Part II - Creating Glowing Materials and Animating the Blade
A) Creating the Glowing Materials and Maps
The Light Saber is now ready and it is now time to apply materials to it. Hit "M" on your keyboard to open up the "Material Editor".
1- The Handle Materials:
Select the first slot in the window and name it "Handle". The next step is to make the following changes in the "Linn Parameter" rollout:
"Specular level" : 61, "Glossiness" : 63
Finally, scroll down to the "Maps" rollout and then add "Ray Trace" map on the "Reflections" slot. Click on the "None" button next to "Reflection" and select "Ray Trace" from the list and reduce the value to 40. Check the images below for more information.
Tip: Specular level & Glossiness both deal with light in that they affect the way a material reacts to light. You may want to change the values of these to see how the material could react differently to light.
We need another material for the grip . Create the second material with the same parameter as the first one, you do this job easily by simply dragging the material from the first slot to the second. Change the name to "grip" and then change the "Diffuse" colour to "Black".
Our materials are now ready. Assign the first material to the handle by selecting the handle from the scene and the clicking on the "Assign Material to Selection" button 
that could be found in the Material "Editor panel". Assign the second material to the grip using the same procedure.
2- The Blade Material
Back to the "Material Editor". Select a free slot and change the "Diffuse" colour to the colour that you wish the blade to be coloured in. I picked blue. You will have to set the "Self-Illumination" to 100. Once you're done, assign the material to the blade.
- The Glow Effect
The final effect to add to our blade is the glow. Open the "Environment & Effects" window by pressing "8" on your keyboard. Click on the "Effect" tab, click on "Add" and then select "Lens Effect" from the list. Scroll down to "Lens Effect Parameter" rollout and add "Glow".
The "Glow" effect is now done, however, we still need to setup its parameters. Scroll down to the "Glow Element" rollout and make the following changes in the "Parameter" tab: Size: 0.1, Intensity: 161. You should also change the "Radial Colour" to the colour you want the blade to glow in.
Tip: You can try different Size and Intensity values to reach your own personally preferred result.
Access the "Options" tab and check the "Object ID" checkbox. You will have to remember the number ID as this value tells Max to make all the objects that have this ID to to have the glow effect we just created.
Close the window and get back the scene. Select the blade and right click on it to access the "Transform Menu" from which you should select "Properties..". In the "Object Properties" window, look for "G-Buffer" and change the Object Channel to 1. This number is the value that we used as the "Object ID" for our Glow Effect.
We are done, render the scene and you should get an output similar to what we got in the image below:
B) Animating Our Light Saber
We have completed the modeling and texturing of our Light Saber and the only remaining part is to animate it. We are going to use the "Auto Key" to make key frames of the movie, this is the easiest way of doing it. Before we start, you will need to convert the blade to polygons, then change the selection mode to "Vertex". Finally, select all the top vertex and move them backward inside the handle.
Move the time slider to Zero and then activate the "Auto Key" by clicking on it. Move the time slide to 20 and move back the top vertex to its original place. Hit "Auto Key" again to deactivate it. You can hit "Play" to playback the simple animation you just made.
- Final Scene Setup
I added four omni lights with a value of 0.3 for the Multiplier with shadow. A large "Plane" was put under the Light Saber to case the shadow Omni. A mid-gray coloured material was applied to the plane.
- Exporting The Animation
I used the "Video Post" to export the renders in sequence of images in JPEG file format. Those JPGs were imported to Flash to create the animation you see in the SWF movie below.
This concludes our tutorial. I hope that you learnt some new techniques on how to model, make materials, apply effects, and create animations in 3D Studio MAX. You can download the final result 3DS file here if would like to take a closer look at my work. If you still have a question please feel free to visit Oman3D Forum or simply contact me at fadi_shehadeh at hotmail dot com.
- End of Tutorial