Animating retractable lightsaber

[matsuo_lano]

Hi,

Like the topic said, I want to try and achieve this (I hope rather simple) animation. The idea is to render it with SUPodium when finished. Since this uses scenes for rendering, I found out that Fredo6's animation plugin wouldn't be the right one. Any other plugins I can use?

[Mike Amos]

How about sketchup scenes? Different lengths of 'blade' on different layers, switch off all but the one you want for each 'frame'.

[pbacot]

Could one use the section animation for this. Two scenes with different section cuts. Wouldn't SU animate the transition?

[solo]

Technically, a lightsaber beam is about 3ft so from off to fully extended it would take 3.0501e-9 or 10 to the 9 nanoseconds. An animation is what 30 frames per second? so it would take way less than a single frame to extend, no need for animation, render it off then on, there is no visible transition.

[matsuo_lano]

Well, I've decided to ditch animating it all together and just make a simple render. Will post it in a few!