Chase light effect

How-To
1

Hey everybody !
I am new to Notch and loving it.

I am trying to get a simple chase light effect, where I imported a 3D asset with 2 materials from C4D.
I cloner it with the Notch cloner and I want to animate the emissive part of the material among the clones, one at the time - to create a chase effect.

I thought of using the math modifier, but that works on all the clones at once, how do I offset it?

Also, I would want the material to be black+emissive, but if I set the color of the material to black, the emissive channel doesn’t work anymore.
is there a way around that?

Thanks in advance

Elad

2

Hi and welcome,

As far as the cloner issue goes, I’m pretty sure you’ll need to rethink your approach as clones are instances of a single source. I’m not sure if they’ve yet added a material affector type feature, but that would be the way forward.

As far as your emissive and black goes, it might be better to share a scene file that demonstrates your issue. You can make a material colour black, and still then set an emmisive value and colour separately. If you need certain areas to emit and others to not, you can feed an image into the emmissive input on the material node. You can also manually link a modifier into the emmissice amount value to control it that way. So not sure what issue you’re encountering is…

3

Hey Jamie,

I ended up talking with support via email and they showed me a way to get the chase light effect,
by pumping an image effector to the cloner.

Then with a gradient + transform node + position X movement + mapping node
It forces a color change on the light part of the clone.

Like you said, a material affector would make much more sense but probably will happen in a future release.

Thank you for your help!

4

Actually that’s what I was picturing, image affector makes more sense!