Lightsaber

[anon18124415]

I finished watching Star Wars Episode 3 again this morning and realized: “Oh my God!!! I never made a 3D lightsaber! I’m a failure as an artist!!” :rolleyes:

I decided to challenge myself not to use raytracing, which is kind of risky when a metal shader is required (lots of reflections). So I resorted to using the old school reflection map with tangent specularity. You can see the above results. I’m fairly happy with how this turned out and would love to hear your opinions.

[Marsan]

Definetly not a failure of artist. I think the light is a bit sharp. It should be more diffuse or blur. The metal thingie is sweet!

[anon18124415]

Definetly not a failure of artist. I think the light is a bit sharp. It should be more diffuse or blur. The metal thingie is sweet!

Thanks! Yeah, I know the light core needs some blur. It’s because I used a mesh for it. If I use a mesh, I don’t get any light blur, but if I use halos, I don’t get any control over the shape of the tip. Meh! I’ll figure out composite nodes one of these days and blur it.

[Midian]

The funny thing is that I prefer the look of your blade to the way Star Wars has always done it. In the past it was simply technology limitations I think. This makes more sense to me considering they’re supposed to be comprised of highly concentrated crystals and whatnot…anyways, enough with the star wars diatribe I could potentially go off on.

For non-ray traced reflections, going back to the old style when we all had to fake it they look pretty damn good. Though up close some slight errors are present it’s not a bad job at all. The modeling of the saber handle is very good though the intensity of the halo around the blade could be less sharp. Anyway you cut it though, good job.

[anon18124415]

The funny thing is that I prefer the look of your blade to the way Star Wars has always done it. In the past it was simply technology limitations I think. This makes more sense to me considering they’re supposed to be comprised of highly concentrated crystals and whatnot…anyways, enough with the star wars diatribe I could potentially go off on.

For non-ray traced reflections, going back to the old style when we all had to fake it they look pretty damn good. Though up close some slight errors are present it’s not a bad job at all. The modeling of the saber handle is very good though the intensity of the halo around the blade could be less sharp. Anyway you cut it though, good job.

Heh, I didn’t really expect to see this thread ever again…

You have a good point about the sharpness of the light core, thanks. I never thought about realism, just replicating the movie version =p

Fake reflections are often better than raytraced reflections because there’s plenty of times when there’s nothing to reflect, even though it’s not as accurate. The reflection of a black background isn’t as interesting as my room set to greyscale and then warped to death in photoshop.