Blender Beginner Tutorial: Create a Lightsaber - 1 of 2

hey guys it's Steve here from CG geek with another blender tutorial this one is a beginner tutorial on creating a lightsaber in blender so lots of fun things to the to explore with creating a lightsaber and lots of room to expand but this is going to be basically a good exercise on getting familiar with blender and creating something cool like a lightsaber so this is going to be simple enough that it could even be your first blender project and if it is your first blended project that's awesome and thanks for using blender but if it's not you can still expand on it or learn some tips along the way there'll be a lot of workflow tips and shortcuts that you might pick up along the way so it should be fun and intuitive and I don't know if that's the right word but does it matter let's get into it so to start we don't need a cube we don't need well we'll leave that lamp there we do need a cylinder because we're creating a lightsaber now here's a few reference photos real quick that I pulled off the web and I encourage you to look at some yourself as well because lots of lots of cool saber designs out there that you might get some inspiration from so do that and think of what you're going to do and then open blender and proceed so I'm going to create the one you see here which is the finished tutorial result when let the finished Orioles out it's the scene I came up with before recording the tutorial and I'll be recreating it so without further ado let's do it so I'm going to start off with a cylinder so we're going to go shift a and add cylinder so it's the first time using blended shift a is we're going to go to add in any sort of geometry to your scene and also if I ever move too quickly I have my screencast keys on here so you can see whatever buttons I'm pushing and whatever mouse clicks I am using let me quick reset my cursor there with shift s curves adjustable cursor to Center cool so I'm going to go shift a and we go mesh and I'm going to choose cylinder now I don't need this cylinder to be filled on both ends and whenever you add a piece of geometry you get your settings over here in the tool bar and so I'm just going to change it from cap fill type to nothing right there so now we have a blank cylinder I'm just moving around with my middle mouse wheel there so let me rotate this 90 degrees by hitting R and then 90 and my keyboard along the x-axis so then hit X on your keyboard and you'll rotate it 90 degrees on the x axis so we have this cylinder here now I'm just going to scale this down a little bit now I'm hitting s and moving my mouse cursor and then I'm going to scale it along just the y axis by going S and y let me just pull it out to be something let's go about that wide for now and to start off I'm going to put these these kind of this hand grip basically so it's going to be a lot of little grooves along here and I'm going to want to cut them out so to do that I'm going to tab into edit mode so you hit tab and you go to edit mode and now you can adjust all your vertices and whatnot this is how we do our fine-tuning and adjustments on our objects so let me go ctrl R and this will put in a loop cut so if you just click with your left click it'll place the loop cut there and you can slide up and down wherever you want now I want this to start right around here and I want the end of the handgrip to be right around here it looks about looks about right now in between here and want all the grooves so to do that and then go ctrl R again but this time scroll my wheel my mouse wheel and put in a whole bunch of ridges like you see there so that's perfect I'm putting it about you can see in the bottom left corner about 18 cuts and that should be about right maybe 16 you can experiment I'll go 16 for now and actually not going to change so I'll go 18 scroll up to 18 perfect and then just click so I want to put the grooves in now along here and to do that I'm going to switch to face select mode because it's just a little easier and now I'm going to select the different rows that I want to not be now I'm going to select the ones that I want to be grooved down into so this is where the groove is going to go down into it to be the grip so I'm just holding alt and shift and right clicking along the edge here just like the whole loop around your your saber so just go control shift and just click along the edge then just select the whole loop going around your lightsaber so select them all up like that now I want these to be a little bit skinnier than the the bigger grip here I want this to be a little narrower gap that makes sense so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch over in my pivot point settings to median point now this will take the median point of each of these selections and so if I go scale along the Y okay that's not working I'm sorry individual origins is what I meant to go for and this will scale along the individual origins of the selections so if a scale on the Y it'll shrink those up a little bit that's exactly what I want so scale hit s hit Y and just make that groove a little smaller there excellent so with that done now I'm going to well maybe I'll scale done just a little bit more we might want to scale our entire