How to make a lightsaber in Blender

[Music] okay in this video i'm going to show you how to make a lightsaber in blender using hard surface modeling techniques and hopefully it'll be educational as well as fun i have been making lightsabers for years i don't know what it is about them i've always loved lightsabers they're doing they're unique they're interesting they're technological they're also a weapon and they're really fun to make in 3d they're easy but there's a little bit of challenge so it's kind of therapeutic for me i just enjoy making them i want to share my nerdy passion with you guys out there and in the meantime you'll be learning some good techniques to use in blender so we'll model it we'll texture it we'll light it and render it here is an image i found from the brand new little star wars lightsaber collection book that just kind of outlines and shows all the new all the you know canon lightsabers in the movies we're going to basically do a mashup of different parts that i like from each of these sabers so i like this vertical line grip i like this bottom pummel piece i'm going to do probably this center piece right here where the control button is and then the emitter on vader's lightsaber with this diagonal cut i like those parts individually and it'll be fun just to kind of make a mashup lightsaber make something interesting so let's go to our 3d view and i am going to change this outliner view to the image editor and i'm going to open that image so light super collection 2 there we go i don't use the outliner very much until late maybe later in my modeling process but in the meantime i like to use it for my reference images up here so let's uh get to making some shapes i'm going to do shift a mesh and cylinder so let's expand this little menu if it isn't already before hit anything and finalize this we're going to we're going to tell blender what we want so i'm going to make 120 vertices which is pretty smooth and then the radius um you know this is all relative because it's 3d but we'll just leave it at one you know one meter radius which is a really huge lightsaber but like i said it's all relative so right now it doesn't really matter if you really want to go into measurements you can do that later and by the way most lightsabers are between 24 and 36 millimeters thick so there you go all right so we have this and we're going to make this basically the base piece it's going to go underneath the grip so let's go to edit mode by doing tab s z and maybe do number three also make sure this uh setting is set to global and make a lot easier so there's our kind of base piece now let's make these little grippy extrusions here we're going to make them out of cubes so shift a cube tab for edit size it up so s z really pretty big and then s and just size it back down altogether and let's switch to our move tool over here and i'm going to move it on to the outside of the cylinder so remember i'm in edit mode i'm not moving the object as a whole i'm only moving the vertices whereas the center point of the image or the origin point is still right in the middle see that little orange dot that's actually the middle of the shape so i'll show you why in a minute so we're going to get this pretty skinny so size it down some more that's good now s z to size it up we're going to click using edge mode we're going to click on this edge and the bottom edge and press ctrl b for bevel and add a few um you know segments to it by press using the plus button smooth it out enter when you're done now let's hold alt and right click or if you're doing left click select select this edge loop and this edge loop now we have the edges all along the edge of the mesh selected but not these edges on the bevel we don't want those let's go back to normal view okay so ctrl b again and there we go got a nice smooth kind of rubbery piece extrusion there now we're going to duplicate this all around the center point so let's switch to top view by pressing the number seven now i'm going to alt d to make a linked copy which means whatever i do to the future copies of one of these grip pieces it's going to be applied to all them such as material changes model changes anything which is good big time saver there so alt d and then r and then 30 enter okay now we're going to do shift r which is going to repeat that over and over so shift r rr r there we go now if we switch to material mode which is this little sphere over here apply material let's get let's be good and let's name it rubber make the color black and let's look let's bring this up a little bit for rubber it has a low specular and a high roughness it doesn't really reflect anything it just kind of absorbs light you can increase the specular if you want it to shine a little bit more so there's our rubber grip pieces now the bottom we're going to make kind of a base aluminum texture which we're going to use for a lot of the lightsaber so make new name it aluminum or aluminium if you prefer uh the base color is keep it white turn the metallic all the way up specular up about you know three quarters of the way and roughness down kind of low there we go now to smooth these vertices out let's go back to object mode see we can still see these vertices it's kind of you know bumpy polygony let's move that out by selecting one of these grip pieces press w and choose shade smooth which is going to just kind of smooth out all those those sharp edges and it'll render like that too which is nice so we have a relatively low polygon shape rendering as a very high polygon shape let's do the same thing to this base cylinder select it press w and shade smooth now this cylinder has 90 degree angles unlike these grips so to fix this weird like smoothed out non-angle here with that object selected still go down to this little triangle down here and under the normals panel uh select auto smooth that way anything uh what is it less than 30 degrees will be smooth anything over that will be sharp and that is perfect that's what we want okay so we're done with that part let's move on to the pummel which is this little guy now with our 3d cursor still in the middle if it's not let's say you accidentally clicked out here you can re-center your 3d cursor by pressing shift c there we go now shift a we're going to add another cylinder keep it at one now all the default settings are still there that's good we don't want to