Thousands of Lights effect

[iggy21]

Im trying to animate a scene of darkness, then one light turns on, then another , and another and another, until their appears to be thousands/ millions of lights. Creating an envelope for each light would be a waste of time. Does anybody have any other suggestions? I would like each light to 'pop' on, or shine really bright for a brief second.


(Im actually using a method right now, but im hoping for more ideas. Currently I have a scene with thoushands of lights going off into the distance created with particle clone. I use a black poly and slide it back and over time, as each light passes through the poly, it exposes the light to the camera and I get the effect that the light was 'turned on'. The downfall is that i cannot get that 'popping' effect i want.)

[prospector]

here may be an idea.
may produce sparkling lights too.

inbetween lights and camera make a wall of small bricks (one sided polys but thousands in a wall) and make sure it covers full camera view.

Give it some hard FX and destroy wall with collision object or multiples of them.

make the wall flatblack

then as wall is destroyed the lights are uncovered in random fasion and as bricks tumble out of camera view they hide and reveal lightrs on the way.

Just a thought

[Celshader]

Im trying to animate a scene of darkness, then one light turns on, then another , and another and another, until their appears to be thousands/ millions of lights. Creating an envelope for each light would be a waste of time. Does anybody have any other suggestions? I would like each light to 'pop' on, or shine really bright for a brief second.


(Im actually using a method right now, but im hoping for more ideas. Currently I have a scene with thoushands of lights going off into the distance created with particle clone. I use a black poly and slide it back and over time, as each light passes through the poly, it exposes the light to the camera and I get the effect that the light was 'turned on'. The downfall is that i cannot get that 'popping' effect i want.)

Here's a thought...

Create a point cloud in Modeler.

Apply bright/glowing HyperVoxels to the point cloud in Layout.

Use an animated texture map to "turn on" these HyperVoxels by affecting their scale from 0% to 100%.

This could work great for all the lights in the background, since they'd be so far off they'd only appear as little points of light anyway.

[iggy21]

Thanks everyone, these are great ideas

[Lightwolf]

A clip mapped polygon might work as well, with a carefully crafted procedural clipmap that reveals the lights.

Heck, if you front project it, then you could even paint the revealing image sequence in a compositing tool.

Cheers,
Mike