How To Make Tracking Stage Lights in Blender

all right so i was trying to make another tutorial and it wasn't working out so i'm gonna try and make a different one for uh for like stew stage lights uh and stuff so uh and they're really cool because they like move around and track and and everything so uh yeah delete the cube as you see i have done um yeah let's make it kind of big i guess let's uh rotate it on the y axis just to get it going 90 degrees um hop into edit mode um i'm gonna inset this a little bit like that and then extrude it all the way back almost cool see how we got that bit um next thing i'm gonna do is we gotta scale this along the x-axis a little bit like that and then i'm gonna shift right-click to put the cursor right at the end there i'm gonna make a plane we're gonna r rotate it on the x-axis 90 degrees we're gonna scale it down on the x-axis as well we're gonna bring it up g zed is how i did that um how did i do this before oh yeah okay so and then go into edit mode with that i'm going to hit 2 to do edge select and i'm going to hit e to extrude it but i'm going to hit y as well so it's just along the y axis yeah like that and then i'm gonna e zed extrude it along the z axis i should probably see if these line up where they okay that one is below a little bit so i'm gonna see if i can kind of select that bottom bit no that's not me okay go back to which one is it here three they'll bring that oh no i can't see it that's annoying okay well we're just gonna do trial and error okay there we are cool and now um yeah it's a little i overshot a little bit as you can see but i did that purpose because now i can three select that um and then g on the y wait what okay g on the y there we go now we're nice and flush okay so that's our little mount and then what we're gonna do is uh hit two to select edges and we're gonna select these two edges and we're gonna control b bevel those guys out so it looks like a nice uh yeah a nice little little wire i'm just i'm noticing that i'm intersecting a tiny tiny bit here so i'm gonna g y hold down shift to just barely make it work okay cool so yeah we got that uh next thing i'm gonna do is um i'm gonna shift s and cursor to world origin i'm gonna make a cylinder and i'm gonna scale it down on the z axis i'm gonna scale it down a little on the regular axis too i'm gonna rotate it on the y there's gonna be uh oops g on the x this is gonna be our um this is kind of like a non-functional type of uh it just showed like when you have a light in blender you can't actually see it like it makes the light and you can see the effect of it but you can't actually see the light so if you see if you're looking at this light up on uh like in the scaffolding of a stage or something like that um it's just gonna be like black there might be like a little bit of blue around like the edge like inside here although don't do that because it's really bad for rendering um but yeah so i like to make this little cylinder here we can even let's actually just like materialize it now so go on material new and we'll do flood light um front i think there's a better thing that you can uh name that as but yeah then we'll go down to a mission let's make it blue and then if we hop in here oh no shoot i made it a part of that okay well normally you would make a new cylinder i made it while i was still in edit mode so it's attached to this mount um but yeah i'm just going to pee by selections now it's a different it's a different thing it's called plane one even though it's not uh a plane uh what's it called what did i name this a mission flood light emission friend is that how you spell a mission i don't even know okay we're gonna we're just gonna materialize this thing really quick okay so this we are gonna we're not gonna do that one let's do a new one and let's just make it black blip this guy um we'll choose that material too cool yeah in an eevee preview we can see this is blue this is black this will probably even look better in uh cycles let's go gpu yeah why not okay so let's go back into whatever this one is uh the clay mode okay so now what we want to do is rig it up um with bones and this is the part that i'm not really good at so i'm going to try my best but i kind of suck um we're gonna make an armature um i know there's a way to make it so you can see that in front of you but i don't know how i'm just gonna bring that all the way up and then we're gonna go into edit mode i'm gonna tap this i'm gonna extrude down until i get to like where the world origin is kind of thing cool so that is down and then we're gonna extrude another one along the x yeah there it is just like that and then we're going to get out of edit mode and we're going to make a new armature we're gonna bring it we're gonna bring it over over here cool so now we have this uh this joint over here we have this bone that's gonna control the uh the railing and then we're gonna have this uh this bone in here which is gonna control where the light points okay how do you do this again um so yeah i'm gonna have this bone i think i gotta go into pose mode so i did control tab for that so this bone shift shift click this bone just click this bone shift i yeah uh it's new empty object oh dear oh no that's not what i wanted at all um so i accidentally made two different bone like armature objects and what i have to do is i need to make this one in uh in the the whole thing and sorry the whole thing i have to make this separate bone still in uh the same collection or the same object basically okay so that is our third bone sweet now we can go into control tab pose mode that shift that and then we're gonna shift i to active bone cools now this is all controlled which is sweet and which is what we want um i'm just gonna re-line that up again but that's not the way that a light behaves it doesn't go like all wacky around like that so we have to click on that bone um bendy bone reverse yeah and then we have to go into inverse kinematics and lock this one only goes on the z axis so i think we have to no for some reason that wouldn't it maybe we have to lock that one and not the other ones no that's not quit it one of these combinations there we go okay so um yeah that one's only going to spin because that this this mount here this guy trying to point the screen like you guys can see this guy is uh is only going to be able to like swivel that way um and then the