Laser beam howto?

Support Basics & Interface
#1

How can I make a laser beam in blender like in https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7492 ?

I found a tutorial on the net months ago, but I can’t find it now. I googled about it and only found this:http://www.ingiebee.com/Blendermania/tutorial_list.html, only a item says “Laser Tutorial MeKenzie Martin Blender Intermediate”, but no link.

Thanks in advance.

#2

Actually that tutorial was originally in the old Blendermania.com site and was lost after the site went down… I think I found it somewhere else, but it was actually a German translation of the tutorial and I can’t find the url anymore…

I know that IngieBee had personaly contacted the author, to see if he could send her the tutorial, but that was a long time ago and it seems that McKenzie has forgoten all about it…

It’s not something too difficult, if I remember well, you “play” a little bit with halo’s…

Basically you start by adding a plane, then go in edit mode and delete three of the four plane’s vertices… Then put your cursor to where you want your laser to end and press Ctrl+Left Mouse Button… You’ll see that you have 2 vertices connected with a simple straight line…

Now Subdivide (with both vertices selected, press W and choose subdivide), this line, several times (6-10 times or even more, depending how long your laser is going to be…).

Now the tricky part…

Go to the Material buttons and change the material to halo, press the “Lines” button and adjust the halo settings like this:

  • Halo colour settings: R=1.000 G=0.000 B=0.000
  • Lines=2
  • HaloSize=0.20 (not sure about it, play a little bit with that to see where you get the best resault…)

I hope this helps…

#3

Thanks alot, that really helps.
But I can’t control the lines’ direction. So instead of Lines I enabled HaloTex, and applied a blend type texture(sphere) to it.

I’ve tried to use a lin type blend texture which has a brighter inner glow, but that restricts rotation of the laser beam.

#4

I believe it was called ‘we have lasers!’. I’ll do a keyword search,…brb

here it is: http://vc.bc.ca/~kingsland/blender/tutorials/lasers/Blender%20tutorial%20We’ve%20got%20lasers!.htm
You’ll need to copy and paste the link.

#5

Use a blend texture and choose “Halo” instead of “Lin”… Press the “colorband” button and add only two colors, red or blue (for example…) as color 0 and white as color 1…

With the white color as active, set the Pos (colourband buttons…) around 0.700 and that should do the trick for you…

Now you can rotate your laser beam wherever you want, without having the texture flipping…

That’s the easiest solution I could think of…

Keep Blending… :smiley: