Animated Light Procedure

[peakyfreak80]

I have looked all over the forums and can't seem to find anything about the procedure for rendering when you have animated lights (lights turning on and off). Would this be the same procedure as what I would do for an animated object with animation-prepass and animation-rendering modes?

I've been having a devil of a time getting them to look right. Most of the time its seems like the maps run off with no problems, but when I try to load them it takes forever to render, and it not even close to the same as when I render a frame by itself.

Anybody have some advice on how to do this?

Thanks!

peakyfreak

[vlado]

It might be easier to just render two versions of the scene, one with light(s) on, the other with light(s) off, using regular walk-through methods, and then blend between the two animations in a compositing application.

Best regards,
Vlado

[peakyfreak80]

I have thought about doing that, but my scene is a lot more complicated than that. I have a series of lights pointing at a building that turn on one by one. Oh yeah...and the camera is animated as well. It looks awesome in my head...its just getting it to work in Vray that I'm running into problems.

Any other thoughts?

[Jcaddy]

You could definitely still do this the same was vlado is suggesting. You could use after effects or whatever video software you composite with and animate a mask that allows the lights to show up one by one.

[jonahhawk]

This is a great job for a pass manager tool like RPM

Create a single render pass for each light in the scene (and one with just your environment lighting) then add them all together. you can animate the exposure of each light and/or groups of lights or simply snap their layer on and off.

What compositing package do you use?

RPM will write a script for After Effects, Combustion and Fusion, that willl build the comp up for you from the light passes. Easy as pie.