In honor of the upcoming He-Man film I’ve designed a new Gesture Based Multi-Phase blade style in my Early Access Library to honor He-Man’s iconic transformation from the 80s cartoon.
I wanted to make a fully interactive style that honors the full transformation but allows it to be completely user controlled. In addition, I wanted to tie the music into the transformation so I expanded the options in the Blade Builder to allow for a Sound Loop to be toggled on/off depending on the active “Phase”.
For this style, I set up the Gesture Based Special Abilities to use the Incremental feature, which means each step has to happen in a specific order so that you can still use the blade normally after the transformation.
- It’s set up with a default Blue Rotoscope style: When you point the blade up and hold it for a short time it will trigger the Alt change, I’ve set up the altchng sound for Phase 1 to be the iconic “By the Power of Greyskull” quote along with the music cue and sound effects from the cartoon (forgive my quick Audacity shop job). There is a new Delay feature in the blade builder to delay the animation, this is so the quote can start as it did in the cartoon before the lightning and electricity animation begins. At the same time the new Sound Loop for the music will toggle on. This allows the music to play during the entirety of the blade being powered up.
- The interim “Powered Up” phase uses a new Electricity Ripple style with a Mirror Out modification to honor the original cartoon animation. For this alt phase I used an unstable blade font, the music will keep looping via the Sound Loop as well for however long you stay in this phase.
- To finalize the transformation you’ll hold the blade parallel, this will trigger the final phase change and plays the last altchng which is the “I have the Power” quote, electricty and Battle Cat roar along with the final “He-Man” chant like in the cartoon.
- The blade’s final form is a DeepSkyBlue rotoscope. This form will remain active until you do the Gesture control to revert to the default and start over. For my style I set the Revert gesture to Point Down and Ignite, but you can set anything you want to revert.
This style is only available on my Early Access library and I have the altchng and trloop sounds I made in Audacity available. I am definitely not a Font maker so hopefully one of our talented font makers create better versions, but I have the ones I used available, you’ll just need to add them to a font of your choosing and will need to set up alt000, alt001 and alt002 in the font to support the 3 Phase steps.
To learn how to build in the Early Access Library see here: https://youtu.be/CeYdL1nLV4M
