Hello,
I’m new to Blender and need your advice on some issues (posted previously on other forum, sadly with no reply) Here’s the first one:
In tutorials on making a light saber they usualy advise to make the neon part by putting meny vertices in a row and turning the halo effect on.
Surely it is nonsense to use more than two poits to define a line or anything concerning a line. So how can I use halo effect on a line/curve?
(any help appreciated 
)
Hi,
Welcome to Blender and welcome to these boards!
Please note, News and Discussion isn’t the place to post questions such as these - people are more likely to answer your query if it appears in the right place.
Halos operate on vertices, not edges or curves. You’ll need to subdivide your edge so there are lots of vertices running down it.
Thanks,
i will try to move from News and Discussion, sorry.
Vertices and edges are so close geometrically and making a glowing line by putting redundant data ( points on the line ) seems so stupid. It’s really really hard to believe it must be done this way 
A halo is like a circle that is active on a vertice. In other words, each vertex is displayed as a ‘halo’ (which is generically a little circle, but many effects are possible with textures and dynamic shadows and such). So, you have to have a lot of circles to make up the beam. Another way to do it would be via a cylinder (with few vertice’s, if you like) and use render layers and glow from nodes to get it to work. However, assuming you are a beginner, i’d use halo’s, and get into nodes a little later. Once you get materials 
BTW: To turn on the ‘Halo Effect’, simply click ‘Halo’ in the material’s buttons window
If you’re talking about the tutorial that i think you are, it was written before arrays and such, which are definitely the way to go for lightsabers.
Make and array that conforms to a curve object that is a straight line with two hooks (one at each end) and then you can control orientation and length of the blade.
I will check a filtered cylinder and an array methods. Both seems acceptable ( by the way I study programming at university probably that the reason I seek optimalization in this task) Thank you!
Using a cylinder don’t give a general answer to the problem as I still need a mesh.
Still I see no reason for restricting halo to the point and not allowing me to iluminate for example a bezier curve or other non-mesh object.
Well thanks to Jason H I have learned arrays - but the idea is still based on duplicating mesh structure and not logical reduction of the line definition. It also destroy abstract idea of an edge because you have to use points to imitate its Halo. Rendering of line should be made by the program not the user.
But (optimistically) learning arrays gives me yet another question.
Well I’ll be. I was doing a lightsaber test last night and it’s potentially come in handy twice this morning. And I thought I was wasting my time…
http://www.cdupload.com/files/39403_crk12/TurnLightsaber1.MOV
Method is a cylinder of bright white, pass index of 1, separated from the rest of the layer, blurred, changed to green, then blended back over the rest of the render with screen/add.
Only one render layer needed. I found that with the halos it didn’t render right with a character that had strand hair.
For the lighting though, there is a single ‘line’ of verticies with a weak point light dupliverted along it.
For next time, one of the support forum sections is probably better suited for this sort of thread.
(BTW, most of the nodes in that file are more to do with gamma correction etc.)
Lightsabers come in handy that’s true.
(May the Force be with you, BenDansie)
Funny I had just this problem with neon writing yesterday. I kept the Curve path and used ramps (input ‘result’) to make it semi-transparent then put the glow on in composite nodes. I could animate the writing effect with the curve better than using an animated mask in materials. good luck using the right category next time, dont worry I get moved too 