Tutorial: Animating a Traffic Light (and other nonsense)

passssworrrrdddssss!

Anderson Atlas

great tutorial!

excellent

Thanks a lot Ian!! I've been looking for that one for a while :D and I didn't know about Shift+S, super useful!

Thank Spaghetti Monster someone else believes in spotting lies. Glad to have you aboard.

Loved the box modeling and texturing on the traffic light.

Thomas Heaney

thank you.. but tracks from ae to blender is possible.. i wish blender to blender is possible. i watched your green screen video.. copy loc rot and parent camera to png sequence.. thats great! i tried too! if it is possible to import tracked camera from other blender files.. we can create wonders just by adding tarcked camera to various scenes and use your green screen trick! i dont have after effects.. thats my problem!

Ooo- doing a quick test, it looks like it doesn't (since the camera-tracking constraint references the "Active Clip", which wouldn't exist in the other project. BUT, you can always hit "Constraint to F-Curve" in the camera tracking constraint, which turns it into regular keyframe data, and then you can import it into any project you want. I could totally be overlooking something, though. I WISH you could do this, because I really want to make a library of "subtle handheld camera motion" based on actual tracked data, and just quickly apply it onto any camera I want.

Ian Hubert

Yeah! It's an ability of the "Node Wrangler" addon (comes included with blender, you just have to activate it in the preferences). FANTASTICALLY useful. Ctrl+Shift+Right click and drag combines two nodes with a mix node. There are lots of other really useful tricks, too- one I use all the time is SHift+S, which lets you just switch a node to some other node, while still keeping the relevant connections intact (as opposed to having to delete and re-wire everything). There are a lot of other tricks too, but I just can't remember them :P

Ian Hubert

Does anyone know the shortcut Ian is using at 34:25 to hook up the two nodes to a mix shader? Thx!

Another super handy tutorial but the bit with the new mouse makes me so angry; not at you, at the way every product you buy now seems to come with the caveat that now you've paid some money to some company they have a right to ask for your personal details and sign up for an 'account' so that they can install tracking shit on your computer and spam you in perpetuity, and you won't get to use the product you've paid for unless you submit to this. ARRRGH!! I hope this video goes viral and destroys corporate greed.

Pete Burges

can we append or import blender camera with tracking data ( movement with tracks) to other blender scenes???

It sounds like the surface of your mesh might not be subdivided enough. Subdividing the problem planes might help.

Ruddy marvellous! :)

Doug Brown

Ooo- I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the times I used fSpy? I forget if I did or not, but it's a great tool to help keep things from being "wobbly" (if you can really line up the camera's perspective with the global axis it makes everything SO much easier; you can just hit "exturude" and it all lines up) I talk about fSpy a bit here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/quick-grocery-39659877 I do sort of a complex example (grocery store), then a more straightforward one one a cubic building. Regardless, yeah!! I should definitely cover it a bit slower and in more detail some time soon, here!

Ian Hubert

BUT- I think it would be really super helpful if you could go over this at a slightly slower pace? If I've missed any material that covers this, please do let me know- It would really help me out on a current project! Thank you, thanks again & thank you once more!

Chris Alldridge

Video suggestion- About a year ago you released a video in which you used a photo to magically bash out a pretty groovy train booth. I screengrabbed the image and tried to follow along but every time that I do my geometry ends up all wobbly. Being spatially (and intellectually) inept, I can't quite work out how you got it all so plush and straight. -I feel like this is a little bit more advanced than the traditional image-from-plane building texture modelling that you've covered so extensively. BUT

Chris Alldridge

I know this is a bit late but good job on dynamo dream I love it. I love your content. I want to achieve having as good textures as you some day. I know you project you textures and use online stuff but I think you still use prop walls for textures am I wrong? cause I want to do whatever you do to achieve the scenes you achieve.

Callof_ZON

Why your work has a quality similar to David Fincher. I may be wrong but i could see your vision on sci-fi , broken worlds ,dystopian kinda thing. This idea came to my mind when i was watching Fight club over and over again. Did you got inspired by him.........i mean does your imagination engulfs those gritty wood plastered walls surrounded by old telephones and greebles , with that fart smelling steam , that clattering sound of rain falling down on those roofs....I can't put into another words but i see a great film maker indeed!!!

