Lightsaber Emagine Entry

Lightsaber

The past few months I've been working on a lightsaber. Within the video I modeled it, I textured everything, made a moving camera, and also wrote the song for this animation. After I completed my house the move Star Wars Episode VII came out, getting me into the Star Wars mood. So I decided to just make a lightsaber.

Tutorial

I started by extruding a cylinder to the size I wanted it to be. After that I took a second cylinder and added several faces to it. With the several faces on it I pulled them up giving an area for where the light from the lightsaber would go. It starts out short and goes taller and taller as the tip goes on. Once I managed to get the tip to look the way I wanted it to look, I made a cylinder and rounded the top and textured it green. But when I rendered it out the lightsaber looked like a popsicle not a lightsaber. I had no clue how to add a glow to it. I found a couple of videos on how to do it but some did not explain very well how to do it. I found a glow intensity setting on Maya and it worked beautifully. It looked like a lightsaber!

Above you can see a cylinder with the
edges stretched out

Now that I had a good top and a lightsaber, I needed to add some grips and buttons. The grips for me took a little while, I had to make each one basically the exact. I probably made it harder than what it had to be. I extruded and remembered each of the numbers that changed. I also wanted to smooth out the edges, so I beveled out the edges and made it look like more of a grip. If I remember right I believer there are about 5 grips.

Once the grips were done I wanted to go around the lightsaber and add some detailed buttons. I booleaned a small hole in each of the areas for buttons and screws. I made the screw by just extruding a square on a rounded tip cylinder. A few more details to add, a lot of it is just personal preference.

Overall

Overall this project was really fun to work on. I enjoyed ever minuet of it and I didn't run into too many problems. It  was just a fun project to occupy my time very well.