change that and press g z to move it downwards on the z axis and uh let's make this kind of connect with the grip piece with some shapes so with our new cylinder selected let's press tab using face mode select this top face and let's do e for extrude just go up just a little bit i'll zoom in and then s to scale it in a little bit as well and then eat again just like that so we've got just kind of a nice little ridge there oh look at that it's not smooth let's press w shade smooth and then we got to go back to our triangle auto smooth there we go cool all right with this bottom piece selected let's go back into edit mode ctrl r to make a loop cut and press plus to add an extra loop cut hit enter and we're going to go to face select mode and alt right click or alt select this whole ring of faces hold alt and just select one of the faces it should automatically grab all of them now we can press e one time and then s to move it in so basically we did we just kind of extruded the whole thing and then we scaled it in now if we accidentally pressed e and moved our mouse we don't want to do that so don't move when you we press e i'm going to undo a few times there we go so e enter s to scale it down now our grip pieces are going to be on this inner face here but we need to be a little bit taller so i'm going to press control plus to expand my selection to grab this little edge here and the bottom edge now i can press s z and scale this whole section up or down cool so that's enough room i think for those portions let's press the number one to get a front-facing view deselect by pressing alt a i know there's a lot of keyboard shortcuts but hey you're gonna have to learn them if you want to edit in blender efficiently okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab a few of these faces i'm going to extrude them and then i'm going to make them repeat around the circle just like we did earlier with these grip pieces so to do that again press 1 for front view alt a to deselect press the letter c to get the circle select tool which means you can just grab whatever you want and we're going to expand the selection to i don't know maybe about that big um and just click right in the middle right there so we have a good centered selection you don't have to be exact as long as they're all next to each other now here's a cool trick we're going to make this a separate option a separate whole object on its own so press shift d and then enter now look if i move these we have duplicated faces they're just floating around we want this to actually be its own object so to do that with these faces still selected don't deselect them we're going to press the letter p which means separate and by selection so now if we get out of edit mode i can select this little guy see separate object and the origin point is still right in the middle which is good we want that okay so let's turn this into these bumpy cube things over here that we find on the bottom of the saber so with this little panel selected tab for edit press a for select all e to extrude them out and we're just going to size it down a little bit like that cool pretty easy and it's got a nice curvature just like the cylinder does now to be now to make this look nice we do need to bevel these edges so i'm going to select this edge i'm going to hold ctrl and select that edge ctrl hold that select that edge and control there and then control all the way over here so in case you're wondering what i just did holding ctrl allows you to basically make a kind of a an adjacent or linked selection let's say i grab this guy and then i select this one down here it's going to draw a line between the two it's going to find the shortest path to select from point a to point b so corner control select corner control corner control corner and then up here this last face there we go now with all these uh kind of edges selected i'm going to use ctrl b for bevel and don't go too much because you'll get some weird distortion overlapping faces but we're just going to do a little bit right there and wow doesn't that look nice very realistic okay now let's press alt 7 to go to a below view instead of the top view alt 7 because it is a reverse so let's press alt d r 60 there we go now press enter to finalize that and then shift r rr so we got six 60 degree separation that looks pretty cool i like that let's go down to the bottom of this piece select this the cylinder grab this bottom face and we can bevel it a little bit maybe do an eye inset extrude scale bevel again just to give it some interesting shape you can maybe maybe like an inset piece like that it's really up to you i for n set e for extrude you can do a whole lot of fun modeling with those tools okay so we got the pummel down at the bottom and let's add the ring now my little cubes are actually not quite thick enough to have a ring coming out so i'm just going to make a ring holder so shift a make a cube i'm going to move it out scale it down move it down it's going gonna connect it right there that'll do maybe make a little bit taller okay so i want to bevel the top face and the bottom face so select those and ctrl b cool and i'm going to move my cursor right here because i'm going to make a ring going down so shift s cursor to selected shift a mesh let's make a taurus which is a ring and open up these little settings down here let's uh increase the number of segments on the minor and also the major just a little bit make it a little bit smoother um the radius i think is a little bit big let's make it draw it down a little bit we don't want it to be as round as a saber just a little bit less like point six or seven and the minor radius we definitely want to be thin but not too thin so 0.07 looks pretty pretty strong i'm going to hit enter i'm done with that and let's rotate it ry90 gz to move it down there we go cool that will connect to the jedi's belt connector and if you want to get fancy you can even use a cylinder in this place to do a boolean so shift a cylinder size it down rotate it on the x at 90 degrees size it down again and then scale it along the y so it's you know it's poking out now with the cylinder selected we're going to use this as a cutter to cut out of this little holder so shift select the cube and then just do control minus and there we go we use the cylinder to cut a hole in the cube again i selected the cutting object then i selected