Ok i’ve tried to make a lightsabre blade(for rendered images) with halos but it didn’t work well up close and they didn’t animate well(scaleing).
so is there a really good technic to making convincing sabre blades that are animate-able(is that a word?)?
Maybe you should try with paricles.
Subdivide your Lightsabre mesh a couple of times, then add a particle effct.
There should be a lot of particles with very short lifetime.
I’ve made it that way once.
Try a plain mesh with a Blend texture…
Stefano
I think also that the particles could be good, but instead of making a huge particle system, try making the system from one vertice only…
I’ll try out, 'cos I can’t explain it well, and post the results here
edit:
okay, I made a really, really short tutorial (it basically only shows the settings I used):
http://www23.brinkster.com/ondoval/lights.html
The sabre “blade” is made only of single vertex placed right on top of the handle.
The purpose of making a ^huge particle system^ is - that the lightsabers leaves some kind of shadow (I guess thats the word). I’m talking about animating a saber. For still images one-vertice-particle-system is pretty good.
:o I should have been learning english more :o
Ahh, you mean the light “swoosh” that follows the blade? Yes, I think that then the huge particle system would be better. Render-time can be quite long though (at least on my machine…)
Now that I tested more, the best way of making static lightsabre blade (or one that doesn’t leave trail in the air when swung) would be making a line with two vertices, then subdividing it couple of times (4-5 times should be enough) and adding a halo material with white blend/halo texture to it.
Looks a LOT better than the one I made earlier… 
I have made all types of lightsabers in Blender, most of which didn’t work. However, do this: (WARNING: Mini-tutorial up ahead!)
Make a plane. Right Click on two vertices that are on one edge, and delete them. If your two leftover vertices are horizontal, rotate them so that they’re vertical.
Scale the edge to your desired length. Subdivide lots of times. Use a halo material for the blade. Make it shaded. IMPORTANT: Move it to a layer that only contains saber blades, unless you want blinding light for the surrounding objects!
Create a lamp, set it up so that it only affects one layer, and move it to the layer with the lightsaber. Bring up the energy level in the lamp buttons to the maximum of 10.000. Duplicate 3 times (one for each side).
Parent every lamp to the lightsaber. Parent the blade to the handle which is in another layer. Now you can move the handle, and the blade will move, with the middle white part moving along!
I haven’t seen the “Star Wars” movies in a long time. I think this is how they looked. Render the blade, and if it doesn’t work, go with another way.
This method is a bit complex, but it worked very well when I used it for an animation involving Darth Vader.
Yeah, this is another mini-tutorial.
Make your lightsaber handle.
Make a cylinder the same length as the blade you want, but pretty thin. This cylinder needs to be white, with emit on full, and shadeless.
Make another cylinder around the white one, and set it to the lightsaber color you want. It also needs to be shadeless with full emit.
You can animate the size of both blade components, parent them to the handle, etc.
Render your entire animation WITHOUT the lightsaber blade pieces (Move them to another layer). If you want this to look good, save it as a high-quality avi JPG (95-100), raw AVI, or image sequence.
Set all materials other than those of the lightsaber blade pieces to Env, so they won’t show up in the rendering. They will, however, keep pieces of the blade from showing up where they shouldn’t. (alternately, move all the lights to a layer that won’t be rendered, and turn off any emits or shadeless values.
Now, it’s time to set up the Glow plugin in the sequence editor (I don’t know any tuts for that offhand). Turn on “Only Boost” so only the glow shows up.
Move the outside blade to a layer that won’t be rendered. I am not sure exactly what values work, but play with the glow plugin until the glow is quite a bright halo that is not very diffuse. It should be white. Once this looks good, render another sequence with the rest of your scene. The only thing visible in the images this time should be a white glow that is clipped off by other objects in your scene.
(Repeat 8 with the outside). Move your inside blade to another layer so it won’t be rendered. Now, set up the glow so a fairly large, diffuse glow exists that’s not too bright. If you are rendering a red lightsaber, this glow should be red. Render this with the rest of your scene.
Ok, here’s the final step, compositing your three sequences. In the sequence editor, add your three sequences as follows (The order of addition matters little):
Add the inside and outside lightsaber blade sequences.
Add that to the scene without the blades.
If you want, you can experiment with rendering with alpha channels – it might look even better, but I’m not sure.
TADA! A lightsaber!
I am at Villanova right now, without my computer, so I can’t provide an example picture. If you need more info, ask Skates – he worked with me on the Darth Vader animation.
Make the Handle Then a cylinder (pretty thin) that slowly gets wider near the base and rounds… now make a plane, delete the verticies and add a line with two points at either end of the saber. subdivide and add a halo texture with the appropriate color, halo size about .9 and for effect u can add a single vertex to the bottom of your blade with a slightly bigger halo, parent the blade to the handle and the halos too the blade, and add a lamp with quite a bit of energy to add lighting and ur all set, motion blur dullens the whitness but it can be fixed in photoshop
and the blade has to be shadeless