Lightsabre tutorials
This month, two mini tutorials were published on Elysiun on how to make a lightsabre in Blender.
AniCator tries a different approach: he uses two halo spotlights with a low distance setting to get the glow effect.
I haven’t tried AniCator’s technique, but I would think that Jason’s approach is easier to control and it will probably render faster as well. Still, it’s cool to see how you can achieve the same effect in two radically different ways. If you have another way to create a lightsabre, don’t be too shy to share it here!
hey, this is awesome!
the only way i’ve been able to do it is on Adobe After Effects, but that renders a HUGE file! this will be much better.
I think doing it pn postproduction will be better. You can make new empty scene, link lightsabre object to this new scene, then blur sabre in sequencer and put it over original image.
My technique was actually made for myself because I couldn’t work with Halo Materialled LightSabers. So I made a different technique.
But I think Jason G’s technique is better. The lightsaber of him is more volumetric (I think)
My technique is volumetric, actually. Put your camera looking at a shallow angle on the tip of a saber made with halos, you can see the buildup of the halos. (volumetric!)
Being a huge fan of the node-based compositing found in recent 2.41 test builds, I used a system of nodes to both blur a green tube and add the white highlight in the middle. Perhaps a little cumbersome, but… nodes are sweet and (once it’s set up) is very easy to use as a layer in a larger composite.