The Toddler Strikes Back

Creating my "Human Cloning Works" video was highly educational for me.  I learned a lot of new stuff about Blender's compositor and rotoscoping.  I wanted to keep that trend going, so I found another post-production challenge: light sabers.  I admit that these kinds of videos are a dime a dozen on YouTube.  I doubt any other subject matter could be as cliche for aspiring amateur effects artists.  Probably because they're not too hard to do, and they can be fun to watch.

I knew how to mask out the saber blades from previous experience, but I wasn't sure how to get the saber effect.  I experimented a little, but nothing looked like what I wanted.  Eventually Google turned up an example for me that I tweaked a bit to arrive at this node setup:

The mask is on the left, and gets split into three different blur nodes.  The Fast Gaussian gives you the larger aura, with the other two lesser blurs completing the inner glow of the blade (in two layers).  The color curves can be adjusted to whatever blade color you want.  This whole thing is then overlaid on the original footage with an AlphaOver node.

I made four masks in all.  One for each blade, one for any foreground body parts that needed to obscure the blades during the fight, and one for the wall that blocks part of the view towards the end.  The overlay order went like this:

• Original footage
• Blue blade
• Pink blade
• Wall mask
• Foreground mask

The only other detail I added was to brighten everything with a Gamma node (at the output of the original footage) any time the sabers collided.  It's crazy convenient to be able to add keyframes to anything, including node control values.  I thought about getting more complex with this concept, like masking the characters or certain parts of the room and just brightening them based on the location of the fight during any given clash.  I lost interest in this idea, but I'm still pretty pleased with the added complexity added by the simple brightness tweak.

I noted on the cloning post that I did the audio mix in Audacity, and a helpful poster at BlenderArtists informed me that the Video Sequence Editor could have been used.  I decided to give it a shot this time.  I still feel pretty uninformed about the ins-and-outs of the VSE, but I did figure out how to cross-fade a few segments, and control segment clipping and fade-in/out effects for both audio and video clips.  Here's my final strip setup:

The VSE was really indispensable for doing the audio looping on this clip.  I originally envisioned figuring out the time codes where I wanted all of the saber sound effects, and then putting it all together in Audacity.  That would have taken a long time, and the results would definitely have been sub-par.  Using the VSE I could drop the effects right on the time line, in multiple tracks, and check the sync in real time.  It was so simple to tweak and adjust the timing.  I'm definitely a believer in the VSE, even if I still have a lot to learn.

So, with no further ado, here is the finished product:

And now, for my next trick, I think it's time to try a little motion tracking.  We'll see how that goes.