topic Re: Lighting Tunnel in Modeling

Lighting Tunnel

JackIPL — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 16:39:04 GMT

Hi,

I am currently trying to create a lighting tunnel,

attached is an example found online.

This will later be put into twin motion for a render as I do not require any form of documentation for this (just looks),

My initial idea was to create a profile using lots of squares, approx. 5mm x 5mm - then rotating this square lots of times around a central position - then I could drag out numerous copies of this profile and I would get the random scatter effect,

Obviously this has made for millions of individual squares and therefore Archicad is saying No.

What are my options?

Re: Lighting Tunnel

Ricardo Lopez — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 17:00:11 GMT

Hello

Have you tried to do it with the curtain wall tool? I found this old video that might be helpful.

https://youtu.be/gfFeFdwdZzM

Regards

Re: Lighting Tunnel

JaredBanks — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 21:20:08 GMT

Build the primary structure (ribs and horizontals) with Archicad elements (probably complex profile beams will be the easiest). Then use a similar extruded shape with the beam tool or She'll tool to make a thin skin along the length of the form. Create a surface with the random lights derived from a jpg or png and apply that to the thin skin.

So super structure: model

Substructure/lights/randomness: image mapping

Re: Lighting Tunnel

Ignacio Azpiazu — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 04:40:33 GMT

I understand the question is about the string lights.

If you intend to model the lights, as opposed to just throwing in a vault surface and adding a texture in Twinmotion, each individual light can probably be reduced to a rectangular or perhaps triangular morph face (aren't they much larger than 5 mm in reality?) –polygon count shouldn't be that high with triangular or quadrangular faces, as opposed to the prisms you are getting with complex profiles.

(You create and rotate a bunch of them, and then group, and duplicate/multiply groups. Or (I think) converting the bunch of lights to morph will give you a single multi-light morph to multiply or drag around, which for spatial rotation purposes is better than objects.)

If you were to do this tunnel more than once, or wanted to try variations in light fixture size, spacing, rotation, etc., it would be an ideal situation for scripting a very simple GDL light string. But for a quick one-off, rendering-only, in a non-GDL user, I think your approach makes sense.

Re: Lighting Tunnel

Lingwisyer — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 01:52:31 GMT

You could try using the Massivator object mentioned in this post to create a random scattering.