Upon request by an elysiun member for a tutorial on a lightsaber I made, I present:
This tutorial will be a quick summarization of how to set up a lightsaber blade made of halo materials and make it look good too.
Step 1:
Add a plane and delete two of the vertices and form a line like this:
Step 2:
Now Subdivide it a few times….
Step 3: Make another Line using the method of the first one and subdivide this one too, But make it slightly longer than the first line.
Step 4: Give the line you just made a new material and match these settings
Boy, I just finished making a halo lightsaber that I had this “brilliant” idea on how to make, and then after I’m all done i look on here because I remembered seeing a title that said halo sabers, so I thought i would take a look. My idea wasn’t original after all I made a saber blade instead of a row though, I think the row looks better. Heres my blade anyway, with motion blured action!
Check the third page of my Darth Vader lightsaber WIP topic for a little different halo settings. Vader saber (page 3) Instead of making the second line a little longer, I made it the same length and offset it a little bit.
I’m not sure if this would help, but I think if you just give the halo a blend texture set to halo, and change it to white, you won’t need a new blade for the core.
Thanks for the mini-tute, Jason G! Thot I’d give it a try in a refresh of my old rendition of b@rt’s “cutting thru steel” tutorial (now @ blendernation.com):
Nice job jason… i havent seen many tuts lately on these forums. Although i think this topic should go in the blender general section imo. Nice tut though… Im gona go try that effect with text.
edit: text idea is obviously not a good idea unless you manually create the text without the create text option or subdivide regular text carefully for certain area’s to balance it out…
you just gave me the best idea: put colored light bulbs in the maglight, and that’s your saber’s “glow” on the character who’s holding it! you could have flashlight duels, too!
May I know how you achieved this amazing laser sabre sound? :o
SocKsy:
I’m not sure if this would help, but I think if you just give the halo a blend texture set to halo, and change it to white, you won’t need a new blade for the core.
I have tried this method. It works, but you have to increase the halo size, and the white row of vertice is a bit more visible at the tip of the blade. You also can’t control the offset of the white area. this said, it is very simple to use. Halo Tex must be enabled, or you will get only a white spot on the middle of the blade!
I have tried to add Lines and Rings to the green halo material, and I got an interesting Excalibur effect that could be used for fantazy movies. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to animate the effect with a second texture (Wood with turbulence and an Ipo offset).
I’m not sure that halos supports multiple textures…
Thanks, ROUBAL. I’m still working on it: I want to set it up to allow the world color/tex to show thru where the steel’s been cut out, then shine a volumentric spot thru the cut slot, gettting progressively brighter, flashing out to white in the end. Any tips on getting the alpha’d area (the text) to be transparent? I’m probably gonna have to switch the texture bitmaps to be PNGs with a transparancy channel, but I’m not at all sure how to generate these. I’m looking at how to post-pro the existing ones in PS, but that sure would be tedious, unless I can batch process. (Reference the original tute here: http://www.blendernation.com/tutorials/blender-3d-intermediate-tutorial-cutting-through-steel)
As to the audio: I just googled for lightsaber WAVs. There’s a ton out there. Then I just added them in a vid editor (currently Pinnacle Studio 9+, sadly) to match the motions as best I could (with only two audio tracks…) More effort certainly could be done to improve this aspect, but for such a “fun-only” project, its not really worth the trouble.
Okay, I’m such an idiot. I had my premul turned on instead of sky. Now I just need to research/test how a volumetric spot interacts with the alpha’d portion…
Greetings:
JasonG, some parts are really easy to learn, the render nodes are just like any post-pro software, you have layers, blending modes, filters, etc… for this thingy it was my first try at the nodes and it took around 5 minutes to figure out how to do it