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I need to make a laser beam that when it goes out from its source it looks like an hourglass. The strongest density of the beam is where the beam is more thin (basically where the sand clock is thinner - the middle part).

Is there a way to do it with particles? If not show me another way, no problem :)

enter image description here

Thanks in advance!

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  • $\begingroup$ There must be a better way, but one way would be to shoot the particles from the thinnest section to both down and up and then mask and time-reverse the upper half of the video - so that it looks like all the particles go from all the way from top to all the way to bottom. Just my 2 cents $\endgroup$
    – Manu Järvinen
    Commented Mar 3, 2020 at 13:18
  • $\begingroup$ Is it only about the shape (mesh model) when it is close to the surface to cut? $\endgroup$
    – lemon
    Commented Mar 3, 2020 at 13:41

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In complement, to @ManuJärvinen answer, here is a way to make the saber light shape 'automatically' when close to the surface to cut:

enter image description here

The light tube is subdivided so that it has enough geometry along.

All its vertices are assigned to a vertex group.

And it has 2 modifiers:

  • VertexWeightProximity: to influence the group weights when close to the plane.
  • Cast: to modify its shape for influenced vertex weights

enter image description here

The parameters to set are in green. And these to tune are in blue above.

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  • $\begingroup$ thank you so much for your help. Regards! $\endgroup$
    – lemax
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 23:55
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I may have accidentally made what you wanted (maybe). Please correct me if something isn't right:

enter image description here

So I emit particles from the vertices of a circular ngon (so that the particles collide immediately with the edges of the tube).

And the tube is a collider that has a little bit of stickiness, friction and dampening that luckily seems to make the particles to flow nicely outwards as well.

That's about it.

To do this in Blender 2.79:

  1. Add particle system to the green 'emitter' object. Put Lifetime to 250 and Emit from 'Verts':

enter image description here

  1. For the 'hourglass' object, put collision and Stickiness: 2 - Particle Damping: 0.2 - Particle Friction: 0.2:

enter image description here

You can also go to the particle settings and in Render panel set the particles to be the 'Icosphere' object:

enter image description here

Here are the objects as .blend:

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    $\begingroup$ Hi. Please include at least some of the basic explanation in the answer itself instead of only in the blend file. $\endgroup$
    – Ray Mairlot
    Commented Mar 3, 2020 at 15:11
  • $\begingroup$ Done :) Thanks for the note $\endgroup$
    – Manu Järvinen
    Commented Mar 3, 2020 at 16:49
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    $\begingroup$ Hello, thank you so much for your answer. Can you please tell me,how can I achieve this with Blender 2.79 ? That would be so great for me,if you could add some screenshots. I'm so new at Blender :( $\endgroup$
    – lemax
    Commented Mar 4, 2020 at 13:16
  • $\begingroup$ Alright @lemax , I updated the instructions on how to do this in Blender 2.79 $\endgroup$
    – Manu Järvinen
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 10:03
  • $\begingroup$ @ManuJärvinen thank you so so so much, I really appreciate your help. Greetings! $\endgroup$
    – lemax
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 23:54

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