mesh actually down a little bit now on the Y just because it's looking a little too long but go ahead and select those again now actually the smaller ones sorry and we'll be extruding these inwards whoops you don't want to select that or take command Z if I do that and you can still keep your selection there I'll be extruding these inwards though to add the groove so to do this I'm just going to extrude by hitting E and then I'm going to hit s and then I'm going to hit shift Y so basically this will scale it on every axis but the y axis so it doesn't go down on the y axis and then I'll just pull this in to be a nice groove like that something around there appropriate and there you have it you have a nice grip along there now let's move up this Nash a little bit by clicking smooth shading over here in our tool bar and it's looking pretty good so now I'm going to work on the head of it a little bit more basically I want I want this to be more narrow so what I'm gonna do here is scale and shift why whoops we have an issue basically you want to choose this setting right here and now you can select to the mesh when you go b-back select a chunk of mesh you can select it on both sides of the mesh so very handy I'm going to put that setting on and now I'm going to scale along the shift Y again and this will give it a narrower kind of pipe so I'm going to go for a narrower pipe here something like that and that's looking pretty good let's just pull it in a little bit somewhere around that length and let me think all right let's let's go ahead and extrude this out now so I'm just going to hit E and then immediately left-click now scale it up a little bit so we have a larger vertice here then I'll hit E and I'll pull it up again so here is kind of a nice larger shape you can select both those rows again a scale and shift Y if you want to go any bigger which I might want to do so we have something like that looking good now I think I'll go smaller again I'm kind of using my image as reference here in my second monitor if you were wondering so I'll scale it down a little bit by hitting E and then s hit you again and pull it up then Oh Thank You London loves voices for subscribing pull it out to about there or so not too bad and then I'll hit E extrude scale down okay I'm just going down and notch's now and then hit again and pull her up very easy but fun and simple to do I'll select these and scale and shift Y to go down a little more with this one and then maybe even one more extrusion down for a smaller pipe so I'll go e scale e pull something like that and then let's go very big at the very end here with a few more e scale e pull it up e scale e pull it up and then 1y e scale and this will be the kind of the left rim there whoops don't pull it up into the hit again I just hit escape there if you want to how I jumped out of that and something like that maybe I pull all this up a little bit here cool and this is going to be our last end of the saber so now if we just zoom out a little bit here you can see what we have and it's looking pretty sweet I might want to scale down this section just a little bit along the Y so scale and shift Y whoops can't have these two edges selected so I'll just alt shift right click and the D selects it I'll shift right click whoops command Z I'll shift right-click and deselect them cool so now we'll just scale on the shift will I and pull it down in a little bit more narrow so if we go top view here I kind of kind of see in my grid here I want this to be pretty much the same as this one so I think that's the scale and we'll shift why just a little bit so it's right around this if I'll like grid there scale and shift Y again and that's about good right there excellent nice now I think the very top of our head needs to be scaled up a little more so grab that not that row right there though because we want them to stay the same and scale it along let's shift Y do something like that excellent so that looks pretty sweet and we're ready to move on so let's do the very end of our of our stable real quick pretty much we can leave this section because this will be around where our button is we'll want a little groove at the end here I think so I'm gonna go control our slider down to about there and control our do one more for that groove at the back end here beyond the button looks good let's put that groove in by selecting that row extruding a little shift why and hitting scale there we go nice little group there and then we'll just come out to the end with this last row so grab that last row there with box selecting it extrude it pull it out just to about that point and right about there and then we'll leave extrude one more time and leave a little gap like that all right so now at this point we can just extrude this and scale it to zero to fill in that last bit there and then that should do it we can always grab all these vertices if we want and go alt em merge at center and that just merges them all into one vertice there cool so that's looking pretty good we got a pretty nice lightsaber already now one thing I'm going to have you do at this point is put a subsurf modifier on it and straighten up or edges after we do that so to put a subsurf modifier you can go into your modifiers