Turn lights on and off

[willowc84990896]

Is there a way to get rid to the dark when using light? I'm using light to illuminate a screen but I need to lower it when the surrounding environment lightens up. Is there a way to do that?

[Rick Gerard]

You can animate the intensity of a light. You can also add Ambient light to the scene. Sometimes you need to lower the intensity of a spot or point light and at the same time increase the intensity of the ambient light. It all depends on you you have set up your scene.

[angie_taylor]

I agree with Rick, add an ambient light of about 50% to your scene. You may need to experiment with intensity. Also, you can adjust the material options of each layer to determine how much ambient, diffuse, specular light it accepts. This can help you fine tine the lighting in your scene.

[willowc84990896]

I feel like you don't understand what I'm asking. Imagine someone in a dark room and they turn on a flashlight. The flashlight is the light and then when they turn on the light switch, everything brightens up. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

[Dave_LaRonde]

Animate the intensity of an ambient light from zero to whatever you want over maybe 3-6 frames.

[angie_taylor]

As we said, Ambient Light is what you need. Or, if you prefer, you could use a point light. Set it to whatever intensity you like. If you want to have it come on suddenly then animate between 0 and the chosen intensity. Toggle hold the first keyframe so that the value changes quickly and does not interpolate between values.

[willowc84990896]

When the intensity is on 0, the whole screen is black. I don't want the black when the light needs to turn on.

[angie_taylor · Accepted solution]

I presume your "flashlight" is a Spot light? When you want to see the spotlight in the dark room, set the flashlight intensity to 100%. Add another new light (this time Ambient) leave the intensity value at 0. Click on the Intensity stopwatch for both light's intensity values. When you want the main light to switch on and the flashlight go off - change the flashlight intensity value to 0 and the ambient light intensity value to 100%. This will create new keyframes. If you want the value to change suddenly follow my previous instructions for held keyframes.

[Rick Gerard]

There is nothing magical here. Put two lights in the scene. One spotlight for the flashlight and one ambient light set to something like 10%.

When you want the lights to turn on then set a keyframe for the ambient light intensity by first pressing the A key twice to reveal the light properties and then click the stopwatch. Move down the timeline about 3 frames and set the Ambient Light Opacity to 100%.

There you go. you have turned on the lights. Depending on how you set up the spot light you may need to also animate it from something like 100% to 40% or even turn it all the way off or trim the light layer.

This is really basic AE 3D stuff. I would strongly suggest that you spend some time with the help files and community resources that are available if you type Animate lights in the Search Help field at the top right corner of AE.

If you still can not figure it out then select all of the layers you are working with and press the u key twice. This will reveal all modified properties. Take a screenshot by pressing PrintScreen on Windows or by pressing Shift + Ctrl/Cmnd + 3 on a Mac. Then come back to the forum and hit reply, Tell us what kind of problem you are having, press return then Paste using Ctrl/Cmnd + v on Windows or drag your screenshot from the desktop to the reply field on the forum. Then maybe we can help you figure out a solution.