How to create a pulsing light?

[cgrill]

Hey Everyone,

I'm trying to get into more of the animation capabilities of KeyShot and was wondering if there is any way to create a pulsing led light? Could you fade and emissive material in and out?

Thanks!

[TpwUK]

As far as i know there is no way to animate the emission other than by hand. So you would need to each frame one by one then use video editing software to render them out as a movie sequence.

Martin

[Ed]

I don't know of any way to vary the intensity using only KeyShot animation.

You would need to render a "clown" pass of your animation where the LED is a unique flat color.  Then in a program like Adobe After Effects this LED mask gets selected and you keyframe the intensity of the render layer.

Or as suggested below, you could do it the hard way.  Render out individual frames including a clown pass, then in Photoshop select the LED and change the intensity frame-by-frame.  It would be very hard to get a smooth result using this method.

Or, (I just thought of this) if the LED is behind a panel, create a disk with a curved slot cut-out and animate the disk to rotate between the LED and the panel.  Presto!  Pulsating LED.

Ed

[cash68]

I would render one video with the light in the ON position, and another identical video with it in the DIM position.  Then just go into any video editor, stack the videos on top of each other, chop up the upper one, and ramp up and down the opacity.  Export.  Viola. 

[OK]

You can also try putting another item in front of it and fading that one. That might do the trick. But the suggestion from Cash might give nicer results.