Lightsaber effect using built-in Bloom

Scripting Issues
1

Hello.
Lately I was trying to achieve lightsaber effect using Panda3D.
That’s the effect of my efforts:
jasonuniverse.appspot.com//file/ … GlrGKnAAgw

The texture of lightsaber is simple, just full white (FFFFFF) for core and gray for hilt. Whole lightsaber (hilt and core) is made using cylinder in Blender.

I’d like the core to be white. But glow must have another color. Gloom doesn’t have color atribute, but I’d like to use it because of its simplicity:

	self.filters = CommonFilters(base.win, base.cam)
	self.filters.setBloom(blend=(1,0,0,1), desat=-0.5, intensity=6.0, size=2)

Two lines and I’ve got lightsaber glow effect.

I’ve never written shader before so I’d rather use built-in methods. But if anyone wrote shader for lightsaber effect, I won’t mind if that one wants to share :slight_smile:

2

The best way I could do it without shaders is to use billboards.
I don’t think panda’s bloom filter can do that.
Heres a snippet I made: mediafire.com/?tkwmnt0jryn (zoom out to see the lightsaber)
The problem here is when looking at the model from top.

Lightsaber isn’t the easiest thing to make, you’ll also want some motionblur effect…

3

Cool, thank you very much :slight_smile: