I know a few people out there can rotoscope lightsabers onto video in blender and some have made incomplete tutorials, is there a complete one out there somewhere?
Anyone?
Anyone?
I noticed that there is a VSE plug-in for a light-saber effect. Here is a link if you haven’t already seen it:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Sequence_Plugins#Lightsaber_Plugin_Effect
There really is no “trick” to doing it. You just make your sabre mesh(s) and move them to match the video every frame. Yes, this is extremely boring. After you get bored, render it with motion blur (IMHO, it is also good to do some node work with the rendering). Then, use the sequencer or compositor (probably the better choice), and render again.
I know how to do the effect, but how do you move the vertices? Like, how do you set the keyframes for the individual vertices? And how do you do masking for when the saber goes behind something?
Fot the light saber rotoscoping I would try to make rig of tube(shape of lightsaber) and two end points were my controls (this need a rig with two empty object on the end of tube both constrained to the tube and one of them would have half influence - this achieve something like 2 point constrain in XSI) and start with four view editing(one - video and the rest only for you to see what is the lightsaber doing…
For the masking here is a link…
http://www.weirdhat.com/blender/compositing2/
…where show how to mask your object in scene by another and also animated
I think I’ve just figured the vertices out, I could make vertex groups for each one and give them each a bone. If anyone knows an easier way, I would be thankful. And thanks for that bit on maskin/composting Paya!