the target and control minus and if you click on the cube and go to modifiers here you can see it we have a boolean using cylinder to cut a hole out of it and now our ring is going through the hole pretty cool let's uh smooth shade these guys so they look nice and smooth so w shade smooth and then turn on auto auto auto smooth select the ring shade smooth there we go that's looking pretty nice all right let's move on let's go the control p portion of the lightsaber which is where the usually the button is to turn it on and we're going to kind of copy from leia's saber right here so i want my 3d cursor to be up here i'm going to select this cylinder edit mode select the face face mode shift s selection of cursor right there and now my 3d cursor is there so i'm going to get out of edit mode because i want to make these separate objects shift a make a cylinder let's maybe move it down scale it down a little bit move it up now let's have some fun with loop cuts and extruded pieces so first i'm going to do tab make a loop cut which is ctrl r i'm going to make one at the top and make one at the bottom just to preserve those areas now i'm going to make one here and i'm going to do ctrl b you can actually bevel a loop cut which is one of my favorite little hard surface modeling tricks that i showed in my other video that 10 hard surface modeling tricks hit enter you need to make what is it three or four segments you just use the plus or minus so with my face tool selected i'm going to alt select this middle one and it'll grab the whole ring around now i can s to scale it out and i can do that as many times as i want maybe i can make i mean i can even copy this piece so with this ring selected i can do control plus shift d to duplicate it and just move it up on the z but just press the letter z and then shift r r there we go we can make you know rings like that if you like that you can us make one of them you know extra big make one of them extra small like this it's really up to the look that you want now we do need to have a place for the button to go so let's start with a cube and we're going to keep it within the same mesh just to keep things clean i'm going to move it out on the x-axis scale it down scale it vertically move it up remember g is for moving s is for scaling make it a little bit narrower okay get it to a size you feel is realistic for a finger to to be on and i think i kind of like that okay so let's make a two loop cuts right there i'm going to move this part down or inwards and the other one outwards because i just feel like if your hand is on this and your thumb is resting you don't want a sharp edge poking you in thumb because that would really make some calluses i'm going to select this top face and bevel it just to smooth it out a little bit and the bottom one too just to make it nice and smooth let's grab this one this is kind of a weird sharp angle we can bevel this as well like that and the other one about the same amount look at that it's a nice organic curve now we can bevel these edges by clicking on this first one hold ctrl and click on the bottom face or sorry edge then shift select this up here and control click along the bottom there we go now we grab these we just used that trick to grab these edges ctrl b to bevel them together there we go that's a nice shape now let's add a circular button let's go back to edit mode shift a let's make a cylinder and we need to get it in place there move it up scale it down rotate at 90 degrees don't worry you'll get really fast at doing that too if you practice that's one thing i like about making lightsabers it's just good practice for you know navigation and editing and things like that okay with this face selected i'm going to bevel this again to make this not a sharp edge to give me ugly calluses inset extruded in scale it i for inset extrude that and scale that down that's the actual button right there so we got a nice ring around it and there you can even be fancy and you can rotate this whole thing so with this face selected on the edge of the button i'm going to press ctrl l to grab the whole thing now if i press number three actually number one gives me a side view of this i can rotate this whole button with the letter r so i'm going to rotate it a little bit and i'm going to move it down here just like that so the buttons at the bottom and then maybe i can put some other kind of control thing at the top shift s cursor to selected and i can make another cylinder up here rotate it and i think i'll make this one slanted as well just to match the the you know the angle of that thing i'm going to make two of them like maybe it's like an indicator led you know low battery light something like that now i need to we need to smooth shade this thing so it looks nice so select it w and shade smooth and then go and turn auto smooth on in the triangle tab with the normals panel so now it looks nice and nice and smooth okay moving on up let's go to the emitter that's where the blade comes out of and we're going to copy darth vader's emitter somewhat because i like that 45 degree angle cut that he has that diagonal cut let's get out of edit mode let's make a new cylinder here oops it's not aligned so let's delete that select this top guy shift s cursor to select it now shift a we can add a shape and it'll be right where we want it to be move it up and scale it down a little bit all right so for this i'm going to make it hollow first of all so let's press the forward slash button this basically gives us a solo mode of just this shape in tab mode i'm going to grab the top face hold shift and select the bottom face and press i to inset both of them and then spacebar which is our search function and select bridge edge loop watch this it connects the two faces and makes a hole pretty cool no boolean needed let's get out of solo mode by pressing our forward slash again and i'm going to make a diagonal cutter to cut this you know at an angle so mesh and cube move it up and in a side view i'm just going to type r45 make the cube pretty big it doesn't have to be it's not going to be visible so i want this to be like a nice clean edge cut like this one is so that means we need to make our cylinder taller so let's uh select the cylinder alt click this top rim of faces make sure you're in face mode right here that little square and then gz you can move it all the way up there we go