here and go Add modifier subsurf or you can go ctrl - and that sticks to the subsurf right onto it now you can see that it looks much more organic with a subsurf on it but we don't really want that organic look for a mechanical saber so what we're going to have to do is straighten up a lot of these edges with loop cuts we could also use the mean crease setting up here or in edit mode we have this mean crease and that works for smaller areas but if it's going to be real obvious you don't get as good of results with this so I'm going to go for most areas just ctrl R put in another cut and that will straighten up these edges tighten them up so I'm just running along and going ctrl R and sliding the vertices to their head ends by to square up these different cuts very easy very quick and you get a sharp edge instead of a loose edge but you can see is much cleaner looking now with a subsurface so this one only quick do just run along here and add it to all these edges where we don't want it to be beveled or rounded just do one here one there one here there and then along here as well we got to run along real quick throwing in our loop cuts not hard and you can kind of experiment if you want and you sort of bevel to by not going all the way to the edge with your loop cut but I want it pretty sharp so I'm going to go all the way to the edge along here anyways there we go and few more rows whoops commands do that commands e at any point if you make mistakes so you don't have to panic there we go few more almost there right there and here we go for the last one BAM and then this last bit at the end we want to square this up as well because we'd be putting the button in here and then let's do this little gap here as well cool we might want to leave a very end kind of rounded like that it looks not too bad alright so we have a nice sharp looking saber now let's add that big button on the end so do this I'm going to grab my face select mode right here so I'm working with faces instead of vertices let me go to top view I'm going to grab four faces here one two three four and it looks right if I switch to front view with number pad one looks about right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to extrude this up so just hit E pull it straight up to about this point here and now you can see it's kind of rounded like that I don't want the button to be rounded on top so I'm in front view here with number pad one I'm just going to scale that along the Z to zero so it perfectly squares up those things so just sz0 all right looks pretty good now let's just go back to our vertices select mode control are put in a cut there to square that up and then I'll go ctrl R again and square it up on top not bad-looking now we can add a little bit more detail to that button though by putting a little crease in here I think that would help so let me put a little crease in here just to give it a little extra detail like there's a little Ridge there like maybe the top part can come off or something so I'm going to go ctrl R and then these vertices need to be scaled along the z20 as well all right so just do that SZ 0 and then let's kind of place this Ridge where we want it to be right around there so I'll put another one in there ctrl R pull it down to right about there now we have that little gap in there we can just grab that loop there with alt right click alright got that and extrude scale just a tiny bit to kind of give it some extra detail very good now we have to throw and have few edge loops in there to tighten it up but it looks not too bad there we go and yeah not too bad at all one thing we might want to do is we might want to scale these two edge loops to zero as well it all depends on what you're going for but it might might be a little better if these will scale to zero we can try it so the scale is set to zero and see what that looks like alright I think I like that better very good so looking good now on top here we need to add in a few loop cuts just tighten that up now that we've added it in that's looking pretty good we have a little bit of an issue right here might be too many vertices in one place or we could try maybe it's a normal issue to do this we might be able to fix it just by going shading in new visas and recalculate the normals now doesn't look like it I would say there's probably too many vertices in this gap right here possibly so let's just let's just try and delete some of those all right so what do we have here we have that loop if I just delete the edge loop does that fix it X to the edge loops nope that doesn't fix it huh that's interesting well oh there we go I see now and I tab into edit mode it's because all right not a big deal not a big deal we should be able to fix that actually in this next step here where I want to put a little crease in the inside of this button so just go to face select mode select those faces on top there if you wonder I'm moving around here I'm just doing that with middle mouse button anyway just to make sure you guys are keeping up and I'm going to go extrude actually no I'm not going to go extrude I'm going to go eye to inset and this will basically extrude it inwards here so do that just a little bit and then we want to scale it along the Y a little bit