I’m new to Blender only about a year and have spent maybe 60 hours in the program until this week. Anyway I’m trying to make a laser that will hit a cd/dvd and do a kinda of virtical scan of the disc. I have my disc and i have my red laser. The only problem i have is my laser goes through my disc. Unless i put the laser (light) so far a way that it doesn’t have the power and, then it is to thick to look lik a laser. My disc is reflective using a reflective tutorial. I hope i have given enough info.
thanks
What is your laser source? Spot light? particles?
I tried using a spotlight with angle of 1 (too much for laser) and shadow buff on. color = red, and halo = on. My cube stopped the beam (didn’t stop it if it was a ray shadow type).
Particles could be used too, but it would take more time if you wanted to animate the direction and length/life of the “beam” - but it wouldn’t have an angle, and therefore more direct like a laser.
i tried the spot with angle of 1 as well and halo on. I haven’t tried particles yet. Im not real good with particules yet. As a matter of fact i have not done anything with them yet. I guess i have a lot more reading to do.
I’ve spent the past five years trying to make good laser beams in blender, usually getting really ticked and opening up After Effects and doing it the old fashion rotoscoping way…or opening Lightwave and doing it that way…
Anyway, the new particle system and wind feature can make it pretty simple.
If you have questions, let me know and I can upload a sample .blend file to simulate what your trying to do…
At some point I should become the unofficall “laser” guy around here…
Well I don’t have lightwave but i do have AF but i need to learn a lot more about particals. They seem to be a key part of Blender.
I would like to see a laser though.
Here is one way to do a laser effect that looks decent.
Add a plane and delete all but 2 vertices.
Sub-divide it about 20 times
Add a material set the color to desired color.
Add a clouds texture to the material
Set the texture size to 5 on on x,y and z
Change the color of the texture to black
Turn on the emit on the Map To of the material panel
Change the Shader to Halo and and turn on Shaded, X Alpha, HaloTex
Change the size of the Halo to .2 to .1 (adjust as needed)
Next set some IPO curves up for the OFS’s (xyz) of the texture to animate it.
Ok that sets up the beam
Next you need it to glow
Now Ctrl Right Arrow over to the sequence editor. Add
the current scene into the edit HOT Key is SHIFT A
Add the scene then Shift A and add effect and choose the glow effect
Hit N to change properties on the glow effect
Change the Boost to 8 or higher
Change the Threshold to less than .1 or lower
Don’t forget to turn on the Do Sequence on the Render panel and then render your frame or animation
By the way sequence instructions above will make everything in your scene glow not just the beam. There is a way to seperate it out. Let me know if you need to know how.
i’m using particals as pulse weapons. how do you get rid of the speed up of the particals. i need them to be a constant speed
Digidamn-By the way sequence instructions above will make everything in your scene glow not just the beam. There is a way to seperate it out. Let me know if you need to know how.
Please tell me how in the world you do this. I have been wanting to know how to make just one object glow in your scene at a time. This has been killing me for an extremely long time.
Check this site out, the second video on the page shows you how to isolate objects that you want to glow.
http://mke3.net/archives/2004/08/live_on_camera.html
Many thanks to Matt as this video got me started on using the sequencer
However to get a really good glow effect you have to take it a bit further than what is in the second video. Otherwise if your glowing object pass behind something “solid” you still see the glow shining through the solid object.
What you will do is render all your scenes in premul so you can use the alpha channel
See this link from elysiun
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=562317#562317
What you want to do is render all the objects that glow with boost only,
then render them normally without the glow at all. Next combine those 2 renderings with the ADD effect in the sequencer.
Now go back and render your scene with just the objects that don’t glow.
Ok now take that scene plus the scene that was created with the add effect of the previous mentioned scenes and put them in the squencer, this time add them with ALPHA OVER effect when selecting the 2 scences make sure you select the non-glowing object scene second as it matters which will come out on top.
By doing the above steps the glow will not come through “solid” objects.
Hope this helps.
Digidamn
Wow!!! Thank you so much. You don’t know how happy I am right now. (I just jumped so high that I smashed through the ceiling.) Again thank you:)