okay so we're gonna use a boolean again to cut this cut to make this cut so with our cube selected first shift select the cylinder piece control minus and there we have a really nice cut um i'm going to make this next piece hollow as well because that's going to really annoy me so with this next piece selected go into tab mode and let's do solo again forward slash select the top face select the bottom face and set it and spacebar bridge edge loop there we go and we can add some cool led light emitting you know laser pieces there if we want later so forward slash never have we have a nice cavity to add stuff in so let's add some details here i'm going to add this little dial here which is supposed to be like a blade width control which no one ever uses in any lightsaber movie or show anywhere which i think is ridiculous also the length control which is also never used i don't know why so let's shift a cylinder why can't i find cylinder there we go move it up move it over here rotate on the y at 90 degrees we're going to scale down pretty small and let's put it down here zoom in or you can press period to zoom in really close to your object it's selected edit mode let's grab this face and move it in a little bit actually weigh in extrude out and scale it down extrude out again and scale it up and then extrude and scale this one pretty big this is the actual gripping piece of the knob so that's what it looks like kind of like an hourglass shape and then the knob and then we can bevel this maybe make an inset piece you know that's up to you however detailed you want to get now let's smooth it out by doing shade smooth auto smooth and we are going to add some grippy teeth here by um alt clicking the outer edge here of faces all right with all these faces selected let's press i and then i again we want this individual inset we don't want them all to inset together like this we want individual little mini squares just like that and then with the median point selected we can scale them all out based on the medium point and just go out just a little bit like that oh that's nice nice grippy wheel to control your lightsaber with nothing better and if it's too small you know you can size it up or make it however big you want so that looks cool to me now as i zoom out i realize this lightsaber looks ridiculous it's super short i need to have a longer control portion right here which is a i don't know how i just i don't know how i made that mistake i've made like a billion lightsabers uh and this is probably my dumbest looking one so far as far as the this the shape so let's select this emitter go to modifiers and apply we're going to apply this boolean cut so that we don't have to mess with uh you know screwing it up so i'm going to move this up oh grab the dial we made gz let's move it up here that seems about right now the control piece is usually up near the top so let's move this up as well right up there and we're going to add some cool details right here let's copy from this saber and kind of do these rimmed black and gray pieces so i'm going to uh my 3d cursor is no longer in the center so select s shift s cursor to selected now i could add my new cylinder right there move it up scale it down a little bit s z to scale it up actually we're going to use the array to make this a lot easier so let's scale this along the z-axis pretty small because we're going to make one rim and then duplicate it multiple times so let's put it right down here it's like a starting point edit mode let's make two loop cuts on the edge which again is ctrl r and then plus to add another loop enter i'm going to scale them outwards like that and i'm going to give a little bit of a piece on top so there's a gap in between each one okay now let's go to the modifiers and add the array modifier we don't want to go this direction we want to go upwards so that's usually this bottom one there we go that's the z axis so it's arraying this along the z let's increase two to however many we need maybe not all the way up we want to add another little detail up here just for fun it's still a little short so i'm going to grab all these up here with by using the c circle select just a quick and dirty way to grab stuff there we go i'm going to move this up as well let's make a new shape on from this top face of the grip i'm going to extrude it and scale it down pretty skinny scale it up all the way up into that grip piece there we go and i'm going to continue that up here i'm going to just extrude this this is still the same shape i'm still holding on to the grip piece let's put it right here go up a little bit and then extrude it and make it fan back out to wherever we think it needs to be there we go that's cool now let's add some cutouts to make it interesting so with this face selected up here let's go to x-ray mode we can actually see that's selected shift s there get out of edit mode we're going to make some cutters turn that off so when you're out of edit mode let's add another cube let's um go into edit mode move it out on the side this side scale it down big time on the z axis so it's going to be nice and short like i like my move tool to be selected there there we go awesome now this is like sticking out of the side don't worry we'll make it look cool in a minute and we're going to add a mirror modifier to this shape and put it on the y so it's copied over here if you did it the other way you'll need to have x selected but here we go so in edit mode let's grab this top and bottom face that's these edges right here top and bottom edge sorry i keep i'm probably mixing up my terminology and confusing all of you sorry about that so ctrl b awesome and then with this crazy piece selected grab the um lightsaber piece and ctrl minus to make a boolean cut cool now we don't want this to be totally empty we need to fill it in with another cylinder so shift a cylinder and size it down and just just fill in that gap right there cool now i like to have consistency in my design so i don't want this to be the only place i have this weird little cut here i want it to be copied up here and maybe at the bottom not sure about that yet but let's do another copy here so with my cutter selected i've got my bevel selected i can do ctrl l shift d and move this up here and you may notice i just extended this control plate piece so i have more room but look it's not cutting out because this mesh