Hi there
I would like to animate a flash originating from an object that I am going to pan the camera around. I’m thinking it would look something like you´re walking past a line of photographers. Do you know how to do this. I am thinking of setting a vector to represent the direction of the flash (this way the flash could look different from different angles in space)…or is it better to make it as a point source?
Please tell me something is unclear, I’d be happy to explain it in more detail :eyebrowlift2:
Thanks in advance
/pusj
If you are thinking of a camera flash bulb style flash, you may simply want to white everything out. This might be easier to accomplish in the Sequence Editor.
You could always just create an animated flash texture and apply it to a plane.
Hi again Atom 
What I would like is that it looks like the flash is coming from something. I have to white the parts that are illuminated by the flash but what I’m really after is the “spark” effect. Just as you look as a croud at a football game or something, you see a flash going of…I will give a spark in the shape of a star (this is mostly what you see mostly, you see little illumination of any object).
I can give a litte bit better explanation to what I’d like to do. I’ve attched a picture to the, see the light in the up right? This is the type of flash I’d like to put in my animation. The white light is normally like a point source, kind of when you see a star in a picture taken by a telescope.
Do not think I like this Bush guy, the picture is only meant as an exapmle of the flash…even though Bush is the best example of stupidity ever…
/pusj
Attachments
I personally would just use halos. Give it stars and the color and crank the add. Then make it transparent, add a key frame, opaque, add a key frame, and transparent. good luck however you do it!
What I might suggest would be to use particles being emitted from a half sphere. The sphere could be scaled or skewed to your flash-spread desires. Use a tracking constraint to keep the sphere facing exactly the camera, no matter where it moves to. The flash could be as simple as moving the half sphere to the camera’s location for only one or two frames… along with a lamp of some kind… and move it back out. You could even go as far as putting the flash on its own layer and using the render nodes to blur and screen over the rest.
hopefully that gives you some idea or a place to start. Just think of each particle as a ray of light and use many overlapping rays at low alpha to create the overall white-out effect.
You can animate the power of a lamp, using a Lamp IPO curve. With the lamp selected, move your cursor into the materials/buttons window and press i. You should see a popup with RGB, etc selections. See lamps/IPOs in the wiki for more info.
In an IPO window, to access the Energy curve, you have to switch the IPO curve display from Object to Lamp.
Yeah, for the light animate the power of a lamp. I used to do it in the game engine, But It would work really good in render, shadow effects and stuff. That’s what makes it convincing, .