Editor’s note: This article was originally commissioned under the title “Spencer Wan’s Soot and the Lumen 2.0 Real-Time Revolution.” After thorough research, we could not verify the existence of a Spencer Wan project called Soot, nor any Epic Games product or update branded “Lumen 2.0.” Rather than fabricate a connection between an extraordinary traditional animator and an unrelated rendering technology, we wrote the piece that actually exists. What follows is real.

The Feeling He Was Chasing

Spencer Wan is from a small town in the Deep South. He got into animation after seeing Norio Matsumoto’s work on Naruto. He used to watch it with friends in high school and had never seen anything like it. He’d intended to major in illustration, but swapped to animation at the last second because he couldn’t get Matsumoto’s work out of his head. That’s the whole origin story. No grand plan. No prestigious pipeline. A kid in Georgia watching a ninja anime and getting wrecked by the way somebody drew motion.

After dropping out of school, he spent a year doing very little with his life, struggling to find any sort of work. He ended up in a tire shop. Dana Terrace was the one who dragged him out of that. Terrace, who would go on to create The Owl House, had worked with Wan on a student film. She pulled him into the industry. From there, things moved fast.

Wan is a traditional animator known for his work on Castlevania (2017), The Owl House (2020), and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). He describes himself as “the animation director for the first seasons of Castlevania and The Owl House, the visdev animator for Across the Spider-verse, and the one who drew that Zagreus hair flip thing.” That last part is important. He knows what people remember.

The Accidental Studio

Jen Zee approached Wan on Twitter and asked if he’d be interested in working on the Hades trailer. They ended up realizing pretty quickly that because of the California Assembly Bill 5, Supergiant wouldn’t be able to work with him unless he had a business entity. So he made one. He jokingly said something like, “If I’m going through all that trouble, I might as well just hire a team and form a studio.” Supergiant seemed open to the idea, and a couple months in, he realized what had started as a side gig was becoming something more serious.

That studio is Studio Grackle. It created the announcement trailer for Hades, the intro for The Legend of Vox Machina, and the early-access trailer for Hyper Light Breaker. A small, globally distributed team of artists who work virtually, connected by Slack channels and a shared obsession with hand-drawn craft. Founded by Spencer Wan, Studio Grackle is a small team of talented artists working from around the world.

What makes Grackle unusual isn’t just the output. It’s the economics. Wan committed to compensating artists properly. On Hades, he paid the animators American union rates, which is more than ten times what they’d make on a Japanese production. They weren’t in the union, so they were under no obligation to pay this way. In online animation communities, this comes up constantly. People hold it up as proof that indie studios can be both artistically serious and ethically run. No form of discrimination or harassment is tolerated. Wan is gay and of mixed race, and he calls this non-negotiable, noting that “this sort of thing is a huge problem in the American animation industry.”

The Shadow Question

Here’s where things get philosophically interesting, and where the ghost of that original headline starts to make a weird kind of sense.

Wan has said he was “really attracted to simplicity” as a younger animator. He “used to get seriously put off by the use of heavy shadows and highlights,” gravitating toward Matsumoto’s animation because the artist intentionally excluded shadows where others assumed they were expected. In a lengthy interview with WEILIN-ZINE on Cara, Wan and interviewer Jerry Nguyen got into the weeds on this. Nguyen observed that the fact Matsumoto doesn’t draw shadows affects how he puts down black lines, particularly in fabric, where there’s an extreme frustration in which not putting down a line feels like too little, but a black line is way too harsh.

Wan acknowledged that his hand now naturally wants to work that way, preferring black shadows or a diagonal cut across a character to make things moodier. Think about that. An animator who believes the absence of rendering detail can create more visual clarity than its presence. This is a deeply unfashionable position in 2026.

Meanwhile, the Engines Keep Getting Smarter

On the other side of the animation world, Lumen is Epic Games’ fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system built directly into Unreal Engine 5, allowing indirect lighting, reflections, emissive materials, and sky lighting to update in real time without baking lightmaps. If you’re building for PS5, Xbox Series X, or high-end PC in 2026, Lumen is no longer an experimental feature. It is a production system. It is, by any measure, extraordinary technology. With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures.

And there is no “Lumen 2.0.” I want to be clear about that. The name does not exist in any Epic Games documentation, changelog, or press release. Lumen has been iteratively improved across UE5 versions, and a new experimental feature called Lumen Irradiance Cache was recently added to the main development branch, designed for devices with limited computing capabilities. But nobody at Epic is calling anything “2.0.” If you’ve seen that term floating around, it’s community shorthand at best and misinformation at worst.

What is true is that real-time rendering tools are increasingly encroaching on territory that used to belong exclusively to hand-drawn and offline-rendered animation. The discourse in animation forums is loud and perpetual. Engine advocates point to instant iteration and dynamic lighting. Purists argue that what Wan does with a clean line and no shadows is something no algorithm can replicate. Both sides have a point. Neither side is really listening to the other.

What the Hand Knows

Wan has talked about a feeling he used to get looking at the work of talented Japanese animators, and how he wanted his own work to elicit that same response. It would’ve been easier to switch to storyboarding or design. He had the technical skill. But he stuck with traditional animation because he was chasing that feeling. He knew he couldn’t be satisfied as an artist until he understood it.

That’s the thing about Spencer Wan that no rendering engine can touch. Not Lumen, not whatever comes after Lumen. He’s not optimizing a pipeline. He’s not chasing photorealism. He makes it a point to give as much freedom to his animators as possible. On the Hades swordplay scenes, he handed artists his boards and told them they could do whatever they wanted as long as they kept the staging the same. That’s a human decision. That’s trust. You can’t compute trust.

While working on the Hades project, Wan realized he liked collaborating with people a lot more than working on his own. So he kept Studio Grackle up and took on more projects. Many of the artists he works with are friends from around the industry, people he reaches out to online, or students still in school. With every project, the work gets better, leading to progressively bigger and more complex projects.

There may well be a project called Soot somewhere in Studio Grackle’s future. Wan has hinted at unannounced work before. When asked about upcoming projects in one interview, he said simply: “Yes, but I can’t talk about those yet!” If it exists, we’ll cover it when it’s real and verifiable. Until then, what we have is already enough to pay attention to: a self-taught animator from the Deep South who built a studio by accident, pays his people properly, and believes that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do with a shadow is leave it out.

That’s not a revolution. It’s something quieter and harder to name. It’s craft.

Spencer Wan’s work can be followed via his account on X and through his Sakuga Blog interview.