I just finished crafting a lightsaber in Blender, and I was wondering if anyone here could tell me how to give the blade a glowing effect in Poser 6.  As it is now, I only know how to give it a glowing effect through postwork.  If anyone can help me out it would be much appreciated.  Thanks.

Here are links to it if anyone is interested in seeing it:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/molina00/ROTJ-Luke-Green-3.gif

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/molina00/ROTJ-Luke-Green-4.gif

Use the Ambient_Color to whatever colour you want and Ambient_Value to 1 on the material you want to glow.

It's not working for me.  I want the blade to have an outward glow like in the pic I posted a link to.  All that was doing for me changing the color of the blade.  It's possible I was doing something wrong though, since I don't know what I'm doing in the first place.

You won't get an outward glow unless you add another part to your blade.  A flat plane, such as the Poser One Sided Square will do the job just fine.

Then you can create a transparency map for it, which extends beyond the edges of the blade.  Make this glow in the same way as the blade and you should get a simple and effective glowing outer edge.

Another way you could do it is with a spotlight parented to the blade and using Atmosphere.  The downside of that approach is you'll probably die of old age before you get the settings on the light to your liking, or failing that, before the render finishes.

I'll see if I can figure out the first option tomorrow.  I'm not really interested in waiting until I die to get a simple glow.  heh

Thanks for the advice.

No prob.

The flat plane thingy is really simple and it's used by a lot of people for flames, plasma and glow effects.  You can make several of them at different angles to give a 360 effect.

Set up the color you want in Ambient_Color and set Ambient_Value to 1. You can have different colors on the inner versus the outer cylinders if you like.

Then set the innermost cylinder to be .2 transparent, all the remaining ones at .8 to .99 transparent - the right amount will depend on how many layers you make.

Here's my demo with 3 cylinders. The innermost is yellow - the others are green.

Oh forgot - make sure there is no other reaction to light. So on all materials set the Diffuse_Value = 0 and Specular_Value = 0. And you'll need to make this a separate prop - parented to the handle, so you can turn off "Cast Shadow" for the blade - light doesn't cast a shadow :)

SamTherapy, where do I find this Poser One Sided Square?  I'm not seeing any options for it.

baggins, thanks.  I'll give that a try too.  Hopefully between the two options I'll get something figured out.

The one-sided square is in the Poser Props:Primitives folder, along with spheres, box, cylinder, etc.

You understand what he's suggesting with the square, right? Basically you attach a drawing of the glow effect onto the prop. You'll have to always rotate it so it faces the camera - if you view it from edge-on it will become nearly invisible.

Personally, I prefer the concentric cylinder approach. It works right from all angles.

Thanks!  I could actually follow this and do it! 

Also, for anyone else reading this, I also had to set the "highlight size" and "transparency falloff" to zero to make it actually look like it's glowing.  Before I set those to zero it just looked like a long, bright green cylinder.  I may play around with some more settings, and maybe add a little more to my cylinder later.  Maybe I can get it looking even better. :D

Here's a render of it laying on the ground. I found that increasing the scale of the blade (x and z) to 150% inhances the glow - it was a little tight by default.

Also I lowered the transparency on the innermost two mat zones. Gives a bit of sharper look to the core of the beam.

I also added a bit of Fresnel reflection to the hilt.

Use the Gather node on nearby objects to make them pick up some of the glow from the blade.

I tried a glow-tube in poser with GI enabled, and it casts lite/shadow, but it doesn't interact with the atmosphere effect, hence I reckon the method described in the thread, and executed by bill/molina et al. is the way to go, at least until poser 8.

Thanks for the tips baggins.  I was wanting to give the core of the beam a more noticeable look.  I did make it more yellowish but didn't think to play with the transparency.

I get a lot of milage by setting up an object's materials like this, below, and then adjusting Emission, Color, and especially EmissionStrength. Also following is an example of using this for getting light from a Wall Lamp. You can get a starting setup by copying it from the Wall Lamp (looks like this one!) and editing its materials. You'd probably want EmissionStrength a lot lower. Oh, and make sure that the Properties of object has Light Emitter checked.

You realize the original post was from 2007, before better Firefly settings and Superfly rendering.  If you are truly interested in achieving a true PBR incandescent bulb, it would be better to attach a Blackbody node to the Emission connector and adjust the temperature (Kelvin degrees temperature).  Any value below 5000 will give off a warmer emission tint, above 5000 will appear bluish or cooler in emission.  Also, turn the Color chip to Black rather than matching the tint on the Emission chip, otherwise, you will be multiplying the Emission with the color chip.

The only problem with using the PhysicalSurface node for illumination is that the emitted light is attenuated which is perfectly fine for bulbs or light sources.  However, if you want the prop to emit a continuous light then you need to add a LightFalloff node to override the default settings.  You will find that illustrated below:

Not my preference for Superfly.

lol 2024

BB, good to see you lurking in the background.

hborre -- Great Tip about Light Falloff! I will be using that!

Anyone else feeling very very old? 🤣