My experiments with light saber glows...

Hi guys,

I was doing animation for a little short I was doing, which involved a CGI darth vader with saber. I was kinda amazed that I couldn't find a decent tutorial for a saber that satisfied me. The ones I found included a illuminated cylender with 1 glow filter applied. So I started fooling around with different settings, borrowing some from an after effects tutorial I found in the films forum. Here's what I ended up with.


This is a saber model using a tapered cylynder. The cylender material is just a all almost white diffuse with falloff set to OUT=100 Type additive.

I turned on object motion blur.

In vid post, I created the cam object with image blur set to frames=1, dither-40%, duration=4

I created 3 glow filters.
#1 set to size 8 intens=50
#2 set to size 5 inten=70
#3 set to size .5 inten=100 color is almost white.



clickie for divx test 1


For this test, all settings are the same except I turned off image motion blur and increased the duration of object mo blur from .5 to 2

clickie for divx test 2


What I'm missing is the nice flow of white that the blad should produce as it swishes through the air.

Test 1 is fluid, but the duration isn't long enough for me.

Test 2, the duration is good, but the white swish isn't smooth.

Am I being over critical? A friend here said it looked alright, but something looks wrong.

Anyone want to wade in here with ideas?

IMHO, the first is too flat looking, and at the top you can see the saber tip jerking along. The second... it's pretty obvious. Keep up the good work.

-Olen