Simple oscillating (rotatin back and forth) light actor

Development Rendering
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Late Night

I’m doing a just for fun late night show mock up, and was using unreal for my set as I can throw 3d objects in there and the lighting etc is good. I’m trying to make lights that rotate back and forth in like you might find on a tv set.

I know that i can make a simple actor, and add a 3d model of a light and a spotlight component to it, but I don’t know how to animate it after that. I’ve animated moving spotlights in the enclosed video, but I would prefer an animated actor that I could place so I wouldn’t have to manually keyframe everything in.

Thanks in advance for any advice. Know this is dumb.

2

Hi.:

  1. You can add InterpToMovementComponent or RotatingComponent to your Light Actor. Then set component properties
    in DetailsPanel.
  2. You can use Timeline with different Track curves ( vector for color,location etc. float and event tracks ) and update your LightComponent properties.
  3. As you mentioned you don’t want to keyframe anything, but Sequencer Editor is good to know tool anyway.
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I’ve tried RotatingComponent before without success. Timelines seem like they will work for me though. I got a basic light setup with a box to use as a visual indicator of where the light is. I’m able to get it to rotate back and forth, but once I rotate the light within the world, the object contines to oscillate from the origin, rather than its new position. I’ve enclosed a video of the behaviour as well as a screencap of the blueprint in question.

245132-rotate.png
245132-rotate.png1024×768 153 KB

[Video][2]

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i wouldnt be calling the timeline on tick. i know it works but it seems quite wasteful and not good for performance. if you call a timeline once it will do its thing on its own. you can also enable looping in the timeline if you want it to keep moving.

5

Ok. I plugged it into event begin play and it still works the same. Thank you for the response. Do you know how I fix the way it seems to be rotating absolutely rather than relatively? I posted a video of the behavior in my first comment if that helps.

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