How to Create Lightsabers - Motion 3

Hey, guys, this is Eric back at you with a motion tutorial and this time around we’re going to do Lightsabers in motion. Now, this movie clip, I have here is from a place called CPO studios, this third media that they have. I downloaded it online. They have a written tutorial on how to do light sabers in motion, and it comes along with this media and I’ll post the link in the description if I can remember so, I just want to give them a shout out. And I know there’s a Lightsaber tutorial for motion all over YouTube and stuff but maybe some of my viewers haven’t seen it and maybe some people would just like to see me go through it.

So, as you can see we have some footage here and it’s just of the fellow for CPO studio’s holding an imitation light saber just as a reference and when we get finished this is what we’re going to have here. And if we play it I’m not going to go through the rotoscope the whole thing and it will take too long but I want to show you the finish results after rotoscoping. We just have a few frames I would hear you know after enabled motion blur and try to adjust the wit of the saber as it travels to the area that we rendered out real fast. Play it in real time and as you can see it sticks pretty good. It’s pretty good roto. You just got to take your time and do it right.

So, let’s go back to the beginning and let’s get started so let’s turn off of our light saber. Now, we have our regular clip. So, the first thing we are going to do is we’re going to have to make our saber. So go to your library, in your contents folder you’ll see a white square PSD. Select that and apply it and when you apply it, this is what you’ll get. A little square over the top of your movie, take your square and make it the same size as your media.

Now, we have a screen that’s all white. Now, what we’re going to want to do is we’re going to want to take our mask tool like this and just click four points anywhere and now as you can see this is what we’re going we’ve been adept with. So now I want to take this and I want to position it, now here’s a trick to your roto. If you want to it will make it a lot easier if you turn off the white shape, uncheck the white shape and select the mask again and as you can see we have our mask with no shape and now we can go in here and adjust things a lot better.

So let’s adjust our saber down to the right dimensions. Let’s see here how long—s okay we want to make sure we get it along enough as you can see there’s the tip there. Position you need by the handle. Now we got our first position. Let’s turn on our record button and let’s step through it frame by frame. Let’s go back one frame to frame six and we’ll bring this up here like this and make sure your record buttons is on, now the only way to do this is painstakingly do it frame by frame you cannot motion track a light saber, trust me people tried and people have failed.

If you successfully find a way to motion track a light saber please let me know, share your knowledge with me because I have no idea I’ve tried and several people has tried and tried and tried. As you can see, I’m just going stepping through here just frame by frame. I want to do three or four frames for you guys to see if you can get an idea.

The tedious part is down here by the handle now. In Shake, you can do it a little better. I made core mat, you can make a core mat to give it a blip at the end and you can just do better light sabers in Shake but people ask a lot about doing them in motion. So, we’re going to do just one in motion and finish key frame in this guys for you rotoing this.

So, now if your mask disappears just select your mask again and if you don’t see your points just right click and they’ll be a selection for edit points. Okay looking good, looking good. I know this is boring to watch guys you are all going to step through the video if you like but I want to go through the whole thing so you guys can get an idea of how this is done.

I think that’s our last frame. We suggest our end here and let’s see what we got. There we go. Turn my record button off now you can watch as I play it. The mask is thicken pretty darn good. So now let’s begin on our light saber, let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s close down this other group so you guys won’t get confused. So now as you can see we have our footage, our white PSD and our mask on the white PSD, which turns it into our light saber. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a Gaussian blur add filter blur, Gaussian blur. This will blur out your filter.

Now, don’t adjust it, don’t do anything leave it alone, select your white PSD, go up to add filter, color correction, color balance. Now, you have this white PSD with a mask a Gaussian blur on the mask and the color balance on the white PSD. And that’s over top of our saber clip. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to duplicate this about three times by hitting and selecting and hit command D.

Now we have four clips and they’re all exactly the same and I’m not going touch the top clip what I’m going to do is I’m going to start with the one rock below it. Actually it might be better to start with the bottom. So go to the bottom clip, duplicate clip, turn it down, turn down your mask, select your Gaussian blur, go to your inspector. The first Gaussian blur I’m going to make it about 35 like that. Go to the one above it, turn down the mask and select the Gaussian blur, I’m going to make it about 12.

Now we’ve applied the Gaussian blur to the bottom ones, let’s go up to the next one, turn the mask down and select the Gaussian blur. Let’s make it about and we’ll leave it about four, now we’ll try to select the very top one and turn it down, select the Gaussian blur and we’ll make it one.

Now, we have that. Now, let’s go back and start adjusting our color balance. We go to the bottom and this is where personal taste comes in. You just got a mess with your colored balance until you get the color you’re looking for. Adjust color balance on the bottom then you go to your next one, then go to the next color balance and adjust that one and the very top one is the white one you don’t want to mess with that one.

So now as you can see we have this pretty good light saber here and when you play it you can see it looks pretty good and I’m going to render this. So you can imagine the pain staking process it is to put a light saber on a whole scene. Especially some of the star wars scenes you’ve seen in the movies and how long they are. I mean they have saber battles that are 10, 15, 20 minutes long sometimes and it’s just unbelievable the amount of work that goes into this because there’s no easy way to do this. So, let’s play it and there we go, there’s our light saber.

Thanks to CPO Studios for the written tutorial and the wonderful media. I’ll open a link to the tutorial in the description. Its quite old tutorial and I think its back in 2005 but I still want to give a fellow a credit anyway because he done a good job. So this is that written tutorial translated out on the video. I hope you guys have learned something and we’ll see you next time.