Looking for Knight Rider KITT style lights

Boorsman

I want to create a new version of KITT using a model of a new Camero from another site.  I can't quite figure out how to do the scanner lights on the front.  I tried searching for something similar online, but to no avail.  Does anyone know where I could find somethimg that would work, or perhaps an easy way to make them?  I have no modeling experience at all.

FSMCDesigns

You can make any surface a light emitter in Iray. try taking the camaro, load it and get it all set up. then create a primitive cube with the lowest number of sides. Scale it and place it where the light should be on the car. then apply an iray light shader to it and play with the settings, it's fairly easy.

UHF

I was more a fan of KARR (Knight Automated Roving Robot).  :-)

You could try a row of 'light cubes' and turning each one on\off you could simulate that way. A simple red light texture would probably be needed for the right effect.

Haruchai

Quick and dirty setup with Primitives. Sphere inside an elongated cube with an orange plastic shader surrounded on five sides with black planes. Play with emmisive values on the sphere and cube and you may get close to what you want. Duplicate it and put them in a row, increasing and decreasing the emmisive values on each block to give the moving light apperance.

Last two pictures were rendered fully inside a cube so no other lighting other than the emmisives.

tj_1ca9500b

Haruchai said:

Quick and dirty setup with Primitives. Sphere inside an elongated cube with an orange plastic shader surrounded on five sides with black planes. Play with emmisive values on the sphere and cube and you may get close to what you want. Duplicate it and put them in a row, increasing and decreasing the emmisive values on each block to give the moving light apperance.

Last two pictures were rendered fully inside a cube so no othe

r lighting other than the emmisives.

 

As a quick followup to this, you could put some dividers inside of the cube, set just forward of the sphere/cylinder, to simulate the 'black bars' that you see as the light is scanning back and forth.

And, this was probably implied, you could then move the emmissive sphere back and forth along one axis to simulate the 'scanning' effect.  And this should be easy to animate, should you be looking to do a short video...

Once you get this working, you could then take the rectangle and dividers into Hexagon, and then pull the lower side corners forward to better 'fit' the angle of your Camaro.  You could then use the geometry editor to delete part of the grille or hood if needed, and set the scan assembly inside of the grill/just under the hood.

Anyways, yeah Haruchai has made an excellent suggestion here!

Haruchai

tj_1ca9500b said:

And, this was probably implied, you could then move the emmissive sphere back and forth along one axis to simulate the 'scanning' effect.  And this should be easy to animate, should you be looking to do a short video...

 

This would work. My initial intention was that this would be a single unit of the light bar. Duplicatiing this so that you have a row of them, so each has the distinctive centre light and darker surround as shown in the picture above. Changing the emissive values of each unit to make it lighter/darker in progression for animation if needed. As it is made of DAZ Primitives it shouldn't be too heavy on resources :)