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Hey guys, it's Yonis again.
In this video I'm going to teach you how to create the cool wavy laser effect that I used in my LittleBigPlanet level, "Virus Survival."
First, I'll pop over into Create mode and show you the rig that generates this effect.
These are tweakable lasers which are glued to glass objects.
These glass objects are attached to dark matter by pistons which are synced to move in a rolling series.
Now, to create this effect, you'll first need some tweakable laser objects.
You'll need to have bought the Metal Gear Solid Pack from the PlayStation Store to get the laser objects I used.
If you play through Virus Survival, you'll get the tweakable laser mechanism that I used, but I'll also show those advanced players out there
how to break the laser out of the Super Sentry Turret in the Cornish Yarg patch.
If you just want to learn how to create the wavy effect I used, collect the tweakable laser
from Virus Survival, then click this annotation to skip ahead to positioning the lasers.
The first thing you'll need to do is get the Metal Gear Solid pack from the PlayStation Store and
play through the levels to collect all the items.
Specifically, you'll need the Super Sentry Turret, which can be found at the end of the Level Factory level.
The MGS pack does give you a standard laser object,
but as of the time when I created this video, you couldn't change the color of this laser,
and you couldn't attach a switch to it in order to control its strength.
The Super Sentry Turret has a tweakable laser in it, so in order to use that laser in your levels,
you'll need to either break it out of the turret yourself, or get it as a prize from someone else's level (or my own).
You can't edit the Super Sentry Turret directly, so let's learn some editor tricks to get around that limitation.
The first is the crush.
Simply create a large block of material, then grab it with your Popit cursor and drag it on top of other objects to crush them.
The next trick is the shove.
Again, create a large block of material. Then, as you did with the crush technique, grab the material, but this time
push it against the sides of the objects to shove them around. You can also rotate your material block if you need to get between objects.
The last trick is the scrape.
Create a large block of dark matter in whatever shape you like,
and then grab the object you want to rotate and push it against the dark matter to perform a controlled rotation.
This is useful if you want to rotate an object to a specific angle, or if an object won't rotate by 90 degrees with the grid turned on.
Now that you're armed with these new tricks, let's tackle the extraction of the custom lasers.
This walkthrough is designed for the 1.12 patch, which is codenamed "Cornish Yarg."
First, create a blank level and head into Popit.
In the Goodies Bag, under Collected Objects, hit Square and sort by "Theme," then scroll down until you see the Metal Gear Solid pack.
If you've collected it, there should be an item called the Super Sentry Turret in that area.
Spawn it at a completely ludicrously large size.
The Super Sentry Turret has some beta creature brains in it which fall apart at gigantic sizes.
If you've done it correctly, the creature brain on the right should completely fall off its laser.
Now grab the turret and scale it back down.
It should be large, but not ridiculously so.
Here are the tweakable lasers.
They have switches attached to them.
You can't attach switches to the standard laser objects.
Let's change the front face of the turret to Dissolve material,
then hook a button to the material and dissolve it.
You'll see the front face disappear, revealing the guts of the turret.
Next, change the material of the pivoting head, the timing wheel, and the base of the turret
to use the Dissolve material, then dissolve those using the button.
Now, let's clean up a bit.
Use the shove technique to separate the left and right parts of the turret,
then crush the left laser and Creature Brain.
Then, go over and crush the fully disassembled Creature Brain on the right.
Now, capture the remaining laser and backboard.
When you capture an object like this, you can respawn it, and it will allow you to
detach and move things like particle emitters and switches.
Go ahead and delete the remains of the turret after you capture it, then respawn them from
the "My Objects" section of your Goodies bag.
Detach the particle emitter from the laser and stick it to your crusher.
Then, detach the switch terminal from the emitter.
Next, zoom in on the backboard of the turret.
There will be two magnetic switches there.
Grab one; if it's not connected to anything, place it out of the way.
Now detach the magnetic switch that's still connected to the laser and scale it up,
then place it on the laser.
Finally, change the backboard and the crusher objects to Dissolve material,
and hook the button up to them to dissolve them.
Now you can tweak the laser!
Turn up the brightness all the way, bring the radius up to the max,
and change the style setting to "Foggy."
Now capture your custom laser so you don't have to go through that ridiculous series of hacks again.
Hopefully Media Molecule will update the standard laser so that you can tweak it attach add switches to it someday!
Now to create the actual mechanism that moves the lasers.
Turn on the small grid, then create a small piece of dark matter.
Duplicate the dark matter, move the copy up a little,
and change it to glass or another material of your choice.
Connect the glass to the dark matter using a piston with the settings shown here.
To adjust the values finely, use the left analog stick instead of the control pad.
Glue your tweakable laser to the glass, then move the magnetic switch onto the dark matter.
Then, add a magnetic key to the laser, setting it to the same color as the switch, or vice versa.
Now tweak the switch, setting its behavior to speed, and adjusting the radius
so that the magnetic key just escapes it when the piston is fully extended.
If you're just joining us from earlier in the video, welcome back!
Go ahead and place down the mechanism you got from Virus Survival and rotate it so that
the laser shines horizontally and to the right.
Duplicate the mechanism and position the copies as I'm doing here.
To make the bottoms of the copies line up with the grid, move the bottom of the copy upward so that
it's above the gridline you want it aligned against, then move it down and it will snap into place.
Once you have a set of five lasers, duplicate the set and position it so that the laser pattern
repeats perfectly over on the right.
To create the actual wavy effect, increment each piston's sync value by its interval divided by 10.
In our case, we have a 3 second interval, so each successive piston
should have 0.3 seconds added to its sync value.
You can have a slower or faster wave by adjusting the sync and interval values to fit this formula.
Duplicate this set of lasers, then select the new larger set and duplicate that,
so you end up with a nice large set of lasers.
That's how the red laser wave is done.
Now I'll show you how to do the crisscrossing rainbow version.
Go through and tweak each laser so that you have a continuous spectrum of color.
This will just take a couple of minutes.
Next, create a large piece of dark matter, then duplicate the set of lasers you created and
rotate them so that they scrape against the dark matter, then delete the dark matter.
To get the lasers to crisscross diagonally, grab a right triangle,
put it between the two sets of lasers, and then select all the objects as a group and
rotate them so that the hypotenuse of the right triangle scrapes against the floor.
If you want the pattern to move in a different direction,
simply use dark matter to rotate your lasers instead of the floor.
The sides and top of the level can't be used to rotate your lasers because material won't reliably scrape against them.
That's it. Hope this video has helped!