Crafting Cool Detachment Lightsaber with Substance 3D

Introduction 

Hey there! I’m Logan McComish, a 3D Environment Artist. My portfolio is primarily hard surface modelling and sci-fi, but I also really enjoy lighting, texturing, working in Substance 3D Designer and Painter, and creating materials/shaders work in Unreal Engine. I try to push my skills to improve and learn new programs with every project, and this was no exception to that.

Detachment Lightsaber

When I started out on this project, I had no idea what I wanted to make. I knew that I wanted a hero prop and lots of hard surface elements. After combing through what felt like every possible permutation of a sci-fi gun, I came across this prop from Aaron Fowler and Kurt Klockau, and loved how unique it looks. The strakes that extend upward as well as all the extra emissive parts really caught my eye.

Blockout

Now that I had a concept, it was time to get started. For me, the blockout is the most important step. A mistake or not taking enough time here could cause some massive compounding issues down the line. I took my time to get the size and angles of the main silhouette right, utilizing the orthographic views in Maya and constantly checking the concept. After getting the silhouette right in Maya, I took the mesh into UE5 to check that the scale and “feeling” of scale were right.

Modeling & UVs

Using the blockout as a guide, I started the high poly. I used sub-d modelling for 95% of it, except for some finicky areas that used booleans. It worked out well that a lot of the small details on the lightsaber are repeated, so I only had to make one and then duplicate it about. During the high poly stage, I also set up the presentation scene in UE5, but we’ll get to that a bit later.

Moving on to the low poly, I was able to work quite quickly. I duplicated the sub-d meshes and reduced them to a reasonable level while making sure they maintained their silhouette. While I didn’t have a target for poly count, I stopped reducing at 30K as this is a hero prop, and some shapes were starting to lose their silhouettes.

I did the UVs for this prop in RizomUV because I’ve had issues with Maya’s UV editor in the past, and wanted a change. I was pleasantly surprised by Rizom, after learning the basic controls, it was a breeze and dare I say, nearly fun.

Baking & Texturing

Baking was an important step to get right. With all the details on the handle and the sub-d corners, I was nervous to bake. Mercifully, everything went well, and I had very few issues. I baked in Substance 3D Painter with fairly basic settings and using bake by name.

Texturing was done in Substance 3D Painter using a base of smart materials. I modified the materials for them to better fit my needs and achieve the look I wanted. For the blue-tinted part, I did some research to find out at what temperature steel reaches that colour (around 590°F). I then looked into the temperature of a lightsaber blade, and came to the realisation that it’s hot enough to melt steel! In the interest of not going any further down the lightsaber lore rabbit hole, I chose the blue tint because it looked natural and complemented the warmer highlights on the prop. Dirt, dust, and grunge were added on top using a mixture of generators and hand-painted bits for extra storytelling and detail.

Unreal Engine Presentation

We’ll start with the “studio” presentation. The floor material is very simple, made from only a roughness map and a base colour. For lighting, I used an HDRI to get good GI and a nice colour spill, and then added a single rect light to brighten up the subject and show off some of the roughness. Other than some post process volume stuff, that was the setup.

For the character presentation, I had a rough idea beforehand of what I wanted. I knew I wanted a cloaked figure holding the lightsaber in front of them, and that there needed to be tons of volumetric fog. To start, I chose the lightsaber colour. Out of all the canon options, red looks the coolest against a dark background and helps the image convey a lot more emotion. After that, I had to choose someone to hold the lightsaber. Darth Maul is the most visually striking choice, but was way out of scope for this project. Instead, I settled on Count Dooku.

I looked through the MetaHuman presets for a facial shape similar to Count Dooku’s. Once I found that, I turned the hair gray and aged the skin. I then brought the MetaHuman into UE and exported an FBX to use as an avatar in Marvelous Designer. After finding a cloak pattern online, I roughly traced it into Marvelous and ensured the hood was long enough. Back in UE, I applied a Megascans cloth texture to the cloak using a world-aligned material and put it on the character. 

Next up was lighting. The emissive of the lightsaber did most of the work, while a rim light behind the character gave it shape. There was a spotlight pointing up at the character’s face to help define it and also a spotlight on the lightsaber, to make it more visible.

For fancy effects, I added heat distortion and embers. The heat distortion material is a panned water texture on a plane, using IOR to blend it in. The embers were made with a Niagara system, building off of the BlowingParticles preset. I modified the sprite material to use emissive colour and be a little stretched to help simulate motion blur.

Conclusion

My main takeaway from this project is the importance of having good presentations. Sure, I could have just put the lightsaber against a solid colour background and done some renders, but it would have looked far too clean and uninteresting. By putting the time and effort into the presentation that I did, I was able to elevate this project and open up many more opportunities, including writing this.

Logan McComish, 3D Environment/Hard Surface Artist