Glowing sword trail in Blender

[polygondust]

Hello,

How would other Blender users go about animating a sword, and adding some sort of particle or trail effect to make the sword emit a glowing trail? Are there any tutorials on here that could help with that?

I’m thinking something along the lines of a glowing lightsaber, and when it is swung very fast in the animation, you can see where it just was by a rapidly fading trail of glowing light that tapers away from the sword to a sharp point. Kind of like the below, an effect I know I have seen in some video games/movies.

[Thibaut Bourbon]

Hi @polygondust 

My first guess would be to use motion blur: if you have an emission surface parented to the sword, I think it would work. That could work in an animation, I’m not sure however it could work in realtime rendering (EEVEE maybe? I don’t know and I’m interested to know 🙂 )

A less conventional approach that comes to my mind would be to have a smoke emission to the sword, and fine tune the smoke shader so it emits. That however could be expensive in computing time though.

I’m very curious too to know how other would solve this!

Cheers,

/Thibaut,

[Author]

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