Stage and Concert lighting effects.

kwannie

Hi All,

  I wondering if anyone knows how to acheive animated lighting effects in iray such animated led panels, or animated string lights(like christmas lights). I'm actually trying to mimic a concert light show. I can use the aniblock strobe and pulse in iray, but the light color aniblocks don't work with iray on point lights or spotlights. I'm not sure if you can key emissives to strobe or change colors during an animation. I would like to be able to even acheive laser strobe effects but not sure if it is possible. I am using Atom Cam which does very nice atmosphere effects, although there is no movment in the smoke planes, ( I'm not sure if it the somke effect can be animated). I have bought so many products for concert lighting only to find that they fall short for what I am looking for. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

By the way if there are any tips of doing this type of lighting without causing iray to take an half an hour per frame I would love to know!!!!!!!...........

Cheers!

tj_1ca9500b

Others may have an easier way, but essentially you can adjust lighting output frame by frame, or keyframe by keyframe.  So, say, turn off illumination for a few lights, while turning it on for a few others.

This would also apply to moving heads with light beams.  You'd simply animate the pose of the light, perhaps using Keyframes to define start and end points so that you don't have to adjust the pose frame by frame.

You could also use this technique to change the light beam color as well between frames. 

So, select a frame, and adjust the lighting output for the various lights, then move on to the next time the lighting changes and adjust again (hopefully it adjusts everything in between, keyfames will help here).  I know this works because I had an issue where I was trying to darken the lighting in an animation sequence, but it didn't adjust the light level throughout the entire animation sequence. So I had a 'flash photography' frame creep into my short animation.  Happy accident I guess.

That's how I'd do it anyways.  Others may have a better way.

kwannie

tj

Thanks, I did a bit more experimenting and I am able to use the built in anibocks for strobe and blinking on spot lights and point lights as well as getting the color aniblocks to work on the point lights. I can't get the color aniblocks to work on spot lights. I guess I just need to understand what properties can be key framed. As far as string lights or stage floor lighting go it would work best with emissives since the lights or flooring have geometry, but trying to key frame emissive properties does not seem to work. Do have any idea how to animate emissive properties? Thanks!