I am just thinking how such a thing like a laser sword could be done in bleder. Specifically I am talking about an effect kinda like ‘Outer Glow’ in PSD where you have f.e. a white core with a bluish glow around it (that fades into the background colour).
I tried to reproduce it in blender and I came to a point where it’s been ok, but not really good. .blend is attached. test.blend (554 KB)
Basic node-setup: Basically gradients are used for color and emission to define the volume. But I am not able to apply some alpha effects to the volume. Can anyone give me a hint on that one? Thank you very much!
If you’re making a laser sword, it can be more simply acheived via intersecting planes using a shadeless material with and alpha texture, detailed with the shape and intensity of the effect you want. (and perhaps a emission object that doesn’t render but casts light, though I’m not sure if that’s possible)
Unless your laser sword has some really complex 3-dimensional and voluminous shapes, I don’t understand why you would need to use a solid volume for the effect.
Things like lightsabers in the Starwars games were done with the simple intersecting plane trick. Blender Internal can do that much if you don’t need Ultra realism (but where’s the fun in that ).
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