Lightsaber effect

[kg9491]

does anyone know how to make the best light saber blade effect? i'm kind-of limited to imovie and photoshop cs.

[kene555]

If you only have imovie and photoshop, you'll want to try and export your saber footage as a series of pictures, like a filmstrip. You will need to go frame by frame with the effect.

With Photoshop, import the frame. Then, create a new layer. On the blank layer, use the polygonal lasso tool to make a selection around the blade. When your selection is made, crawling lines will appear around it. Control'click the selection and chose the feather option. Use a feather radius of 2-5 for frames when the blade is pretty still. A radius of 10 or so when the blade is moving a lot. Next, go to the paint bucket and fill the selection with white. Then you can deselect the outline. Next, choose effects for your layer with the blade. Go to outer glow. Choose whichever color you want for your blade. Generally, it's a good idea to choose a color in the upper right-hand corner -- the purest form of the color. You can then experiment with opacity, blur, and intensity to get the best result.

http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/softwa ... hobson.asp
This link will teach you everything I haven't made too clear.

Here is an example of a movie I made for school using Photoshop for the blades.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 87&q=hoban
go to 7:32 and 10:44 and 16:54 to see some examples.

I later upgraded my lightsaber effect to Adobe After Effects 6.5 Here's an example of what it can do for sabers.


good luck and let us know how your projects are coming along!

[nigel101]

check out how2 cgi www.makingthefilm.net

[Grant]

LSMaker is a brilliant free program for lightsaber effects

http://lsmaker.uw.hu/page.php

Simple point and click effect to create each saber. He also has some other handy little free apps

Another good program which also handles muzzle flashes and particle effects is "FXhome VisionLab Studio", but this is not free though