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Creating randomly turning on and off lights in a cityscape
I’m currently working on a project that requires a ‘busy’ cityscape. I need to show that the city is bustling by making lights turn on and off in the windows. I’ve created a ‘lights’ solid and masked all the windows, and I’m trying expressions on the opacity of each mask to try and get the desired effect.
I’ve put in a few wiggle expressions, but these just constantly alternate between the opacity values which isn’t that realistic. A light would either be on or off, although alternating between 100 and 0 on the opacity instantly doesn’t look good either, so i want it to change between on/off over 5-10 frames or so, but be doing this every so often.
Any ideas?
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4 Replies
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Create a comp the same aspect ratio of the face of your building.
Fill that comp with one paragraph of text, all “.” (dots)
Adjust the spacing of the dots and the aspect ratio to match the look you want for the windows.
Apply a “Animate In” / “Random Fade Up” preset (Text presets) and adjust the range, adding some intermediary keyframes to pause the fadeup.
Enjoy resultsTudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
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Many thanks Ted!
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Thanks for the link Chris – my client ended up changing what I was doing so didn’t need the lights to adjust the way i was trying to get them but that link is bookmarked for next time!
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