Lightsaber energy beam effect no post work :D
dodgerrecords
Posts: 123
Hey all, been trying to figure this out forever and I finally accomplished it! This pic was done with no post work, strictly shaders within daz studio, what do you think? It could use some tweaking but I'm happy with it, this opens up so many possibilities :D
saber2.png
800 x 800 - 794K
Comments
It certainly looks the part, well done!
Hmmm. Decent look, nice lighting. A suggestion would be to look for the Ultimate Lightsabers collection by Dodger. That one has alot of good lightsabers, as well as decent blade effects. I used that one quite a bit, and its still good enough for alot of great renders.
Hey thanks for the suggestion, I went and downloaded that freebie! Unfortunately this is daz studio so I cant use the shaders from poser, thats why I'm so proud of this, daz is somewhat limited in certain ways, making decent glow effects easily is one of those limitations. The materials and shaders just arent robust enough.
Very true, the default glow 100% in DAZ doesn't do enough to really get a good enough pop on the glow maps. In my own images, I've found its better to alter the defaults, jack them up to 300%. That way, you really get a good glow without having to use processor intensive shaders.
Ambient isn't really a glow effect, though the way it is implemented in Poser allows it to be sued as one. If you want an actual glow in DS look at the uberAreaLight shader in Light Presets>omniFreaker
I tried that and could never get it to give me a glow effect such as this one, yes it cast light, but to give it kind of an energy beam look I had to use PWEffect.
I dont get anything like that, if I do it on a sphere, it just makes the sphere a solid green, but it doesnt have the transparent glow around it, I dont know if we are expecting different things from a glow, care to give me a demo?
As Richard pointed out Glow in DS terms is just the brightness of the material, no glow around the object. To get that glow one we need either the Glow preset in the Shader Builder menu or an additional object with Uber Volume applied and tweaked. How those two work with Area Lighting I don't know as I have tried.
Ahh I C, yeah I'd say that using pwEffect trumps all of those techniques. The biggest advantage is you have total control of the colors, so I can do a white in the center of the object, and light green around that, and then extremely dark green around that, it's an extremely versatile effects plugin. UberVolume is nice but its so basic, you can really only do one color with it.
Volumetric Camera is kind of terrible for doing this, you just dont have enough control, especially because a lightsaber is not just a glow, its much more advanced than that. The volumetric camera gave me a glow, but not anything resembling a lightsaber. With pwEffect I can even have the glow pulsating, or change colors altogether, I can also do a displacement map on the glow if I want.
Tramp from what I remember AOA saying that the Volume cams don't play well with Area Lighting.
dodger thanks for the tips. I have pwEfects so I might try that myself.
Hey no problem! If you need some help just let me know and I can upload a preset for my lightsaber and materials, I had to export a capsule primitive from 3ds max to make the glow, as pwEffect doesnt work well with sharp edges.
Hey no problem! If you need some help just let me know and I can upload a preset for my lightsaber and materials, I had to export a capsule primitive from 3ds max to make the glow, as pwEffect doesnt work well with sharp edges.thanks for the offer but I prefer to do things like this myself, helps with the learning. Ideas I take though. :)
Did you do this with 3Delight or Iray?