is different than this mesh and this one doesn't have the boolean on it like this one does right there so let's grab the cutting piece then grab the cylinder piece and ctrl minus there we go and i may actually keep this empty because if i add glowing light elements in here it'll kind of show through and that looks really cool i like that uh we call them windows on the emitter so that's pretty awesome let's do that consistency thing so shift d move it all the way down here period to zoom in that's actually pretty good placement there with our cutter still selected select the cylinder and control minus nice now we do need to add another cylinder there and move my 3d cursor there shift a cylinder all right in that little gap cool so even though this is literally uh a mix-up between four different light sabers we can kind of have a few you know repeating design elements to bring it all together and i've got some really fine rims and edges here i may want to copy that down here as well to just give a little bit more consistency so i'm going to grab these pieces i'm going to move them down i needed i need to bring this face back up i'm going to add a few little uh fine you know edges here ctrl b and i want uh one row in the middle just like that and here's a cool trick with it still selected press control minus and now we just have the middle rim selected of both of them and scale them out um and let's do individual there we go just like that so we've got some ridges there ridges up here so that's good enough for me right now let's do some quick materials to it um let's open up our shader tab right here and uh we if you don't want to see these the little cutter cube select it and press h to hide it all right so this top piece let's make it a black metal so color pretty dark turn metallic up oh let's switch to um material mode just hit z and then material preview and here is this dude in the shader window so metallics up uh specular roughness maybe kind of low to get some shine on it let's grab this piece and let's apply our aluminum remember we already made an aluminum for that piece for the bottom piece just right click on it and select here and i'm in the materials tab our little bumpy cube pieces aluminum the ring is definitely aluminum and let's um play with this little array thing here so in edit mode let's add aluminum and we're going to assign it by default it's going to be for all the faces but we're also going to add in our rubber which is here and let's grab this edge loop by selecting faces and then there let me zoom in and it's kind of small there we go so alt click on this face and it'll grab this whole ring and then with rubber selected just click assign there we go or we can do the opposite just do undo with this red with this edge selected or this rim rather control i to invert and then assign rubber to that now we've got that's that's what this sabre has over here the metal is on the outer piece black or rubbers on the inner that looks pretty cool oh we forgot to smooth this so w shade smooth and auto smooth now let's play with this degree because it's still the oh there we go 5.5 because of this really narrow angle it's you know you got to play with that setting okay let's make this inner piece maybe gold so new material let's make the color kind of orangey yellow right there metallic up specular up and roughness way down to make it a nice shiny gold and we need to apply that to this inner piece as well let's name it gold there we go and let's make this aluminum as well because it's all just one piece of metal right there cool and um let's go to this control button thing i kind of want the interface here to be a different color so i just alt clicked on one of these faces and it grabbed the whole loop which is cool so let's add gold to that assign and then let's make this button itself maybe like a plastic so new material name it button let's make it i don't know like red dark red um specular high roughness somewhere in the middle and click assign there we go so we've got that button and you can make these like emissive if you want if you want to add a little light just make a new material name it light um i don't use this as delete this principled shift a search emission just type in em and let's make them green and then connect these two right there cool oh and we gotta do assign there we go nice all right let's make this knob uh aluminum but with uh maybe uh the grips are still selected so we could make those like gold if we want assign there we go kind of a nice little fine detail and this big bulge here is not sharp uh so let's fix that by going to the auto smooth options and playing with our degree there we go yeah unless you want it smooth just looks a little weird so there we have it um quick and basic saber now let's render it and give it some nice lighting and make it look hopefully you know somewhat realistic so we want to rotate everything flat so press a for all r and then y 90. now if this happens you just rotate all your pieces 90 degrees individually you don't want to do that so ctrl z select median point and then ry90 there we go so along the median point which is you know in the middle they're all rotated together that's what we want let's get rid of our shader window we don't need that right now let's make a plane and make it really big just size it up a few times and move it down just below the saber let's give it a dark material with maybe a little bit of reflection so a little roughness like that looks kind of cool okay so when we get a view we like let's make our camera and then control alt 0 will set the active camera to your viewport view roughly it's not always exact but it's pretty close so let's move this um away from the saber by selecting selecting normal and then g z so the z axis is you know pointing toward forwards and backwards so that's nice make a little bit lower if you press r you can just kind of freely rotate this that looks pretty cool there you go get it set to how you like now let's make some lights so let's get out of camera view by pressing zero again zero will get you into camera view or out of it let's make some area lights so light area light move it up and make it a rectangle right here i'm in the light tab and you can change the size of it so x let's make it really long like 20. move it out over there and then let's do alt d y there shift r a few times so we have the