or X I'm sorry X a little bit so s and X just until you get a pretty squared off corner here let's go along the X a little bit more there you go very good and now I'm just going to e to extrude and pull it straight down something like so very good and you can see we have that nice little Ridge in there now we might need to put another edge loop in here to tighten that up pull that up to the corner another one over here pull it up to the corner cool and then maybe on the inside here as well just stick one on top there get it right right in there cool all right so things are looking pretty good last step is to kind of add a grid on top of here for the button because you want some grip basically so to do this I'm going to just there's a number of ways you could do this you could use an array modifier or something to have a whole bunch of going across here but I'm going to do a really easy method here I'm just going to grab a face here shift D hit R and 90 degrees to rotate it 90 degrees here I'm going to scale it down all the way to about that point then pull it to the inside of our button there scale it up a little bit just enough so it's coming out like so all right now pull it down a little bit and now hit E and pull it straight up a little bit so we have something kind of coming up and now a little bit there awesome now let's select this new object by just hitting L and hovering over it with our cursor so we select it there hit an N to bring up our properties tab and let's give it a mean crease of one because this is a smaller detail we can get away with that and then we also need to recalculate the normals so in our tool bar here switch to shading UVs and click recalculate and that still looks a little weird maybe we can flip them actually hit L and flip direction okay that seemed to help somewhat but it's still a little messed up in these corners strange why don't I just not use the mean crease and put a few edge loops in here I might whoops control are not sure if it's an increase or not that's causing that issue now it looks like it's still going to be there alright I think it's just some of these faces at pointing the wrong way so let's just grab it individual face flip the direction hmm what is with this little piece here we can try hitting L on it and seeing if there's any duplicate vertices or something here let's go let's go delete doubles way to get removed doubles all right that didn't help it's kind of pull it out here so I can examine this real close oh I see we have a whole bunch of faces on this and we don't we don't really need these faces actually let's just grab those three faces there and go X and delete faces all right now it's nice and clean looking so perfect just delete those few faces and I'll hit L and pull it right back down into there cool actually I see now that I need to put a cut inside here to straighten up that bottom and that top go ahead and do that and that looks good so now let's grab this little button lever grip thing here that we created pull it all the way over to one end right about where we want it to start that looks about good now what I'm going to do is pay attention to follow closely this is going to be a really fun step because it's going to do all the work for us all you need to do is go shift D and then hold down ctrl and you can move the duplicate so let's just do that now shift D hold down ctrl just kind of slide it straight upwards it's important to stay straight upwards and not snap to the side here so this if you're holding ctrl it will do it in snapping sections so you can keep it straight nice and easy go up about 0.03 or so you can see down there how far I was going up that looks about right and before you hit any other button just go shift R and it will basically repeat the last step over and over and over again so all we have to do is sit back and hit shift and it's doing all the work over and over and over again for us straight across that mesh did we make it to the end and then I stopped awesome and you see you got the nice looking grid across the dress here button so that's how you do that now it looks like I might have actually messed up there real quick because I don't see I didn't see the the both all phases I think I had just the top face selected so I'll just do that one more time real quick hit l grab that whoops there we go ahead l grab that one there drag it to the back right around there top view shift D hold ctrl down snap it up maybe I'll go to point 4.0 for this time and then go shift our picture so it's super fun just sit back and hit shift are and it does the last step over and over basically repeats it so that's awesome and there we go nice and clean looking button cool so let's just finish up this the saber now we got the button and everything else just looking good last bit of steps is going to be at the bottom here I have a half kind of grid look coming around here it looks kind of sweet so I'll do that now we just grab these two faces and then I'm going to skip two faces and then grab these two faces and then skip to grab these two skip two grab these two and so on I bet you can guess what the next step is skip to and grab the next two there we go and two more I think nope we were actually uneven so that's bad did I mess