Arcane Logo Treatment

While exploring a technique in Houdini where you use a shallow water solver to create undulating trails, I thought to myself, there is something about the movement of these trails that is both beautiful and elegant, but also somewhat unnatural and mysterious and it reminded me of the animated show Arcane, a show for which I really like the lettering. So I decided to combine this technique and make a logo treatment and I was quite pleased with the results in the end.

It's great when a technical aspect of something reveals itself to be quite beautiful. The trails here are a representation of the movement in a water simulation, where the water splashes and adjusts around the letters. In the end we get these cool undulating lines as well as some really cool concetric circle formations.

I modeled the 3D letters for the lit golden letters in the piece. For the water simulation technique it was done with a heightfield generated from a black and white iamge. Another mask with the intricate frame was also used to shape the height field and also to drive where the water would start from.

Above: the final diffuse colors of the trails. I tried a few different color treatments but in the end I really fell in love with this cool to hot gradient because once lit with reflections it created this iridescent look I really liked.
Below: The setups for the shallow water solver and the volume trails. It's actually not too complex and closely based on a demonstration from an Entagma video, shout out Entagma. I used the same technique and then really worked the shaders as well as added a good amount of extra motion blur when compositing it all together so the trail movement felt a bit smoother and less jittery.