UDK Lightsaber Effect Version 1.0 – Showing Off
This is me just gloating a little and making a sort of progress report of how this one project is going. It’s far from done I admit, but the basics are in place. I know I said that it took me a year to make this but when you look at the Node network it’s only 5 expressions hooked into the Emissive channel. Here is a correction, It’s taken me a year of experimentation to finally figure out just how to make it work and it wouldn’t be possible for me had I not asked on 3D Buzz and actually got some reasonable answers from two people there. Anyways Enjoy and if you want to know how I did this I’ll make a tutorial of how I got this far real soon.
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Not bad. It turned out nice.
Love it
every one goes to 3dbuzz, where would we be with out it X)
@1992Death
Thanks you.
Yes, 3DBuzz has been good to me these past few years. And the buzz guys as well what with their books and video tutorials. Great stuff there…
Nice Light Saber i love the glow ^_^
@micahpharoh
thank you very much, I’m still working on this little side project but my time is pretty much split between teaching myself how to program and other projects.
Hope to have more up on video later.
@natmaxex
Hahaha… Yes i love the glow too, but still i feel it’s far from finished at the moment.
thank you for the comment and I’ll see what I can do about freeing up a little more time to work this out.
@ninjabuntu well its looking fantastic so fare ^_^
@natmaxex
Again thank you very much, I’ve pretty much have gotten nothing but solid positive feedback.
All of which feed my ego and makes me feel all warm and special… HEHEHE…
But really all the feed back has been great and I just want to make sure to thank everyone properly and personally.
Take care…
@ninjabuntu that’s cool XD
did a good job maybe create a light inside of the object to control brightness
why did it take you a year?
@wildboy789789 It’s take me a year to figure out how to do it not tho make it work. to make it work really takes only a few seconds once you know how. Mostly is a a being to proud to ask for help and once I asked for it, I got a lot of good ideas of how to get it working, and once it started working it came together all really quickly.
@animeadict17 His Kizmet is controlling brightness via the Emissive.
The flicker problem is probably related to the DOF settings. I don’t know enough about the DOF controls to help you with specifics, but that flicker screams “depth of field error”.
very nice i’m currently working on doing the same thing. one suggestion i have, seeing your working in maya, use blend shapes to your advantage. i recently read about a way to get blend shapes from maya into UDK. use google use should find it fast enough. good luck with future projects.
@ryanc0boy:
I have thought about using Blender Shapes for this actually for the ignite animation and a few other things… i have a few tutorials about how to do this in UDK however if you have some more I’m always willing to see other ways of doing things. but I have a feeling that we are referring to the same tutorial. Never the less, please share your tutorials links.
@animeadict17:
This effect does not really cast any actual light, to make the brightness higher, you just ramp up the node that controls the emissive’s overall value. It is already set really rather high, but it can always go much higher if you want it to.
However i have toyed with the idea of having a dynamic light attached to the blade linked to the blades color somehow so that it can actually cast off some real light to a point. I would want to keep the area of effect really rather tight.
@wyldhunt:
thanks!
=)
@wyldhunt:
Thank you very much. I’ll read up on DOF controls and see if that’s the problem. I now have a good lead to track down and see if that is the error.
Next: I have kept on tweaking this set up since this video was posted, the Network is a little more complex but it’s not that hard to do. it’s just a matter of getting everything arranged right.
Lastly: I used this same effect to make a sort of tracer effect for a blaster like weapon in game. OKAY! I’ll admit, it was a Star Wars Blaster!
Something else… If you want to import it as an actual equipable weapon, you should import it as a psk dynamic model. You’ll need a bone in the handle to use as the socket that snaps to the characters hand. The added benefit of using a dynamic model is that you can now use anim trees. If you make a second model that’s just the handle without the blade, you can use Morph Targets (Google that one
). The blade can animate and shoot out of the hilt when equiped.
@wyldhunt:
As of this video’s posting which was a little while ago, I was just experimenting with the UDK’s Materials Editor. Importing this model for a static made sense to me at the time for testing. When/If I end up making this a usable weapon I’ll be importing it fully boned and at least blend shaped.
The goal was originally just to make a simple sword swinging short 3rd person survival adventure, that goal has been put on hold for the time being. Still thank you so much for the ideas.