up somewhere let me check this should work out evenly okay maybe I maybe I want to start on the odd end because I know for a fact that with this number of vertices it does work so maybe I maybe I messed up somewhere try that again just go to 2 - all right here we go hopefully it lines up perfectly and there yes it does you just don't want to choose the center one there and it seems like your work end all right or that means that I messed up in the other time I don't know for sure ok so now I want to extrude these outward so with all those selected now I'm just going to go E and extrude them out but first you want to make sure that you have this pivot point still set to individual origins or set it back to it now now I'll just go E and I can extrude them straight out by just dragging my mouse wheel so I'm going to pull these out not too far but somewhere like that I think we'll be cool doesn't look too bad alright perfect and you can see that looks kind of sweet now I want to sharpen up some of these corners just like I did before so I'm going to switch to my vertices select mode here and just go control R give the sharp edge there control our sharp edge and then you can do the same thing as a whole if you want to pull that up nice and tight but I think I'll leave that a little grounded because I kind of liked it rounded so I'll just put one cut in the middle there and then yeah you can run around and sharpen up these edges by going control-r on each little section here just tighten them up real nice and sweet like so very easy nothing nothing complicated with this at all and it's fun so we're just go control our and tighten up all those real quick go wrong control Z or command C and do it right I keep messing up now I was on a roll there we go and two more view there there and you there we go there and there excellent so it looks pretty sweet there we go guys we're almost completely finished with our lightsaber now a little bit more work on the end it could be done we'll just grab that circle versity there by alt right clicking extrude scale it down a bit somewhere like that and then extrude and pull her in there you go that's where our beam will come from so let me just tighten up these new two edges here that we added go and one there whoops there you go okay I still don't get where I want though there you awesome so then from the beam itself we could just grab a ring in here shift D and then hit s to scale it down a bit and then just extrude that beam out and we'll be we'll be adding the material to that in part two may be able to scale the whole thing up a little bit to then check it out right around there looks good alright that's a nice looking beam it should work well last little step to add some extra detail that I kind of found fun so I'll show you will be to add the little hook back here just a little fun step that I enjoyed so I'll show you how to do it first I'll start off by just rotating the whole saber side a little bit here now that we got it all worked out how we like it I can rotate it to be right there the buttons a little crooked now but that's fine well actually I might leave it straight for now I'm sorry just kind of making up my mind I'll put the hook on this little knob here so do this hook I'm just going to place my cursor right around there and go to side view or actually this is front view by hitting one of my number pad shift a let's add in a curve this time it's not going to be a mesh and you go shifting it and curve be easier this is just a Bezier curve it's what you do for adding curves in blender and we'll go to our settings here by clicking that little icon there and then down in our bevel settings will give us some depth and then we'll change it from failed to half we'll make that full all right let's give a little less depth but we got we got what we're going for cool so I'm going to scale it down by hitting s and now we need to add a little bit more depth in I guess okay just kind of work out the scale something around there will be right now I'll go top view by hitting numpad 7 and I'll rotate this 90 degrees by hitting our and 90 all right so now if I tap into edit mode I'll have my handles here instead of vertices to work with this Bezier curve basically I want this to be rotated 45 degrees negative so I'm just going to go our 45 minus by hitting the minus key on my keyboard same over here our 45 - whoops this is going to be 90 degrees so just hit R and 90 we don't need to go no negative with that one okay so now this one's a little bit smaller than this one let's just scale this up a little bit to be right around so just kind of looking out a grid huge to line these up awesome let's pull these inward a little bit scale them along the Y to do that no that's not going to work we'll just have to actually maybe that would work it's going the way no doesn't work just grab them in here a little bit tighter there we go something like that a little distance from it but not too bad and the last step will be now to grab both these at the same time and go alt see that basically fills it in so right now we have a perfect circle almost now to make it not a perfect circle but just a hook I'm going to grab these last two handles on the Bezier curve and drag them in right before