same duplicate lighting but we can have them they can have different angles which is nice so i'm just gonna point this like there point this there there's no exact science it's really i mean there's there's best practices but uh lighting is kind of one of those things that you know i'm still kind of figuring out in blender and as a photographer i feel like i kind of have a little bit of a a head start on this but i'm still learning it so let's see what this looks like and let's put these at 100 watts let's see how bright that is if we switch to rendered view it'll show us roughly what it's going to look like and it's pretty dark so let's maybe put it at 500. that's better we see the ground let's try 1000 and again all four of these lights are the same light so they have the same settings so this is how our saber is being lit it's a pretty small light source and they're all a little off so let's make them a little longer maybe 35 yeah that's better i want to make sure they're all kind of centered on the lightsaber itself maybe offsetting some of them will be interesting too there we go you can use hdri lighting as well if you like that and i i don't like the hell of sabers position so i'm going to switch to a side view and just c-select all of the this light saber but not the ground and i'm going to rotate it this way there we go i think that might be a little bit better so camera view yeah it's a little more detail let's render it and see what it looks like all right here it is so with this render i already see some changes that i want to make and a mistake i made earlier which i'll show you how to fix so three or four things first i want this ring to be not on this side i want it to be on the on what is the top side from this view that's the first change second is this aluminum is just a little too reflective you may like it shiny and you know chrome but i want to make a little bit more diffuse um this button piece is way too small it just looks like out of scale um and then lastly i lost my boolean cuts remember my gold pieces they're gone because i didn't apply that cube that i hid so the cube is still like vertical up over here somewhere and it's not cutting into our cylinders anymore but we can fix that pretty easily so let's make those changes let's close the render and let's find our uh our cutter by going to outliner so if i enable the eyeball uh you know option here i can see which images which which objects are hidden so this one is hidden that's the that's the diagonal cutter right there and then this one there it is that's the cut that we want so let's rotate this uh 90 degrees and let's try to line it up and see if we can get those cuts again oh look yeah see there they are let me zoom in a little bit you can see what's going on here there's our cuts see that so we had it right around there so that looks good down here oh it's a little weird we need to move it up a little bit move it along the x-axis there and then this cylinder which is the gold piece needs to be there all right now i'm going to apply that to these different shapes so go to modifier apply up here apply and the emitter had it as well oh the control piece apply okay so that's one big thing fixed oops let's get our control piece and make it bigger our little button assembly so i'm going to use uh c but size it down it's going to drag over this so it gets the cubes oops don't get the cylinder behind it c and drag there we go and then ctrl l should grab the whole little piece there that i've got going yeah there we go so i'm going to use median point and just scale it up like that looks a little bit more serious and maybe move it out a little bit so it's sticking out yeah i think that skill is a lot more realistic okay and then i am the reflection was a little bit much for me so i'm just going to select here go to material tab and because the same aluminum material is used on a bunch of different pieces i only need to adjust it one time so i can turn my specular down a little bit i might diffuse from 1.5 to maybe 2.5 ish in that range and let's make our rubber a little bit shinier so roughness down specular up see if that'll get some shine and then our ring let's apply the boolean cut there so see it has a cut permanently cut out with our 3d cursor in the center of this shape we can rotate around that so let's switch to 3d cursor orientation grab the holder piece and the ring and then r x see that we're rotating perfectly around the the 3d cursor so i'm just going to press 90 oh the other way x negative 90. there we go now it's on top cool all right now let's add some light emitting pieces on the inside like i mentioned earlier to give it some cool you know sci-fi lightsaber glow so let's select this piece here it's actually the uh the arrayed piece actually this is part of the grip going all the way up into here let's do inset extrude it up into here oh not too far oh we're on 3d cursor let's go back to individual that that helps a lot extrude shrink it down let's uh press solo button there we go i can really see what i'm doing here cool so i'm going to make a ring of light here let's do a green lightsaber so new material let's call it blade make it an e for emission right there and then bright green make the strength like 20 pretty strong and make sure to do assign if you don't if you if you want to see the the actual changes you're making go to material preview there we go we have a little bit of glow because i'm actually um i have bloom enabled from eevee but it's it transfers over into cycles for some read reason see this bloomer here is it but it's actually not going to show up so i just turn it off because i'm rendering a cycle so it doesn't have bloom okay now let's make a few little extra pieces that are going to glow so i'm grabbing this central uh circle here i'm just going to do shift d size it down extrude it out and the end of it is going to have the green glowing piece let's grab the whole thing press number three to get this front view or actually it's a side view and i'm going to duplicate this piece so shift d move it straight up actually not that far up like right around there and then rotating around my 3d cursor which is right in the middle i can do shift d r 60 and have six of those cool so that'll give us some nice glowing stuff going on in there get out of solo mode by going back to here and there we have it hopefully that green