then
increase the speed until the particle stream is a little bit longer than the blade I need.
We will dial in the exact length in a moment, so leave it long for now.
Bring the particle lifetime down to 0.2, since this is all the time our particles need to
reach the desired length.
To get the appearance of lapping flames at the end of the blade, we need the particles
to travel at slightly different speeds.
We will define this in the Movement Variation.
Set the scale to 2%, first, to create a rougher edge on the effect, then set the speed to
300.
That should be enough to give the variety we need at the blade’s end.
Now before we can properly dial in the length, we need to line up the effect with our prop.
In many cases, we would use the Emitter controls, and link the emitter to a point layer.
But in this case, we want the emitter to always shoot out in a straight line, so I suggest
a new strategy: we will parent the actual particle layer to the Hilt point.
Then, zero out the position so it lines right up.
Now, open the lifetime panel, and select the Alpha property.
The lifetime controls define how each particle behaves from the time it is spawned until
the time it dies.
The alpha property lets us define how transparent the particles are at any moment in their life.
So, change the type to Gradient, then add a new control point by clicking on the white
bar, near the right hand end.
You can set the transparency of any control point by selecting it, then adjusting the
Transparency slider.
In our case, we just need one white point, with no transparency, and one black one, entirely
transparent.
Adjust the position of these points to dial in the length of the blade precisely.
We are basically just making the particle completely transparent at the end of their
life.
I set mine at 93%, and a little before 93%.
Later, when we make the quillons, we can make them shorter by editing the Lifetime alpha,
and we don’t need to change the speed or lifetime of the particles, so they will still
match the blade nicely.
When working with very short particle lifetimes, using the Lifetime Alpha to define exactly
how long the particles are visible is quite useful for precisely dialing things in.
With the main blade core done, let's create a glow on it, using the Lightsword (glow only)
effect, and dragging it onto the particle layer.
We want the glow to be fairly small, so for Inner glow, set the width to 30, Alpha to
0.1, and the color to 248, 94, 60.
For Outer Glow, set width to 80, Alpha to 0.15, and color to 248, 5, 0.
Now that we have our main blade and glow dialed in, we can duplicate this layer to create
the crossguard.
Select the Particle layer, and press Command+D, or Control+D on Windows, to duplicate it.
Rename these two copies, to Blade Flames, and Right Flames.
Now we will parent Right Flames to the right hilt point, and zero out the position.
Set the Rotation Z to 90, so this quillon is at a right angle to the blade.
To change the length of the quillon, select its particle system, open the Lifetime panel,
and drag the two points in the Alpha property farther to the left, 0 and 13.
Once that is dialed in, duplicate the Right Flames, and rename it Left Flames.
Parent it to the Left Hilt point, zero out its position, then change the Z rotation to
-90, to turn it the other way.
The glow effects on our two copies automatically update based on the smaller shape.
Making the quillons ignite a bit later in the shot is as simple as trimming the beginning
of their layers, which I will move to 5:05.
The last issue we need to address with these blades is the way they overlap onto the hilt.
We want to have a decently hard edge there, so the flames look like they are coming from
inside.
To handle this, I have created a mask of the hilt area, which we can drop in right above
the particle layers.
I created this animated mask very quickly using mocha Hitfilm, and I hope to do a little
tutorial later showing this process.
Whether you use mocha or HitFilm’s built-in masks, the main thing is to have some sort
of mask there, so that the end of the particle stream doesn’t fluctuate as new particles
appear and begin to move.
Right now the mask stands out a bit, since there is no glow on it, but the lightning
and gunfire layers will fix that in our next steps.
Now, to make the blade even more aggressive and malfunctiony, we will add some lightning.
Create a new grade layer named Lightning, again starting at 4:12, and add the Lightning
& Electricity effect to it.
Assign the start and end of the lightning effect, to the hilt and tip points, respectively.
Let's dial in the color right away, so the effect blends better and we can more easily
gauge the other adjustments we make.
Normally lightning would have a white core, or close to it, but in this case we want it
to be bright orange.
255, 54, 0 are the values I used for the core, then for the glow the color is a bit more
red, at 181, 6, 0.
We want the Lightning to parallel the blade, and only barely move outside of the blade
as it moves.
So as we adjust the shape, scrub through the timeline to get a good sense of how far the
Lightning is moving away from the blade’s center.
