 Hey it's EJ from iDesign.com and in this tutorial I'm going to be showing you how you can control light intensity with just the factors so you no more having to hand keyframe these things and Doing it the hard way so let's Jump in here. We got our light and just for viewing purposes I'm going to make that visible so when I render you can see what the heck I'm doing Let's clone some of these guys Throw the light in the cloner Go to our cloner Jump up the count Spread them out a little bit All right, so we got a whole bunch of lights here Let's actually spread them out a bit more. So we got all of our lights here So there's actually a couple ways we can get this done the first method I'm going to show you is a method specific to light objects and adjusting the intensity The second method I'm going to show you not only adjust the intensity of a light object, but you can adjust Attributes on other objects as well. So say if you have a custom Piece of geometry that you have a luminance material applied to You can use an effector to adjust the intensity of the luminance to have it look like it's fading on and off And I'll show you that as my third example later on in this tutorial But first off I'm going to show you the first method that is just specific towards Adjusting light object intensity. So let me show you that I'm going to go and actually use a plane object Or plane effector. I'm going to turn the position off where I actually use the color mode turn it on and we're actually going to send the Blending mode to subtract because we have our light here with full intensity We're actually going to go about this and affect it and actually turn and Subtract the luminance value from the light as the effectors going through it. So To get this to work. We actually have to turn up modify clone And we're going to change our falloff to linear. So we have some linear falloff going so the lights will turn on gradually as the effector Falloff passes through it. So we're going to change this to positive y and we're going to make sure we got our effector Actually affecting so once I threw that plane effector in there you can see Everything below the falloff is off and everything above is on so if I render this out See only the lights above the falloff Are on and that's because we have this color mode set to subtract so as as The effector passes through It's subtracting the luminance value and Turning and fading everything off. So now if I actually go in It's actually key frame this Plane effector Move to 90 move this all the way up So you can see as it's going up that the the light Object in the scene is kind of fading Going from gray to just black. So if I bring this all the way up hit another key frame And let's actually render this Make a preview Let this thing go So we have all of our lights turned on and as we have the effector pass up All of those lights intensity are fading down because we have our modified clone We have our blending mode set to subtract. So now if we set this to add it would actually brighten The lights so let me show you that let's get the calculating the preview If we go here Press start see how it's actually adding to that luminance So you can kind of see the the What's going on behind the scenes? And if you wanted all the lights to actually go from Off to on all you'd have to do is go to your plane Effector go to the falloff and just invert it and you can see all of these go black if I hit render again You will see that because you inverted it all the lights will be off and as the effector passes through It'll turn all the lights on so simple is just hitting invert on the falloff And now I'm going to show you the second method to get this done We're going to actually need to Go between two states or even more than that two states of the object So we already have our Light object at full intensity. I'm just going to hold down control And duplicate this light and make one with zero intensity. So right now it's just cloning And just iterating One light on one light off And you can see in the clone under the cloner It's set to iterate if we go to sort If I render right away nothing happens But once I throw an effector on this guy, so I'm going to choose the plane effector I'm going to turn the position off I'm going to change the Falloff to linear. I'm going to orientate that to the positive y And if I render right away nothing happens But once I turn up this modify modify clone And hit render you can see everything Everything above the falloff Is on and everything below the falloff is off And why that is is because we have this sort option and what this is doing is it's sorting between The light with the intensity at 100 and the one with the intensity at zero So as our plane effector is going through you can kind of see The the kind of boundary area or the little light falloff area So the falloff is controlling Where the objects are being the cloned objects are being being sorted. So Right now we have if I go and animate this Animate the plane object go to our coordinate Put a keyframe at the y And move this guy up This guy a little way up so the falloff clears the top And hit another keyframe If I do a quick preview Render here This pops up and if I hit play here Actually, if I select the right preview file and do a little bit of previewing here, so You can see that the the plane effector is Going up and turning all the lights off or it's it's changing the clone from the The light clone with the 100 intensity to the clone with zero intensity. So it looks like it's shutting off Now that might be the look that you need But what if you want to have these gradually decreasing in intensity right now? It's very sudden zero to a hundred or a hundred to zero. Sorry So what if you want to have it more gradual? So the way the sort Option works is it's going to cycle through All of the clones in the hierarchy. So right now it's cycling through a hundred to zero So now if I go in and if I go let's make this a 75 so we're going from a hundred to 75 Let's go to 50 Duplicate this again go to 25 Now right away If I go And have that so it's in the center hit render Nothing's happening right now. Oh I have to actually adjust the minimum maximum to negative 100 so it can pick up some of those lower values so now If I just adjust the falloff a little bit here if I do another RAM preview On this so you can now see it's cycling through The first it's going through the 100 it's going from the 75 To 50 to 25 to zero and each of these clones are doing that So as I hit play you give