light is only going to be able to like swivel up up and down so let's do that one now um this one lock it's only going to be locked by one constraint i think no that's not what we want yeah that's it cool so that's behaving like what we want now we gotta parent these guys so we're gonna go shift tab into object mode we're gonna click the light part and then shift click the bones go into pose mode um click on the bone that we want control p to bone then we're going to do that again go back in object mode with ctrl shift click the uh mount and then shift click the bones control tab into pose mode uh click the bone that we want control p whoops well i don't know what i just did there um uh cool now if we go into in post mode which we are hallelujah it's uh working except we we don't have one one part of it so let's go back into object mode um click on our little our lens i should have just named it lens oh well um and let's parent it to the cylinder and now the most important part of this whole ordeal is we we haven't even made a light for our light so let's make a let's do that let's make a little uh spotlight bring it out on the x-axis axis and rotate it on the y 90 and we're gonna put it a little bit in front of the light um it's just better for rendering and stuff like that if we do that so we're gonna parent it to uh to that cool now the the final thing to make this actually uh to be able to animate this properly is we gotta parent this this bone to like where we where we want it want it to go um is that is that even working properly it's kind of working whatever um so we got to go into the bone constraints add a bone constraint um copy location this is just the way i found out i found to do it um cool and then i forgot i gotta make i'll go back in object mode make an empty let's make a little sphere oops go back into pose mode so yeah this guy has the copy location and we're gonna copy the empty so it's just gonna follow wherever this empty goes even when we are in object mode that's kind of cool um so yeah then if we go into object mode oh yeah we gotta make this guy blue as well uh if we make like a make a plane uh let's rotate that on the y um boop i think this light needs to be a little bit brighter let's make it really bright yeah now we got uh the spotlight and it follows let's bring this back in the eevee so we can kind of see it follows wherever you put this empty and you can track that empty to whatever you want um let's just do some shading smooth on that um and the cool thing about this unfortunately it's it's a little annoying when you try to make a bunch of them which you're going to want to do because there's never just one light what you got to do is you go to click on the collection okay unfortunately you guys missed this part because my big old head was in front of the outliner but um what you got to do is since there are bones and regular objects in each of these at least what i've found you have to do maybe there's a better way of doing this um you have to put each of them into a collection uh so each each light has their own collection inside there the armature has the pose and the armature and then the cylinders that are parented to the armature etc etc um so yeah you have to duplicate collection and then now if i shift g that then i'll have another one um yeah and i can i can duplicate the collection again uh it's just a little annoying and you can kind of it's unless you do it perfectly you can kind of scratch your head around a little bit because you can move some objects and then their children will stay in in another um another collection and uh yeah it's tricky so just do that but anyway um let's just switch oh yeah and the other annoying thing is you have to switch this material like the lens material and the light material separately um i'm sure there is a way to whoops to make it all coordinated and just work but i'm not super super good at that kind of stuff yeah i made the light yellow and the lens yellow and let's go over this one let's change that material and make it red and then we'll make this light red cool and then yeah now you can see that all of these guys have that bone uh bone constraint thing um that are just parented to this and we can it's kind of kind of cool to see how additive lighting all works and uh and stuff like that but uh yeah and obviously this won't like when you're fully rendered they just just look like that uh shoot guys it's uh it's not working right it's i forgot to do one of the constraints so what you got to do is um one of the bones um wow i cannot talk today uh okay so select that bone that's uh parented to the light um well first i'll just show you probably saw in the video before but yeah i uh it was way off like it's completely the mount is going through the the light cylinder really really badly and uh and so there needs to be one more constraint on these bones so um control tab into those bones this one on the on the cylinder is the one that you're going for and you have to also lock that x ik constraint you saw that it snapped um into a better into a better existence when i did that um yeah now i've done to these two lights and you can see now hopefully when i move this they uh they work a lot better and they work like lights would look um oh man i'm also gonna um auto smooth this guy whoop there we go yeah these guys deserve to be auto smooth that will help a lot and i'm sure there's a lot more detail that you can add to these guys um if they move like that there should be motors i'm sure um somewhere on here but you you can figure that out you can make them look however you want i don't i'm just showing you the basic uh structure of how you can make these automated lights and yeah another cool thing that that you can do obviously with this empty now that you have this all um i don't think you guys can actually there we go um is yeah you can i um animate the location of that throw it throw it over here uh throw another keyframe oops um bring it up there location and then bring it back down there and well that's why it's moving all over i got the magnet on um so yeah and then we go back and it's uh just animates nice and easy so yeah i just want to show you guys that bone thing that i messed up really quick

Channel: chrisfastmedia

Views: 1,333

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Id: VEvH7iNreAg

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021