Bring the Wave scale way down, to 0.02, which keeps the overall shape relatively straight,
and the twitch scale to 0.07, which adds a bit of smaller randomness along the arc.
Set the width to 3, for both the Start and end of the lightning effect.
Remove all branches by setting the quantity to 0, then in the core, set opacity to 0.45,
and feather to 1.
For the glow, bring opacity down to 0.25, radius to 0.4, feather up to 1, and remove
any smoothing by setting it to 0.
In the animation settings, increase the speed to 2, so it's moving quickly, jitter to 2,
and scale to 1.5.
That gets our Lightning shape dialed in.
It was a bit of trial and error to bring balance to the... wave, twitch, and animation scale
settings, but those are the values I settled on.
Now we need to animate the start of this effect.
The Lightning doesn't really need to appear until the blade is fully extended, so really
we just need to turn it on.
At 4:17, enable keyframing for the Trunks property, then step back one frame and set
Trunks to 0.
Now, with the particle blades, we duplicated the layer for the crossguard.
In this case, rather than duplicating the layer, we will duplicate the Lightning effect
twice, rename them Left and Right, then assign them to the right and left points so they
track onto the quillons correctly.
This helps keep the timeline more organized, as all three of these effects are now sitting
on one layer, and all of our lightning is easily accessible there.
For the right and left effects, move the Trunk key frames so those two Lightning effects
appear at 5:09.
You might think this is the last step of the effect, but no, there is another.
The last thing we want to do is use our gunfire effect to create a subtle bit of flame coming
off the blade.
Turn the Gunfire effect back on, and drag it to the top of the layer stack.
In the appearance, change the texture to the Sig-Sauer, and bring the color to a dark red,
at values of 149,5,48.
Adjust the color variation to 7%.
Now to dial in the Core shape.
Bring scale down to 40%, so the individual particles are smaller.
We already have our length and Radius set, so leave that, but set the Length Taper to
50%, then set the Radius Taper to 100, which mostly removes the taper, so that the width
of the effect is more consistent from end to end.
Set Intensity to 15 to keep the flames subtle, and increase the Secondary number to 1800,
to give them more volume.
I'm going through these settings from top to bottom so it's easy to follow along, but
it's important to remember that when you are designing the effect you won't usually go
in order like that, you will jump around, and that is perfectly fine.
On the Side Flares, I will follow the order of adjustments more naturally, so you can
see better how I would approach this process.
We mainly want to make the side flares match the core, so the settings will be similar.
First I reduce the jitter, to tighten the effect up.
25 looks pretty good.
Then bring the intensity down around 25 as well.
To get the width more consistent, we will bring the radius taper up to 100.
The effect gets a bit too big then, so reduce the radius to 60.
Now we can reduce the intensity more, to 15.
Increase the Secondary to 82, to create more flames in the effect.
There is a bit of a bulge in the center of the quillon, so pull the Length Taper down
to 23 or so.
That looks pretty good, but the scale is still at 80 for the side flares, and we used 40
for the core.
It's up to you whether you want to adjust that further.
You could bring the scale down, then increase the secondary to 200 or so to fill things
back in.
I think I'm going to leave the scale larger, I like the way that looks.
The last thing to do is keyframe the arrival of the Gunfire effect.
Move the playhead to 4:17, where the blade is first fully extended, and enable keyframing
for the Active state of the Core, then step back one frame and deactivate.
We will use the same process for the side flares; at 5:07, enable keyframing for Active,
then step back one frame and deactivate.
Now to add some movement into the flames, we will keyframe the Seed.
At 4:12, enable keyframing for the seed property, in the Appearance controls.
Then move to the last frame, and set the seed to 500.
And there you go.
Most Impressive.
The visuals are now in place.
To finish off this shot, I have included three lightsword sounds I built, which you can align
with the ignition of the three blades.
These are made up mainly of the sound of a blowtorch igniting, an air compressor hissing,
and an ice cube sizzling in a pan of oil.
I also threw together a bit of score that you can drop behind the shot, just for fun.
Don’t forget to adjust the levels of the audio tracks to get the mix dialed in nicely,
and you should end up with a pretty cool final shot.
I’m Axel Wilkinson, for Hitfilm.com, and thanks for watching.
May the force be with you.
Don’t forget to check out Axel’s accompanying tutorial, which shows how he easily rotoed
the saber handle in mocha.
Thanks for watching, and make sure you subscribe if you don’t want Kylo Ren to have a strop
and smash up your room.