it flips like that so right about there right there perfect and we have that kind of hook design so now the resolution of this is kind of low I'll crank it up with the resolution option right here below the depth crank that up a few steps and then you can do the resolution you hear as well this is the number of basically subdivisions along it there and that looks pretty good so now and side view let me kind of place this where I want it to be right in there I think it also kind of rotate it so it's kind of dangling down there a little bit doesn't look too bad looks pretty good actually maybe make the depth a little less big but that's pretty nice so last step now is to actually you could do it this ways but my version I'm just looking at it now was done the other ways so I might do that I might just rotate this 90 along the x-axis to put upwards like that and then rotate it till it goes along they're nice and even there we go something like that looks kind of cool and now to go just a tiny bit further and add in a hole where this would go through these are all optional and if you're not getting real close up you don't have to do it but it's fun and it's easy so that's what I'll show you how to do it I'm going to grab both these and then the bottom two as well faces the button there I'm gonna hit I to inset drag it inwards right to about that point there so it's right in there with it then scale it up just a little bit all right perfect not bad and now I'm just going to take these extrude and all right we extrude them cool and now all I have to do is alt let me see here is it LW nope ctrl e control is what I want to do and I'm going to choose bridge edge loops all right choose that and it connects those right across so we have a hole going through it awesome super simple super easy so now I can tighten this up just like I've done all my other curves and corners by going ctrl R and pulling that in there nice and tight on top and bottom and there we go so we have a nice hole through there we might into position that's just a little bit better to be in there and it looks nice and realistic so that is just going a little bit further with our lightsaber let me hit 5 to go to orthographic view so you can see what it should look like it doesn't look bad looks pretty good actually the back here could possibly use another row of vertices to kind of clean it up a little bit here so let me see if that would help just go in ctrl R on the end here right around here I think we can do that right should be able to maybe we can't I thought you could could be wrong wouldn't be the first time just yeah it doesn't seem to work so what you could do is you could just grab that centered vertices there hey let me see it K it's not working yep X delete that vertice delete vertices and then try that again by grabbing it hitting e scaling it down about halfway and then we'll hit a skill town and go alt M or jit Center alright and that looks a bit cleaner we have one versi there that maybe didn't work though what is this this one here something looks a little weird about that one there I don't know maybe we can just tighten that up and actually maybe we have duplicates see that might be it let me grab that whole edge there and remove doubles nope huh let's just tighten that up there though and nobody can tell and we might have to tighten up on the outside as well control our oh we do have a little extra vertice there it looks like extra edge loop maybe in there all right no biggie we can quick clean that up but that is gonna about do it for this tutorial let me just click delete these and see is little verse is sitting right there stinker alright now we can just do the same thing again extrude them scale umm extrude umm Ultem largest Center perfect nice and clean so that's our stapler guys and tune in for part two to texture it render it and give it that shine and turn it on basically give it the globe give it the effects and give it the render so part one is finished hope you guys had fun modeling and creating a lightsaber and blender and if this was your first project well hands down to you hands down that doesn't that understand right hands together for you yeah so I'll clap for you awesome I'm just tighten that edge up there so that's it guys and hope you had fun see you in part 2 bye-bye you

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 340,401

Keywords: Blender, Starwars, Tutorial, Lightsaber, Realistic, Beginner, Easy, Noob, Blender (Software), Modeling, BASIC (Programming Language)

Id: YbsYDOiph7U

Length: 35min 36sec (2136 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/catherineirkalla]

I really liked this tutorial and made a few different lightsaber concepts based on it! Part two I think is more of an Intermediate level and I think in general it might be a bit fast for someone totally new to blender, but overall I'd put this at like the border between Beginner and Intermediate level, its a good project for getting into some of the not-beginner features as long as you already have some idea about how to use them but maybe haven't used them in a project yet.

[u/LelouchViMajesti]

Nice video, and nice youtube channel ! thx I can't find the second part yet, im impatient about the texture and material