Light Sabres!

For my final scene I need to produce two light sabres, one red and one purple. This is because I want to give the impression of Darth Revan from Knights of the Old Republic who wielded these two colours. I started off my searching the internet for a tutorial and found these [LINK1] & [LINK2]. Which I would advice any aspiring 3D modeller to follow as they are awesome! Anyway the first new skill I learnt was the ability to select By Polygon when extruding which allows you to extrude from multiple angels which really made the detail on the hilt much better.

Next was Local Normal, this is a tool I wish I knew about a lot sooner, it could have made making the Millennium Falcon less daunting and also helped with the T3-M4 as it allows you to extrude out from a circular selection which was a problem I came across earlier in my model production!

The next helpful tip was something I already knew about but managed to forget about until now which is a shame because I imagine it could have also come in handy earlier in my modelling. The snap tool would have at least saved me time from typing in my rotations by making them move my 5 degrees at a time.

This was the skill that blew my mind, the Morph modifier is incredible, the fact that you can use this on several objects at the same time is unmatched by any other modifier I've used thus far. Unfortunately its uses are limited in a Star Wars animation but there is so much you could use this tool for. I really think you could create an awesome implosion effect or explosion with it. Its a shame I didn't create a death star scene really.

Then the final stage was to add the glow effects but I had already used this technique to create my star destroyer thrusters but the light sabres turned out really well, but if I had messed these up with a tutorial video then what hope is there for me.

One difficulty I found is the video showed the ability to only apply textures to selected polygons but for some reason I was unable to and ended up having to detach the sections I wanted separate. This hasn't been a major issue but I imagine may cause problems when it comes to rotating my light sabres into position in my animation.