Fiber optic lights

[devin]

I've got a room that has a ceiling full of fiber optic lighting poking through it, the intention is to have it look like stars. My problem is that this is in an animation and these lights need to randomly change intensity. I'm not sure how to achieve this affect or if it's even possible to do so. It's been suggested that I can animate the multiplier of each light but the only way to do something like that would be with a maxscript and I don't have the expertise to pull that off. Does anyone have any suggestion on how they would do something like this?

[instinct]

Mind you, untested idea!

Make the fibers all one object (attach em), make a material with animated noise, assign, tweak as needed. If they all need to be real vraylights (not vraylighmats) you wont really get around scripting i assume. You COULD TRY a noise set to world space in the vraylight's texture slot, tho i never even thought about trying that.

Regards,
Thorsten

Regards,
Thorsten

[MoonDoggie]

You don't need to script to animate the multiplier of a light, find a quick tutorial, it's pretty simple. The motion tab and curve editor is all you need.

[instinct]

you need to tho if it is like 200 lights

[Neilg]

I've done this before - pretty much thorstens method. ended up doing the tips of them as a vray light material (all one object), with a large uvw map over them and an animated texture in the output slot of the light material.

Stick a vray light under with 'skylight portal' turned on (either all or each one, depending on detail needed) and you're sorted.

[dellis]

Couldn't you just assign a noise float controller to the multiplier of a vray light...i just tried it and it seems to work fine. make sure you check on the greater then zero checkbox though.

[devin]

Couldn't you just assign a noise float controller to the multiplier of a vray light...i just tried it and it seems to work fine. make sure you check on the greater then zero checkbox though.

Yea but if you have thousands of lights they would all need different seeds and you'd have to do that manually.

I'm going to try instinct's and cubiclegangster's method and see if that works. What kind of animated material would you use in the output slot, would a AVI of clouds work?

[ruud3dv]

You'll have a lot more control if you animate a Noise-map, from pure white to fully black for example.

[devin]

That did it ruud3dv, I just put it in the opacity channel of the light material and wow I've got random blinking fiber optic lights! Thanks guy's for the help!!

[Da_elf]

if they dont actualy light up the room id use a vray light material with animated noise map

[devin]

That's what I did.