will kind of shine through and i might want to move it up a little bit so i'm just going to grab these pieces i just made it's a little deep inset so i'm actually gonna grab um this uh these light pieces and that end piece right there and i'm gonna move it quite closer to the edge so g x not that far just below that little cutout yeah that's better and the blade is going to be emitted right there so that should give some really nice glow i can see this gold piece is not smoothed yet so shade smooth and that one isn't either select it shade smooth okay cool so let's render this and see how this is looking all right here we are this looks a lot better i like the scaling i like the metal surface a little bit better and yeah it's definitely improving let's make a few more tweaks this little emitter light piece in here is a little too visible i don't want it to be like seeable through that hole i just want the glow to be visible so i'm going to move that back and we're going to also add some scratching and weathering to the metal surface which is one of my favorite additions to these kinds of models so first let's clean up our view i don't need to see this boolean shape anymore so i'm going to click on it and hit h also we can hide our lights if you want to by just clicking the eyeball right there these are all the area lights one two three four alright so let's select on one of our cylinders let's bring down the shading window like this because our model is laying down it just makes sense to kind of have the view look like this make sure aluminum is selected on top and i'm going to use one of my own node groups that i've made which you can get in the file of the download on the in the description of this video and it's called brushed lines so all that it does is it generates a noise texture right here a moose grave but it's stretched like big time along one axis which basically wraps around a cylinder you can control the uh rotation the stretching you know how much detail or non-detail there is and it's basically made to be used in the roughness uh input so i'm going to plug this into roughness right there and let me zoom in and i'm actually going to do this kind of quickly because i haven't made this node group available yet except for in this download is like the first time the public is getting it so you guys can't really follow along yet unless you download the file and append or import this node group which i definitely suggest you do it and just put it in your default file and put it in your your startup blender file um so let me do this real quick there we go okay so i'm in render view and i did have to turn back on my light visibility so i had actually had lights but here is what it does it's adding these lines this is called a brushed metal surface in the real world a lot of metals have to get i guess smoothed out and finished with like some kind of brushing tool and it leaves these really small indentions that kind of affect how the light reflects off of it so that's why i made this brush texture was to give mostly my cylinders on lightsabers you know a realistic finish so it's going to add a little bit of detail here and there a few other things with oh yeah let's move that emission piece back i don't need to be an interview for this i'm going to select this guy edit and look at that it's already still selected i like that about blender it remembers the last thing you selected so i'm going to go to individual origins now i have my little moving tool right on top of it and from the camera view i'm just going to going to move it back right there and i'm going to increase the glow a little bit to make a little bit more dramatic from 20 to 35 there we go awesome and let's also add some glow on the final render so i'm going to switch to my image editor and i'm going to view the render results just click on this image drop down type in r you get render result okay so we're going to turn on our compositor nodes by going to compositor and make sure this is checked up here now scroll over to where you can see your layers going to your composite output let's do shift a go to filter and choose glare and put it right in the middle now this is going to make streaks by default let's change it to fog glow and there we go we get kind of like the bloom effect from ev which is nice we can control the threshold which is how sensitive it is the lower the number basically anything's going to glow maybe put it at 0.5 everything's pretty shiny in this scene so maybe a little bit above one 1.2 maybe that way only the brightest parts are going to glow all right we're done with the compositing trick for the glare let's do a few minor changes to the textures to give them a little bit more detail so first let's select the rubber grip pieces here and we're going to add some really small bumps to give it kind of a grippy rubber feel so to do that we're going to do shift a hit search and type mus for musgrave do that again shift a search and bump and plug them into each other but put the muskraven to height and this normal into this normal now if we zoom in we can see that this noise texture looks pretty crazy and not great it's not wrapped very nicely and yeah it's not not pretty so single click on the must grave texture and do control t this gives us a texture coordinates into a mapping which is going to help this wrap around appropriately if this doesn't work for you you need to turn on the node wrangler add-on so go to preferences add-on tab over here type in node or w-r-a-n for node wrangler and here it is you definitely want this on there's a bunch of really good time-saving shortcuts that it gives you in the the shader editor so let's go back to shader editor and let's use object coordinates into the mapping node this will give a much better kind of spread of the noise turn the scale up a lot let's go to 75 because we want this to be very small you know micro bumps and on the bump settings over here let's put this down to like dot one dot two so it's nice and subtle cool all right and that's it it's happening over here as well it's a little harder to see but it is there on these black ridges if you can't see in the final render you can turn this up to maybe dot five or something a little more you know a little stronger dot two something like that okay and let's add some color variation to the aluminum so select any of the cylinder parts that has