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View Full Version : Lightsaber in Maya mentalray

Sully
06-09-2006, 01:44 PM
What material setup would you guys use in maya to make a Lightsaber? Im originally a max user and in there you culd use the glare shader but in maya theres no such thing so how would I setup a material that glows hmmm, getting the bright light part is pretty simple but the glowing thing is confusing me...I presume I would have to use a volume shader for the glow and setup some kind of bounding box for the scatter of light but how would I make the light the shader of the lightsaber, I see in the area light properties there is a user shape you can use? how would you go about assigning your own geopmetry to it?...ANy other suggestions would be great!!
morphium
06-09-2006, 09:27 PM
You can create a gloweffect when you look in the special effects tab in your material attributes. I don`t know if this is the best way, but you can create a glowing material with this attribute.
Rens
06-09-2006, 10:36 PM
I'm not sure what kind of glow you're talking about. Basically there are three types of glow. Let's take the light saber as an example.

1) Glow from light coming from the object and illuminating the objects around it.
Like the light saber lighting up a wall or someone's face. The light on the wall would be the glow.
You can do this by turning up the incandescence of the material/shader way up (like a value of 10 or 20). Make sure you render with mental ray and have final gather enabled.
A quicker option would be to put ten or so point lights inside of the saber and set the appropriate falloff/decay. Make sure you set it up so the light doesn't get blocked by the saber's mesh.

2) Glow from light coming from the object and bouncing off small particles.
Like a light saber in a smoky or misty room. Think of the rays of light coming through windows in a church or something, a familiar image, that's this type of glow.
One way to simulate this is by using volume lights.

3) Glow from light coming from the object and bouncing off and reflecting inside the camera lens.
A lens flare is an example of this. A bloom around the reflection of the sun in chrome is another. This can look very similar to type 2) but is very different.
MR's glare shader is very good at this since it takes high range values into account, not too sure if it's also availabe in Maya. A very fast way to do this which can still be rather accurate is by faking it in Photoshop. Especially if you use a high range image (.hdr, .exr, ...) as your source image.
There's alot of info on how to do this on this site. I know I posted alot about it in the 3ds max section a year or so ago.

Types 1) and 2) can be blocked/occluded by objects inbetween the light source (saber) and the camera. Type 3) can not be blocked in this way unless you get something between the lens and the film, which doesn't really happen all that much.

Hope this helps!
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06-09-2006, 10:36 PM
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