How to create moving spotlights (concert!)

[Dvoyles]

I've searched the forums, and the only thing I've managed to come across regarding rotating lights, is a day and night cycle.

What I'm trying to accomplish is simply having a light move about a room from a fixed position. I am trying to model a concert venue, and this will be for the lights above where a band would perform. The lights are of different colors at the moment (R, B, Y), using spot lights.

My best guess would be to do this using Kismet, but I'm a bit unsure of how to do it. 3DS Buzz has a plethroa of useful videos which I've watched over and over, but as long as someone could get me started in the right direction, in regards to how to set up my first spot light, then I should be fine from there. Much appreciated.

-Dave

[Max Power]

Yeap, Kismet.

Basically you need to use a spotlight moveable, open kismet, create a new matinee with it, the keyframe out the animation of the spotlight moving around, then tell it to play in Kismet however you need it to play (as in when the level loads, or a specific trigger).

It's also possible that if its JUST a simple rotation to setup in the light's properties, but I have a feeling you need something a bit more dynamic.

[Hitpawz]

The easiest way to get specific lights in the scene (spotlight, spotlight_moveable...etc) is to place a point light, right click on it and choose "convert light". Like Max said, a spotlight_moveable will animate just fine in matinee.

[Dvoyles]

Perfect! All I needed were those few lines to get me going, and I should be good from here.

Thanks a lot guys, I'll let you know how it goes as I progress later in the week.

-Dave

[Dvoyles]

It worked like a charm. Thanks fellas.

I still have two more questions though:

1) If I wanted other lights to perform the exact same action (movement pattern), how would I do that?

2) How can I make it so that the light will always finish exactly where it started. For example, if the light moves in a 360 degree circle, how can I make it both start, and stop, at 1 degree, other than having to wing it by eye?

[Max Power]

1. If you have a matinee setup, you can duplicate it and assign it to another object. OR you can assign another object to the original matinee without duplicating it dependong on the result you want.

Matinee records data around the objects origin. So, for example, if you animated one door opening, you could use that same matinee for a door somewhere else, and it will still open properly, granted it the same door setup. This saves a lot of time when a level has a lot of similar moving parts.

2. You should be able to plug the exact numbers in, but eye-balling it should be fine.

[Dvoyles]

Thanks again Max, always helpful. I'll try that out today as well.

[Nawrot]

Some tips:

- if you want more than 3-4 dynamic lights on your scene you need to fake less important spotlights with light function which has texture with RGB circles moving around. Well all lights that do not require light cone (that fake volumetric cone) can be made as single lightfunction.

- add few lightcones with material instance (to change color in runtime) those will fake volumetric lights in smoke/fog

- if you do not need preprogrmmed movement from light, but rather some random, you can do something like fighter pilots use for training: 2 rotating circles with different speeds, then slap lights on that more randomly rotating and make both base circles invisible.

- you can fake lasers with quite nice results: look at that scanning material in CTF-Strident in ut3. You can use something similar to fake laser lights. Make transparent 3d mesh then run that scannig material trough it, as result you get thin glowing shapes mid air.

[Dvoyles]

Nawrot,

Thanks for the advice. I do have another question I meant to post right after, and you seem to have raised it again as well. I am trying to add the lightcones in front of my lights as well. Before I added them, the static mesh of my light fixture only appears as white, with no color coming out of it, so it doesn't look very realistic when I look on the floor and see that it is displaying a red, moving light.

Now that I've decided to add this light (basically a lensflare), "Material'Pickups.Flag.Materials.M_Flagbase_LightF lare" to be exact, I am unable to change the color. I remember viewing those UDK tutorials from 3D buzz a while ago, but UDK has changed a bit since their videos, therefore a lot of the options are changed/moved. I've included a photo to show you what i mean. I basically want to make it so that this light/lensflare appears red, instead of the default white. I started by creating a new material instance constant, then used the static mesh listed above as the parent, but I cannot change the color of this thing. Any suggestions?