Light Sources on Weapons

[Natterforme]

Ok, I ve been thinking it over and I have come up with three new ideas about how to go around this problem. Since we cant give the weapon a light source directly, I think its time for a different approach. Take a look at these ideas and tell me what you guys think:

 

1.Use the sword and give it a scripted light enchantment that gives light a spell indefinately.

 

2. Make a spell that has two effects: using the weapon you have created, bind the weapon to you as a bound weapon and give light indefinitely.

 

3. Script a light spell to occur whenever you draw the sword and have it go away when you sheathe the weapon.

 

In all cases the light spell can be modified to be an appropriate color. If you have played Diablo 2, you know that there were weapons and items that gave a wider light radius to you, which meant that you eventually could do away with torches. This is what Im aiming at with these new ideas. Instead of trying to bind a light source to the sword, we create an ambiant light that goes out from the player. This can be done because vanilla oblivion already has a light spell. If we time it so that it only comes out or goes away when you draw or sheathe the weapon, it will trick the player into believing that the weapon is the source of the light and, hopefully, our goal will be achieved.

 

So what do you guys think? :biggrin:

[lovender]

Ermmm...i tried to understand how your ideas work. :ohdear:

But since i'm not that good with computer things, it looks i'm out of luck... :biggrin:

 

But since we can set the light radius for the gem in CS (i use 512 for my gems),

so i'm hoping your ideas still give all of us the flexibility to control the radius. :thumbsup:

Anyway, i'm hoping these ideas will make sense, so people can work together the realize them.

 

Btw, i'm trying to make the lightsaber blur like this:

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/2199/lightsaberblur.jpg

 

Anyone can help?

 

I'll create a new post for this matter in Technical Support forums... Thanks :thumbsup:

[Natterforme]

Im sort of hoping fg109 will lnow more about how to do it. I dont know much at all really. As to you light saber, the only way I can think to do this would be the way you would do it in real life: Use a camera with a shutter delay. Thats when you leave the lens open for a longer duration and you can capture movement. Of course, you might be stuck needing a new animation of the blur.

 

 

Edit: Have you tried using the motion blur mod? It blurs the screen, so you might be able to localize it into the blade :thumbsup:

Edited July 9, 2011 by Natterforme

[lovender]

I'll try... :thumbsup: Edited July 9, 2011 by lovender

[fg109]

Ok, I ve been thinking it over and I have come up with three new ideas about how to go around this problem. Since we cant give the weapon a light source directly, I think its time for a different approach. Take a look at these ideas and tell me what you guys think:

 

1.Use the sword and give it a scripted light enchantment that gives light a spell indefinately.

 

2. Make a spell that has two effects: using the weapon you have created, bind the weapon to you as a bound weapon and give light indefinitely.

 

3. Script a light spell to occur whenever you draw the sword and have it go away when you sheathe the weapon.

 

In all cases the light spell can be modified to be an appropriate color. If you have played Diablo 2, you know that there were weapons and items that gave a wider light radius to you, which meant that you eventually could do away with torches. This is what Im aiming at with these new ideas. Instead of trying to bind a light source to the sword, we create an ambiant light that goes out from the player. This can be done because vanilla oblivion already has a light spell. If we time it so that it only comes out or goes away when you draw or sheathe the weapon, it will trick the player into believing that the weapon is the source of the light and, hopefully, our goal will be achieved.

 

So what do you guys think? :biggrin:

 

Sorry, I haven't been checking up on this thread.

 

I took a look at the light spell in the Construction Set. It doesn't have any shader effect, so I think the spell is hard coded. If it does work by moving an ambient light to the player, I don't know of any way to reference it. In the game, I cast the Starlight spell on myself, which seems to place a light source at knee height about 2 feet in front of me. But going into the console and clicking around, I could not select a light at all.

 

So if you want to just give the player a light enchantment effect whenever he/she draws the sword, that's possible. But as for any way to change the color of that light, I don't know.

 

Have you tried the script I posted a couple pages back? Maybe you should just settle for that if you can't find a better way.

[Natterforme]

I actually have not tried the script you were kind enough to write yet for two reasons. One, I have been busy with severl of my clothing models, but mostly for the second reason of me being intimidated heavily by scripting. will attempt now....

 

I also looked at the wiki and saw that changing the color of light is impossible. I dont know if this means we can only use colors already available or that creating new colors is impossible. As to Lovender's light saber blur effect, would it be affected by the motion blur mod? I like the motion camera idea, but I wish I could put it to the fringes of my vision. The way it works now means I really cant see the screen very well without getting a head ache. it is possble this side effect may go away with a higher screen resolution however.

[fg109]

Creating motion blur would be beyond me. I suggest asking the creator of the motion blur mod or asking in the OBGE thread(s).

[Natterforme]

I think were just gonna have to give up on adding a light source to the weapon for now and settle for a particle effect with different colored flame. On a different note, I noticed when I was making some clothes in the construction set that under the clothes slots there was torch. Does that mean that a torch is actually a piece of clothing? Does this mean that left handed weapons actuall have to be fitted as clothing in order for them to appear as being left handed? If so that means that clothing can have a light source attached to them. This would be good news because I have several ideas of adding candles to clothing in an artistic way that would create this sort of aged wax/candle/father time outfit and it would be nice if I could add actual light to it. Do you think I am getting my hopes up? Its also possible that the torch/lantern/candle wick light source was a very special one time deal and cant be reproduced :unsure: .

[MarkInMKUK]

Question 1 - can you take a sword, and a torch/gem, and script the torch/gem to mimic the actions of the sword as it is used?

 

Question 2 - can you turn the torch/gem into a rod shape and still have it emit light, and still do #1?

 

Question 3 - can you delete the sword blade mesh/texture while still being able to use it as a weapon (invisible blade effect), and move the rod-shaped torch/gem into the place the sword blade would have been, while still doing #1 and #2?

 

Question 4 - can you use a script to turn the torch/gem on and off, ideally using an animated mesh to get the "grow from handle" effect?

[Natterforme]

And those are exactly the problems we have been running into. Of course, now that I think about it, cant we just make a lefthanded torch/weapon and move it over to be drawn from the right? If we can do that then the left handed weapon would appear to be correctly righthanded and would hold a light source(I think :mellow: ).