Animated Lamp

bkoponen · March 8, 2021, 12:16am

This was a lot of fun. I found that getting the inverse kinematics to animate nicely could be very difficult. I had to do quite a lot of fine tuning in the Graph Editor to get rid of some ugly movements.

When the light turns off, there was an unacceptable amount of noise in the render initially. I found that turning down the Light Path Max Bounces greatly helped with the noise, at the expense of realistic lighting. For this scene, though, it really didn’t matter. I also turned off the Caustics to speed up the rendering.

Miss_B · March 8, 2021, 12:27am

WOW, a psychedelic lamp.

NP5 · March 8, 2021, 2:32am

Very nice animation. You had to make the light do all those colours? Or lots of lights in there?

bkoponen · March 8, 2021, 3:16am

To get the colors, I created a bulb with an Emission shader that has a Voronoi texture mixed with a Wave texture as its color input. You can get some really cool light patterns playing around with the different texture nodes this way.

Another challenge I found was that an object’s current material is not an animatable property. When the lamp turns on, I needed to change the bulb’s material from the glass bulb to the emission shader. To work around this, you can build both materials as one and use the Mix Shader node, which you can animate, to switch between them.