Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/~carrara/tutorials/lightsaber/clickme.html

Thanks Kix, I will try it out and let you know. COOL! -PAG

Outstanding tutorial. I don't know about anyone else, but I leaned a thing or two from it. Cheers Ash

Thanks Kix! I like this one even better than the original post. Now I can't wait to animate it! Chuck

Very nice tutorial! It's the best tutorial I've seen. You must have put in a lot of time and effort into it. Thanks, Keith

Glad it's working. I'm going to submit it to the CD. It didn't really take very long to do this. Maybe five hours. Next, a rebuild/rework/recreation of the famous AZChip explosion tutorial. The explosion may take a little while because I'm working on some other stuff right now as well. -Kix

I see you have constructed your own light saber. The emperor is right; indeed you are powerful. If there's any assistance I can provide with the explosion tutorial, let me know! - Dex

Great tutorial -- one question: How do I turn on the 3D Aura I for one would appreciate some tutorials on building texture maps. I found the one included with the Light Saber tutorial enlightening. Cheers,

The 3D aura is in the scene settings. It's a filter you can select and then modify. -Kix

This may be a stupid question but Im having a problem with the part of the handle that the button goes on, the one with the angled edge on one end. In the tutorial it says to set the extrusion to pipeline before setting up the envellope, but when I do that I cant seem to move points horizontally. So in the part where you have points directly above two others I cant get them in that position. I hope Ive explained this as clearly as possible. Can anyone tell me what Im doing wrong? Cheers, Max

This is a strange quirk with pipeline extrusions. You can move the points horizontally if you grap the corresponding point on the sweep path. C won't let you do this on the envelope. -Kix

Thanks Kix. By the way, this tutorial is very very cool, thanks for putting it out there. Cheers, Max

At the risk of seeming like an idiot, I have another question. The one thing I cant seem to get right in the tutorial is the illumination on the ground, the bulb light I placed under there doesnt seem to be dong anything. I doube checked to make sure cast shadows was off on the infinite plane. Is there some other obvious detail that I may have overlooked? Cheers, Max

Ok, Post an image of what you have so far. The illumination on the ground comes from a spotlight above it positioned at approximately X=15, Y=-15, Z=15. I basically changed the distance light which is default in a new scene to a spotlight and made the settings to it as described in the tutorial. The bulb light is hardly noticeable in the scene as it illuminates the bottome side of the lightsaber very lightly. This effect is more exemplified in the ant picture I just posted here in the forum. You'll notice the underside of the ant is illumnited because I put a light source under the floor to simulate radiosity coming from the white plane beneath the ant. This scene is the showroom environment on the CD. I just added the ant and rendered the picture. -Kix

The blade itself is a light source using anything glows. This is explained in section 6 of the tutorial. The settings I used are in the image. It doesn't look like you've turned AGlows on. It's also possible that your AGlows source is making a general global illumination that's filling the scene and you can't tell. Turn off your bulb and spotlight and make sure your ambient light is off so the blade is the only source on. Then you can tell what light the blade is producing. The light from my blade is bright and falls off sharply. Check the settings I've used for range, range falloff, and fall off rate. Keep asking questions if you're still not satsified, these are good issues to bring up. -Kix

Max, Two other things, 1.) It doesn't look like you've selected the distance attenuation in the 3D aura. Check that if you care. 2.) Your Saber is coming out really well! Nice floor texture! Everybody else, Post your saber images. I'm dying to know what other people are doing! -Kix

Well you've got me a little bit on this one. 1.) I'm not where I can look at the moment but, I think I turned on the soft shadows for the anything glows light. and 2.) I didn't have the blade stuck into the handle in such a way that it cast that shadow. It's just right at the edge and not any farther. That may make a difference. Make sure you let me know if that fixes it. -Kix

Turns out I have raytraced shadows on. Eric Winemiller may be a better resource to explain this one. -Kix