Deceived: Star Wars The Old Republic

This project was a recreation of the fan art lightsaber I made in 2009 from the Star Wars: The Old Republic cinematic trailer, Deceived. I wanted to go the extra mile and not only recreate the lightsaber itself but also the shot from the trailer in which it was most prominently seen. I remember sharing the original one that I did with Jon Rush, who was working on the MMO at the time and being really shocked that he not only acknowledged and responded to me, but also told me that he liked what I did and that he would share it with the team at Bioware. For a kid barely out of high school and learning 3d at the time, this was an insane amount of motivation for me to keep trying to get better and better every day, and this new piece is a testament to that goal to never stop learning, growing and creating.
I wanted this to be a realtime piece. Everything in the screenshots and video are rendered entirely in Marmoset Toolbag 4. The lightsaber itself is about 11k triangles with a single 2k texture set. The background rocks are megascans assets using 2k textures, and the floor is created using tileable textures in only the roughness and normal.
The one sort of "game breaking" odd effect done here is the smoke in the background, which is an 8k 11x11 flipbook rendered on a plane, since there was no other way to achieve this sort of effect in marmoset alone.
Given that I also was rendering this with a 1080 graphics card, it was still a pretty heavy scene to do and each frame for the videos or the still shots took about 2 minutes to render at 1440, so maybe it isnt technically realtime ready :D