KeyShot Quick Tip - Pulsing LEDs Using the Color Fade Animation Node

[Music] welcome back to another quick tip an important feature in visual cue for many real world products is light effectively demonstrating a product's functionality by flashing blinking or gently pulsing an led is important in this video we'll use the color fade animation node in order to achieve that pulsing led animation this is a model of an electric toothbrush docking into its charger this small cutout right here will be our light source the goal is to make this light fade in and out once that toothbrush lands in the charger we're going to use the emissive material for this it's the perfect material for small light sources like this because it's not meant to illuminate an entire scene to really see the effects of this material make sure you have global illumination checked in the lighting tab looking at the properties of this emissive material we're going to focus on that intensity slider this controls the intensity of that light that is being emitted for instance with a value of 0 that light looks like it's off but bumped up to 3 and it's nice and bright here you can change the color of this material but for this demo i'm going to stick with white let's open the material graph this is where we have that ability to add and connect nodes to further build out a material's complexity in order to animate this light right click open the animation and drop in that color fade node we want this to be attached to the intensity socket because as we learned just a bit ago that's how we'll be able to control and animate the brightness now opening that node in the animation timeline you'll see this black and white gradient this is responsible for essentially turning the light on and off we can think of black as a value of 0 meaning off and white as a value of 1 meaning on so right now this is going from on to off adding more stops and alternating the black and white values is what creates that blinking effect for this specific animation i know that the toothbrush docks in the charger at two and a half seconds so i'm going to set that as my start time and give a duration for now of just six seconds then add in several stops and alternate the colors accordingly you can create a swatch to speed this up a bit for smooth transitions be sure to space these out evenly based on my timings they all need to be one second apart there now we've got this gradient gradually going from off to on to off three times every two seconds here's how that animation plays out the pulsing feels a little fast so i'm going to increase the duration to 10 seconds it also doesn't seem like that light is getting bright enough that's a quick fix in the material graph because the white represents an intensity value of one and we saw earlier in this video that an intensity level of three looks better and brighter we can just add a color to number utility node right now it's outputting to one but we'll switch that to three also when the light is completely off and it's totally dark like this it doesn't look super realistic so let's also increase the output from value a tiny bit something like point one or point two and lastly turning on that bloom feature in the image tab will add that perfect glowing effect around the light that looks pretty nice so there you go a very simple and very easy way to create a pulsing light using the color fade animation node thanks for watching this keyshot quick tip leave a comment below with your thoughts and don't forget to subscribe for more helpful content if you enjoyed this video give it a like and share it with your friends you

Channel: KeyShot

Views: 25,127

Keywords: keyshot, cg, 3d rendering, 3d animation, engineering, product design, marketing

Id: pp7O8kg6c9U

Length: 4min 4sec (244 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020