Shhoting a laser gun

[c26354]

I just made a model of a star wars walker, but I really have no idea how to get it to shoot the lasers. If someone knows a link to a tutorial or could just tell me how to make a realistic looking laser shot, it would be very heplful.
thanx

[asciipig]

hmmmm.... [hope george is reading this]

how about a really elongated sphere or a thin cylinder.
then place a texture on it.. make it a bright pink/magenta/red [or add a ramp to give it some more pizzazz.. like red to yellow to white]
under the lambert [or blinn] go to the tab special effects... crank up the glow and hide source! You might want to add some transparency and keep the source on.

first animate your walker.. then draw the paths of the shots with a linear curve.
group the object [the laser geometry].
duplicate as needed, then attach the group to the linear paths
Animate>Motion Paths might want to read up on this in the online help
then scale the sphere or cylinder on the longer axis to make the "laser" stretch after it is fired. you'll probably have to mess with the orientation some.

maybe that helps out. i'm sure there is a gag-zillion ways to do this.
like using particles - oh -then you can have collision events.. like explosions and chunks .. or huge streams of blood. yeah!

[mantrid]

You could also do it with particles of type streak. Releasing one particle at a time by animating the emitters rate from 0 to 1 and back to 0 over 3 frames respectively. Or even animate to 3 to realease 3 lazer blasts in the same time space. If you wanted to be really sophisticated about it, you could make the keyframes for this effect into a mel button, so you could just go the frame you want to realease lazer blasts on and hit the mel button, which then sets the keys necessary to release a blast....which of course you can then edit as you please.

Geometry is an easy method, but its much cleaner to use particles. Geometry will exist forever in the scene and you have to go about your animatio in a messy way with respect to that. Particles will not only look better but have a set life, not mention you can of course set collision events to form the effect of the lazer blast hitting it's target...very easily at that.

[flatlander]

A favorite trick of mine is to use the stock Lightning effect found under the Effects Pull Down in the Dynamics menu set. I then set the spread to zero and change the lightning bolds color using the R G and B channels. This has the added benfit of changing the lighting in your scene while the bolt is active to make a more "Realistic" look.
Turn the bolt on or off using the visibilty channel.