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[Suppastar]

Hello,


 How would i go about making a lightsaber blade? Like the one in this video (Blender)

The guy that made the is using (Halos?) in blender. What is a halo and can Anim8or do them too? Can anim8or even do anything close to this without having 3000 lights everywhere to make it look like it's glowing?

[ENSONIQ5]

This would warrant some experimentation, as the "halo" function is not available in Anim8or.  One possibility would be a set of 4 or 5 concentric cylinders, all of them having a high emissive material value, and all but the centre one having transparency, the transparency value of each increasing towards to outermost cyclinder.  A single local light source, set near the centre of the "blade", would suffice to illuminate the surroundings.  I am sure there are other solutions too, including post-rendering enhancement in Corel or Illustrator, or similar.

[Maxfield]

Another way is to make a texture of a white strip on a black background, then blur it a few times. Apply this texture to a flat thin plane, and adjust the ambient, emissive and transparency settings till it looks like a flat lightsaber blade. Copy and paste the plane, rotating it about its long end, till you have a "turbofan" type structure. This will look rounded from most angles.

If you make each of the planes a slightly different width, and rotate the blade on its hilt, you'll get more of a realistic flickering effect.

The advantage of this method is that you can have a truly smooth halo, rather than a stairsteppy one.

[Maxfield]

Oh, and the material settings:

AMBIENT: 2 - colour 147,189,0 - LS tex.jpg set on DARKEN

DIFFUSE: 0

SPECULAR: 0

EMISSIVE: 1 - colour 255,255,255 - LS tex.jpg set on DECAL

TRANS: 1 -  LS tex.jpg set on DECAL

[thecolclough]

maxfield's method does have the advantage of looking better (ie. non-stairsteppy), but only if you view it side-on.  look at it end-on, and it all goes to pieces.

i prefer a concentric-cylinder approach similar to the one advocated by ensoniq, although i use 10 or so layers to make it smoother, and when i built some (which you can download from here, if you want ), i also put some half-sphere meshes at the end to make it rounded.

just my two cents' worth

- colclough

[jdonzae]

would you be able to get the same effect using a plain old cylinder?

[thecolclough]

not really - you wouldn't get the effect of the colours being stronger towards the core of the blade if you only had one cylinder.

well, i suppose it might be feasible if you used texture maps, but it'd probably only look any good from one side, which is a bit rubbish if you want to animate the thing.

- colclough

[Orange Pickle]

I tried using Maxfield's way of making a lightsaber but when I rendered it nothing showed except a background. I tried making the material twice and got the same result!
I used the texture Maxfield used. Does anyone know why nothing showed?


here is the an8:

[dube1503]

another way to get the lightsaber effect would be just to make a normal cylinder coming out of ur handle and then u could render the image of movie file out and then rotoscope the image,  using photoshop or some equivalant.   rotoscoping is how they create the lightsaber effects in the movies and it is quite effective.

here is a tutorial for rotoscoping http://www.alienryderflex.com/rotoscope/

hope that might help =]

[Deraga]

nice

[Medieval Films]

Obviosly you can make the handle of the saber in anim8or but the light I'm not sure. What you could do is find a simple video effects creator. Most effects creators can create a line of line with ease. I use particle illusion by wondertouch. It cost quite a bit of money but the effects are really good.
Of coarse there are other editers for a lower cost that can do pretty much the same.