Loading...
> >

StageFX Pro beams

kwanniekwannie Posts: 869
in The Commons

I decided to revisit an older product that I purchased a while back that was originall intended for 3Dlight, and an earlier version of DS. I attached a render below. The beams can be made to look vey nice in Iray and DS 4.12 series The beams can be animated and have tweaks for turning the translucent planes  to the camera. My question is does anyone know how to set key frames in the timeline that will turn the beams on and off? There is a menu control that turns them on and off but does not set a key frame. This would really make a really cool concert atmosphere if it is possible to set up a flashing effect.

fx pro test.png
800 x 595 - 202K

Comments

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 869

    I have tried just selecting all the emissive planes in the surfaces tab and setting them all to black to turn off emissiveness but that does not set a key frame in the timeline. Usually to make something disappear and reappear on the timeline one would set scale 0 to set a key the back to 100 to set another key but that seems tedious when each beam consists of 40 emissive planes each. Are there any simple ways of keying emissive planes when there several planes in one group?

  • SevrinSevrin Posts: 6,310

    You can animate a shutter that covers and uncovers the light.

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 869

     Sevrin the beams are actually made up of about 40 individul emissive planes that are all parented to targets that are aligned to form a long column all that shows is the planes with cutout applied. In iray the spotlight attached to the beam has no effect, because it cannot be chanced to photorealistic for some reason. The chain of emissive panes has to be turned towards the camera only at certain angles to give the beam in atmosphere effect. What I am hoping is that all the emissive planes can be key framed to be set to off and keyed to be set on. Are you maybe suggesting placing a plane in front of the beam?

  • FrankTheTankFrankTheTank Posts: 1,229

    What I've done in the past to cheat things which cannot be keyframed is to keyframe the scale to 0% when you want something to disappear.You might try that. If that doesn't work, you could always keyframe a plane to move in place and block the light, but I think the scaling would be the easiest. 

  • SevrinSevrin Posts: 6,310
    kwannie said:

     Sevrin the beams are actually made up of about 40 individul emissive planes that are all parented to targets that are aligned to form a long column all that shows is the planes with cutout applied. In iray the spotlight attached to the beam has no effect, because it cannot be chanced to photorealistic for some reason. The chain of emissive panes has to be turned towards the camera only at certain angles to give the beam in atmosphere effect. What I am hoping is that all the emissive planes can be key framed to be set to off and keyed to be set on. Are you maybe suggesting placing a plane in front of the beam?

    Yes, and very close to the light source.

Sign In or Register to comment.