the illusion that it's actually the light is just slowly fading off The intensity is fading away. So it's looking that's looking nice. But what if you want the opposite effect It's just going by the hierarchy here So if I wanted to start at zero intensity, I just kind of flip these guys around So now I have the 100 percent the bottom 75 50 25 and 100 and so everything's going to be reversed at that point so and and what I had to do was uh Minimum maximum because it was set at zero it was only going through half of the Uh the clones here if you have it go from negative 100 to 100 it's going to cycle through all of these so be uh cognizant of Your minimum maximum settings And also make sure that you have the modified clone on because if you don't have the modifying clone on It's not going to do anything. So Just something to bear in mind. So That's how you can get either a nice abrupt abrupt on off On your intensity or a gradual fade off by uh adding these You know middle steps between the zero and 100 intensity And you can add as many of these as you want if you want a little bit more gradual You just make you know a 10 20 30 40 50 60 You know you keep going on just use your math skills, right? So that's how you can control your lights. So Why I actually came up with this uh was because I needed to create a noise meter for a uh a hockey team and uh I made this little sound meter If I render this out, so I have all these uh cylinders with a luminance texture on it If I zoom in over here if I zoom in here if I can hit the right button here we go So if I zoom in and render it's just all these cylinders with this light texture on And uh I want to go to the same effect I want Uh It's supposed to be measuring the sound so the meter is going to go up Right and the lights are going to turn on it's kind of like the the uh What's the little carnival game where you hit the hammer and the light goes up And you want to try to get the bell all the way to the top And the lights go on until you get to the top figure what that thing's called But uh, you know what I'm talking about So that's basically like the sound meter is as the sound supposedly gets louder these little it's gonna Turn on these little lights up until it gets to the top so it's kind of measuring the the noise That's really not but So let me show you how I did this so it's the same premises before I have a cylinder with a texture That has luminance at 170 I have one at 100 and then one with a uh A darker luminance So it's basically turned off so I just have to go in here make sure that it's set sort And I just need to use another uh linear plane effector And make sure that is applied And you're going to turn off the position you're going to turn on the modified clone And set our falloff to linear And set it to live so already you can see if I render this out It's going the opposite direction, but you have the 170 luminance of this texture and then the one with just 100 and then the one where it's uh The darker luminance so it looks like it's turned off So I'm actually facing the wrong way. So if I go to negative And if I'm moving this up and down you can kind of see what What I'm talking about so The sound meter so You know as a as a sound builds, you know, this meter is going to slowly go up Slowly go up until it just all the bars have turned to full luminance So That's the kind of gradual look I'm looking for if I wanted to I can you know duplicate another middle one and Make another texture that uh has say 50 percent Or 60 percent luminance To throw that texture on there. So it's even more of a kind of Gradual it's very subtle, but if I make this Let's make this a little bit darker So you see a little bit more how you have that gradual Luminance fade as as the effector The plane effector goes through here. So Uh as I did in my other tutorial use cappuccino to kind of record My mouse movements and it's come in handy since I discovered that What the heck cappuccino actually does even though it's not for character animation solely, but uh So what I did is I had to kind of make this camera and as the energy is building The camera is going to shake a little bit more as the noise Supposedly gets louder in this arena that the you know, this animation is going to be playing. So I kind of had to You know gradually have this camera shake Build up with energy shake even more as the noise got louder. So Instead of just hand key framing anything I just went in here and Got Where is it? Got my cappuccino open if you don't know what cappuccino does Check out the tutorial I made called intro to cappuccino. Basically, it just records all your mouse movement Once you hit start hitting record. It's like motion sketch inside of after effects. So I want to Kind of control the position of this plane effector, right? so I'm going to make sure it's down at the bottom And I'm going to kind of make it Make it look like it's measuring the sound All right, so I'm going to go in here and make sure I got Uh 30 frames a second. That's uh in the project Frame rate going to make sure so whenever it records it records in real time and make sure I have my plane effector selected Move it down and then hit start real time And uh as I touch it it's going to start playing the The uh Vibrate tag animation. So now I can start to control this as it gets kind of Real shaky so I can really adjust and go along with the shakiness of the action here So I just stopped a little bit early there. So if I go back and hit play again With cappuccino, it made me able to just interact directly with the vibrate tag so I can match the Franticness of the vibrate tag and has the vibrate tag kind of builds with the shaking build the Build how how high up the uh these little Luminance bars go up. So it kind of looks like it's reacting to the shaking of the intensity Of the vibrate tag there. So it kind of matches with that and would be pretty hard to Try to hand key frame that to make it look believable and get this kind of Sound meter look where it's measuring the noise decibels if you follow me, so there's Couple uses of how you can you create luminance textures to fade on with effectors or Uh, as I started out with how you can get how you can control light luminance as well with your light objects, so Hopefully you can start using that in your day-to-day workflow and never have to Hand key frame a luminance material or a Light's intensity ever again. So because you just know how to do it with a simple plane effector with the modified clone option enabled so Thanks for watching