Up for a good laugh? I need some help with strobe light...

First off, let me be up front - I am an idiot. I have spent the past hour trying to make a red strobe light for a game I’ve been working on. I used a shaped cylinder with a spot-light source inside it, set to spin on its x-axis u sing logic brick function. I set the normals on the cylinder to inverted so that I got the light to shine through it. It looks awful… horribly awful… I am ashamed to post this but I am at a loss and need some direction. Such a simple thing but I cant get it right!

Interestingly enough when I isolated the light source onto a blank .blend, the effect changed slightly (even worse), so I am attaching a photo of what it looks like “in game”. As you can see the projected dot is too small and the object in general lacks that ‘reflective flashiness’ that a real strobe light would feature.

Any help would be sincerely appreciated. :frowning:

The game engine is not simulating real light. So you need to know how it works and how to “mimic” the occurrence of real light with what it does.

A) Game lights are invisible, you can only see the effect of the light at meshes. With the turning spot light you seem to be on a good way. You could even animate the lights output on/off etc… It would result in a strobe effect too.

B) Game lights will never blind you. This is because they are (A) invisible. You could only be blinded be reflective surfaces, but in this case this surface is blinding you, not the light. In difference to real world physics the blinding is limited to the surface (no bloom, blur or whatever).

C) to visualize the light source (bulb) you need a different object to act as light emitting device. Obviously you should exclude it from shade calculation otherwise, it would block the effect of the game light (if you use shadow at all).

A simple light bulb can be created by a sphere with an bright non-shaded material. It still has no blinding effect, but at an bulb this does not matter that much.

To get blur/bloom effects you can either use other Halo-material objects or shaders.

The get the strobe effect, you should be able to switch the blinding effect on and off.

Hint: the bulb animation and the light animation do not need to match. Nobody could ever tell they do/or do not. The human brain gets very confused by strobe effects.

Thanks, this is pretty helpful advice, actually. I will work on it and post the model if I get it looking decent enough. One question, I had at one point played around with materials and managed to make a very metallic and very reflective texture. I have completely forgotten how I did this, but do you have any thoughts on recreating?

In Texture tab try turning Cloud to Reflection… hope that is the effect you are trying to re create.

Edit: i mean UV mapping not clouds, change clouds too ImageOrMovie.

Is this at all what you’re looking for?
http://en.file-upload.net/download-9067789/Strobe.blend.html

Ughh… why is it so hard (impossible) to upload videos onto the forum? Anyway, I got it improved some but I am still disappointed and being a perfectionist, this is driving me crazy. See video at: DELETED. I intentionally kept a bigger portion of the scene in and even the audio… wanted you to get a feel for the vibe I am trying to create.

Also, what about a blinking “point” light? Any quick way to do that for a runway? Sorry for the newbie questions… I am an international relations guy trying to get into media/game development and this is the result… crap… but I am quickly learning a lot! This is a great community!

Saika - I was using Linux at the time and that download was for a .exe …

This forum is not supposed to upload videos. If you want that there are plenty of video hosting services out there. You can easily link the according videos here.

http://www.filedropper.com/strobe

Hey this is perfect for the runway lights in pairs… Thanks Saika! Very kind of you.