Subtitles of the Movie

So far, we talked about how to add lights, how to add shadows and now let's talk about how to animate those lights. So I'm going to go to File and I'm going to create a new composite. Don't forget guys; we need to make sure we're in 3D Mode. Very important. Then I'm going to bring in that same footage we worked with earlier of our YellowLight, our car. And as always, I'm going to scale so it fits in the Viewport and I'll move it up a little bit like so. Let's make sure that we are on our light and let's go to the Light Button and let's change the color of this light a little bit. Let's give it a nice, bluish color. And we also have to go to Settings, turn on Shading to see that light take place. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go to our Timeline. You'll notice, by the way, that when you are working in Combustion, Combustion kind of remembers the last few settings you worked with. So if you didn't change anything, as I didn't change anything, you still have a bit of duration in your Timeline to work with. So what we're going to do is we're going to animate this light moving across the scene. So as I always do, I'm going to go to this Viewport, right click and go to Perspective and use my trackball so I can see the light and I'm also going to zoom out so I can see what I'm doing. Now, this is where we're going to animate the light and what I want to do now is I'm going to move this out of my way temporarily, click on the Animate Button right here until it turns red. This will tell Combustion to automatically place keyframes for you whenever you make a change. So on our first frame, the light is already where it's supposed to be. I'm going to scrub and I'm going to go all the way to the end of the duration and I'm going to move the light. And I can do it in several ways. I can use my Composite Controls and I can transform to move that light so I can grab it and move it along the X axis. I can also move it down a little bit on the Y and then when I can see it, I can even click on it and grab it myself. So you have a lot of control. But the good news is you see this path here and this tells you that you have actually created some animation. And you can always change the duration, you can always change the direction and we'll talk about how to do that in a minute when we curve this so the light actually does a little bit of an arc. So Combustion again puts a keyframe here and one here. So when we go back and scrub our Timeline, we have some animation. But it doesn't look great yet because the light should be a different type of light. Let's go ahead and turn it into a spotlight so it looks a little bit more dynamic. We'll also give it a nice, soft edge. And I'm going to scrub this and we have this nice spotlight moving across our scene. Now don't forget; animate's still on which means at any point I can change this animation and I can change the path of that. I can click on the handles and I can give a nice S and I can move everything around if I want to. It doesn't matter what Viewport you work in. You can click on things, move them around, move the light closer to your composite, further way, doesn't matter. I like to have both open so I can work on left to right, which is the X and your Y and I like to work on the Z by going into a Perspective View as you see here. So I click and move my light away and to the artwork as well. So now that we have this additional animation, we can scrub once again and see the spotlight gets closer and it gets further away from our car. And that is how you can easily animate your lights in Combustion. Let's go ahead and press Play and we can get a preview of this and when all the frames render into the buffer, it'll play back a little more smoothly. Now go ahead and hit Play and there we go. This is really a nice technique to use when you want to animate maybe a UFO doing a search through a field, scuba diving when you have a gigantic ship like the Titanic showing up in the distance and you can have the light change intensity as well. So I'm going to go ahead and do that now. I'm going to go back to the first frame and I'll drop the intensity. As long as animate is on, Combustion's watching you and will change accordingly. So lights off and it's going to slowly but surely turn back on because I'm going to go to the end of the animation and bump up the intensity again and when I play it, look at this. Zero intensity, a hundred percent. I can even change the intensity in the middle of the animation. So I could put it at a hundred or two hundred, move over, drop down to 50 or whatever I want to and I can move it up here and do this and I can have a flickering kind of effect, which is really good for a candle or you want to show some torches when people are looking through a cave. It's up to you. Just remember; as long as animate's on, every change you make Combustion records.