Animated lights

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

I’m trying ot replicate a light system like this one:
http://minilab.perso.sfr.fr/light20001-0880.avi

I don’t know how to animate the lights… They are lit randomly, then they lit following what could be an empty or a driver… If anyone has a clue as how to animate this: please save my life!:slight_smile:

I have placed my light bulbs on a separate layer and I will composite the animation on top of the backdrop image later.

THanks for your help!
NIcolas

2

Your referenced .avi file is not downloading at anything like an acceptable rate (3Kb/sec max) - can I suggest you upload it to Youtube and post the link here instead of the one you have, then we could all see it.

To get an object to “Light up” at what might appear to be randomly, you have a number of options:

  1. Create the “Light” object and then add a Driver to the Emission value of its material (use Cycles), make the Driver target object an empty or bone or whatever and keyframe its initial position in Z only, at frame 1 to be 0. Then go to the Graph Editor => F-curve mode and select “Channel” => “Bake Sound to F-curve” - chose an appropriate sound file, play with the frequencies, etc to get what you want. The Driver for the emission would be something like var * factor where var is the Z movement of the target object in Transform Space and factor is some value to multiply/divide the Z movement to get the emission level you want. So you might have var * 100 to get the object to glow brightly enough.

  2. Create a second empty/bone/whatever that has a defined animation done by keyframes and apply this at various stages to the material’s second emission node value. You can then change the Shade Mixer between the two shaders, one driven by the sound file, the second driven by the animated empty/bone/whatever. So if the Mix shader is set to 0 the first emission node is operational and if it is set to 1 the second emission node is operational.

So you can then switch between music driven - can appear random is you select the sound file/bake option well and a controlled on/off/dimming using the second shader. You can even place a third control object that switches the two shaders as you move it.

Hope this helps! Yell here if you don’t get what I am saying and I will make a quick mock-up. Don’t forget that if you use scripted expressions in Drivers, you must check “Autorun Python Scripts” in User Preferences.

Cheers, Clock.

PS. Look at my “Clockophone” WIP and you will see a “Sound Light” system running for multiple lights on the Video of the robot playing “Comfortable Numb” or you can find this video on my Youtube channel (see my signature).