Hi, I want to animate a hanging lamp from the ceiling swaying back and fourth in the dark. I used hooks to animate the swaying motion of the chain and the lamp but now I can’t get the light source(spot light) to move with the lamp. I’ve tried parenting it to everything that would possibly make sense in the scene, I’ve tried constrains, the only option I have found is to parent it to the empty from the hook but it only moves around facing the floor - no rotations happen, any ideas?
Emty on top.
Parent cylinder to it (cable) - 6 sided.
Weightpaint the top of the cylinder to weight 1 for pinning.
Enable softbody for cylinder, preset rubber, pinning and choose the vertex group you painted in the prior step.
Create emtpy at the bottom of the cable
Make the bottom cable a vertexparent to 3 of the bottom vertices of the cable.
Add a track to constraint, so the bottom empty looks to the top empty.
add a spotlight. add constraints to copy location and copy rotation of the bottom empty.
add a pointlight. add a constaint to copy location of the bottom empty. (for environment lighting)
select the bottom vertices of the cable in edit mode, set the 3d cursor to the top of the cable, and rotate it with softselect into a swinging starting position.
Let it swing.
Here´s the blend (2.56). Just press alt+a.
I didn´t bother to fix the z rotation of the bottom empty, doesn´t matter though.
btw. if you want it more “static” or without softbody, the technique is rather similar, just instead of cloth, use a spline IK chain and let the game engine do the physics and record the movement to a the curve editor. this way you can tweak the animation and got absolute control over it.
The advantage of the cloth method is you can affect it by wind, or bumb into it with a collision object.
THank you so much this has been soo helpful!! I really appreciate it!