Another fabulous tutorial, with a fantastic segue into the horrible cyberpunk future we already live in, where our input devices report our every move to our corporate masters. Thank you!

Lonnon Foster

It's not actually time-lapse. Ian just works *really fast* during those segments.

Lonnon Foster

Time lapse with a non-working clock in the background is trippy

the frustration with the mouse set up is so relatable.

Chunky

This "RAD STUFF TO SHARE" has me on the edge of my seat!

Judd Hyland

I really enjoyed this - thanks Ian!

As soon as I wrote the first version you got to the point where you offset it .5 and I felt like an idiot for not thinking of that, haha! I do like the idea of orchestrating a huge amount of lights using all of the columns, but I don't know of any scene that actually needs that much complexity.

Zachary Macintyre

Oof. Makes my traffic light tutorial a year ago look like absolute garbage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTsIRBwJV7w hahahaha. But my goal at the time was to animate via custom properties so I could use library overrides.

loved the mouse drivers bit. not to be cynic, but would love for more of that practical frustration! thanks ian!

max pirrit

Yeah! I don't know if you saw the part in the video, but setting up the perpendicular lights was as easy as offsetting the UVs by .5! Kinda startled by how easily it came together, actually! And man yeah! What'd be really cool would be having some interplay between this and a traffic sim, although this might not be the best way to do it in that case...

Ian Hubert

Elegant solutions like this are really satisfying. If you made all the lights of one intersection a single object, you could add a random offset for each object and have each intersection be at a different point in time for aerial shots.

Zachary Macintyre

I'd explain it, but there's a lot of math.

Ian Hubert

HAH, yeah I 100% would just assume that'd kick me out of the login process- that's nice to know though, thanks!

Ian Hubert

Logi Options has one of the shittiest dark patterns I've seen. If you just click the X at the top right of that login screen, it just goes to the app, no login required. It just implies that you're going to close it. Infuriating.

AH YEAH! Man, Shift+R is the one hot key I can never remember exists; I've been trying for yeaaaaars, and it's so useful! And huh! Yeah I agree- ctrl+middle mouse seems like it should totally be the way to go.

Ian Hubert

Oh, man, I have no immediate use for them, but now I really feel like I need to make some traffic lights and add moths to them. Radioactive moths with an emitting material. Wait, could the moths BE the traffic light? Jeez, this has inspired me so much XD

Mornarion

They look unsurprisingly good! Against all my expectations, I got used to Ctrl + middle mouse to zoom, and now I rarely use the scroll wheel since it gives a bit less control over how much you zoom in or out. Also, when creating pseudo-arrays in edit mode, I duplicate and move once, then Shift+R to repear the action, and then the separation is exactly the same. The downside, of course, is that many times you don't want them to be perfectly spaced as it reduces the realism.

Mornarion

Dammit Ian! now i have to go change my pants!

Jack_Wolfe

Dammit dude, i'm supposed to be working, dont be tempting me with sweet tuts now, not while i'm so close to the finis...... Oh ok then. you twisted my arm.

Jimmy Deface

Clever AND funny as always. Thank you Ian.

I've learned how to lie professionally, set up cloud security for a mouse, and finally how to kitbash on a less sketchy level. That kinda next-level content is what encourages the default cube to show up on its own job consistently, even though it knows it will be obliterated over and over. :)

Came for the tutorial, stayed for the mouse unboxing and setup ❤️

Glenn Stewart

But can you do a tutorial on how you get 9 blender icons in your taskbar?

Happy Friday Leroi!

Ian Hubert

Gah! What a fascinating way to sequence lights!

N_COUNTER

Whoa! You're totally right! I thought low-color pngs compressed fantastically but this thing is 2mb! Also great thought with the blur, yeah :D

Ian Hubert

Cool technique! I would use a greyscale PNG for the intensity graph though, as it will compress better. If you want to go crazy, you could use indexed mode in the Gimp for super compression. Or leave it grayscale, and blur it to give the lights a tiny bit of ramp up and ramp down.

Paul and Anna Spooner

Yay! Also super excited for your rokoko talk! Saw that email and signed up immediately haha!

Blake Rizzo

Exiting changes?! The best kind!

Robert Gyurko

Writing a geography exam today! I can't wait to watch this when I'm home. Happy Friday everyone!

Roy