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Animating Lamps Properties

As of Blender 2.5, Everything is animatable. Read more about keyframes Here.

Example

Let’s illustrate this with a flying torch deep in a cave.

We won’t detail the cave and torch creation – the first one is an deformed icosphere with Subsurf and Displace modifiers, and the second one, a cylinder scaled and subdivided several times in its length, with a particle system to materialize its fire.

The torch will be the only light source of the scene. Add four Lamp lamps, all using the same lamp datablock. Place them around the tip of the torch, and parent them to it. Give them an orange color (e.g. (1.0, 0.8, 0.4)), a short Distance (2.0, but this depends on the size of your cave!), and an Inverse Square falloff. Also let them cast ray shadows (soft shadows, if you have enough computing power…).

Right click on the Energy parameter and Insert Keyframe to create an Fcurve, then open the graph editor to edit the keyframes. You can for example start at zero (no energy, the scene is whole black), give a short and intense flash (10 over a few frames) to simulate a sort of lightning lighting the fire, then back to very low (0.25), and then a gently varying curve over the rest of the scene, to simulate the irregularities of the flames.

You might also use the same animation to control the particle system emmission, to synchronize the quantity of particles with the luminosity of the lamps.

Once your torch is flying, you should get something as shown below – you can download the blend file File:ManAnimationTechsLampExFlyingTorch.blend.