the aluminum on it uh here we are in the shader editor it shows us the aluminum texture let's do another miss grave i love the misgrave texture and let's use a mix rgb and this will allow us to cross it between basically two colors or in this case the color white and our mousse grave texture which is going to just give us some nice variation so plug it in like this now watch what happens as i cross fade from zero that's the color white which is the original color to one which is all the way up that is nothing but musk musgrave over here color two it's in the in the middle is half of them so you can either use this or what i normally do is multiply which just gives the dark valuation color too and layers them on top of color one without changing the color that's good if you have an image texture or an actual color so let's put this at about dot five kind of halfway there um actually this will go all the way up so we can see what we're doing here let's play with the scale turn up the d actually turn up the detail and then down the dimension that's that gives us more grit and detail there so that looks kind of cool oh that's nice if you have the detail at about seven it gives you way more detail there so with muscle selected we're going to do that node wrangler trick again which is ctrl t and we're going to use the object coordinates it's just a quick and easy way to spread the noise around the surface pretty evenly i'm happy with that and let's turn this down to dot 5 because we don't want that much we just want a little see in that nice and it's going to look a little different in the final render because the reflections and everything so let's leave it like that um and i think we are mostly done with this let's just go i forgot to i forgot to smooth this end piece so with it selected press w and shade smooth and we got some really funky edges going on so we need to turn on auto smooth there we go that's the magic switch right there i wish we just turned on by default that will be kind of nice but it doesn't so there we go let's go ahead and hit render and see how this is looking all right here it is and it looks really nice i will actually turn down that that dirt that we added and the rings are a little strong but i think you get the point it's just those little minor details are so much better so if we look at the very first one this is the first render we did you know it's it's kind of a decent concept art but uh this one is way more realistic it's more interesting there's more details of where to look at and uh you know i just i just like it more obviously it's more real more gritty and it looks like a real lightsaber honestly i don't know how lightsabers stay so clean they're always in battle and getting you know heat and lasers everywhere it's just it would be scarred up and dirty um so uh i like this a lot i'm going to go and turn those down and one other little thing i'm going to add is i'm going to add an area light underneath the lightsaber pointing straight upwards to light up this bottom because i like the catch light or that that kind of double light setup and we can fake it in blender because it's uh because we can so let me first turn down the the dirt and grandma at it so i'm go from a dot dot five so i'm gonna go from dot five to dot twenty five and then the um the brushed edges i'm gonna go from one to dot seven just to turn it down a little bit um and okay so let's center our cursor shift c for some reason it zooms you out really far i don't like that shift a and make a light and area light move it down so g z and it's by default pointing downwards see how it's it's shooting down into the ground let's flip it around at a 180 oh and i'm sorry let me get rid of this shader okay so r y 180 you can do rx doesn't matter and now let's let's stretch it out so it's long like the lightsaber is change it to rectangle and yeah x is the one we want to change we'll just move oops you can actually resize it with uh grabbing these little handles which is kind of cool move it over and maybe i'll make it a little bit longer too so there might be some light hitting on the inside wrapping around the object and i'm going to move it back just a little bit like that okay and then as far as brightness all these lights which there's four of them are all at one thousand so we've got four thousand watts of light on top so i'm just gonna add maybe one thousand watts of light on the bottom about a quarter of the power that's on top and we'll see how that looks and i'm gonna increase the like power of the this glow that we've got going on by lowering the threshold so from dot one point from one point two i don't know dot seven we'll see what that does all right so let's render that all right and here it is i'm very happy with this i turned up that glow or it actually turned down the threshold so there we actually have some glow happening from the aluminum you know the highlights which is great kind of gives a nice haze on top the green looks really nice and soft i like the balance between those brushed ridges and the dirt which isn't super visible that kind of dark layer but i'm really happy with the balance of this and i hope you are too that bottom light looks nice although it is unrealistic so you may not like that it's a little bit cheating because we can just add lights anywhere without actually having to have stuff there normally there would have to be light bouncing off of the floor to hit the bottom part right here so again not the most realistic touch but it's kind of just an eye candy a little highlight edge light so i hope you like this video hope you learned some cool tricks i would love love love to see what you guys make with what you've learned in this video you can send them to me at my email daniel danielgrowfoto.com you can find them on facebook or instagram message me there i'm i'm totally up for you know chatting with you guys you all need any specific help if you have any ideas for videos let me know there or in the comments and yeah make sure to subscribe so i know that you guys are liking what i'm making and i also love when you guys share these videos on facebook it makes my day so thanks again for watching and have a great week

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 17,368

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Id: QuRB6S1ql5s

Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020