During “art” in the first grade, I drew geometric patterns with a ruler. Mrs Weinhausen told me that real artists don’t use rulers. Unfortunately, I didn’t heed her wisdom, and now I’m stuck with the crutch of tools. And furthermore, I’m terribly lazy!
So, for better or worse, I’m hooked on scripting every little thing I can.
Suppose you want to animate an occasionally flashing light. You could just sprinkle some keyframes around flashing the intensity of a light source.
But I’m too “lazy” for that, so I script it instead. This also allows the whole thing to characterized and changed more easily. Want more flashes? Just change one value in some code, rather than re-sprinkling all the keyframes. (Of course, for complete control, you might want to time and place each flash… but I’m working in broader strokes here.)
Simple Flashing
I did this in After Effects, and this post will discuss it in that context. But I’ve used the same technique in LightWave and it should apply to any moderne software.
Getting the light to flash like that is pretty easy, with the following expression on the Light:Intensity parameter:
x = lightOption.intensity; if(random(10) < 9) x = 0; x
So, randomly 1 time out of 10, the light is at full intensity. But there's so much further to go!