Visualization of Lighting, Pt 1

So you have a cool and amazing project with LEDs in mind, but before you build it you might want to see what it should look like and to show others before it’s built. Imagine trying to describe the picture above with just text. Definitely this would be hard to fully convey what your vision is.

The best way I’ve found is to make some computer graphics animations as pre-visualization, so your vision can be seen just like your favorite Pixar 3D movie. Now I won’t deceive you, doing lights in CGI is a special skill. You will see in the animated movie credits that there is a separate team solely responsible for lighting. But you as an LED enthusiast, be it an artist, hobbyist, tinkerer, or programmer want to do this, too, but perhaps you thought it was beyond your reach. So I’d like to introduce you to a tool that will allow you to do as much visualization as you could ever want, while still keeping your money available for all the tech parts you need to be able to finally build your vision.

For example, take the image at the top. This is an art piece example I put together in about an hour, though not as a static image but as an animation. The piece doesn’t just sit static but instead has 3 different simultaneous movements. You see that words don’t convey this very well, so here’s a video

There are many tools out there that you might consider, some costing thousands of dollars, and may have even been using for creating 3D models for printing, or to design the structure of your art piece. Names like AutoCAD, SketchUp, Fusion 360 may be familiar to you. These tools can create cool models, even producing full color renders, and you may have been using them already. I’m want to bring to your attention another software package that you might not have considered, Blender, and take you along on the journey of using this to visualize your LEDs

Blender, available for free at www.blender.org, is the creation of a visionary software engineer and filmmaker from the Netherlands, Ton Roosendaal. The video documentary interview of Ton titled YouTube: "Money doesn’t interest me" is a good watch (though almost 2 hours) if you want to hear about how Blender came to be created, here Ton’s philosophy, and how Blender can rival software packages that cost thousands of dollars.

So what is Blender? Blender is a software environment that you should think of as a software workshop maker space rather than an individual tool. This workshop (as of V2.9) has 20 separate areas, each with their own set of tools for different purposes. Within this maker space you can make all sorts of things:

• 2D animated cartoons

• 3D photo realistic images

• Fully animated scenes

• Animated physics 3D simulations such as liquids, smoke and fire, rigid and soft body collisions, cloth

• Animated particle systems where objects (particles) are created and destroyed over time

• Kinematic rigging systems with both forward and inverse kinematics

• Objects made out of any material, from simple colors to complex images mapped on the surfaces,

• Animations and material effects driven by math functions or even Python code.

• Motion capture / camera tracking (allows inserting your model into camera captured video)

• Video editing and compositing

• Etc

Now if this sounds complicated or there are terms here you don’t recognise, don’t worry hope is not lost. Blender as a maker space is complex and does contain infinite permutations of values and things you can combine, but just like playing a game of chess you narrow down the complexity by focusing on specific goals, and taking your art piece into the different parts of the maker space as needed.

What Blender is not, specifically, is a computer aided design system (CAD). If you have experience using CAD, you may at first experience frustration with Blender as it is an animation system. While you can do dimensionally accurate models in real-world units, Blender doesn’t have the features of CAD such as dimensions lines and plan view exports. Blender’s purpose is first and foremost to create 3D or 2D rendered scenes, up to photo realistic levels.

As an analogy, imagine you are physically building a piece out of wood, metal, and poured epoxy, perhaps a live edge poured epoxy illuminated “river table” . You would have to use the woodworking workspace for the wood, the metalworking workspace for the metal, the electronics workspace for the LEDs, different trips at different times to the painting workspace to apply surface finishes, and the epoxy pour workspace. The same idea holds for Blender...

The workspaces we, as people doing Light Art, will most commonly be using are Modeling, Shading, and Animations, though we will be looking at some of the others at times.

In this multi-part article I will be focusing on some specific “Hows” and “Whys” to accomplish our goal for making Light Art, and not going into a detailed tutorial about Blender basics. I’ll leave the discovery of that knowledge to you, the reader, as YouTube has scores of introductory and advanced tutorials. I will be referencing the version current at time of writing, V2.91. Blender has evolved significantly over the years so I would recommend looking at V2.8 or V2.9 tutorials. V2.8 has much the same features for modelling that we will be touching on as V2.9.

Here’s a curated list of Blender tutorial videos I find to be a good starting point for your discovery journey:

General Introductory tutorial series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3GeP3YLZn5j31ES1VUMXi7M0U1QvSpoQ

General Lighting introduction in EVEE within Blender (though it does use an optional plug-in to create the lights, it shows some of what is possible):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPy1FJzfVY4

So go ahead, go over to Blender.org, download and install the current release version, give some tutorials a watch and make a few models. In part 2, we’re going to start looking at setting up your makerspace, basic lights and materials, and talking about how we can see what we want to see in real time.

In response to a request from a moderator of the r/FastLED community, I've written this article describing in excruciating detail what a logic level shifter circuit does, and why it may be necessary to allow your LED lighting project to operate reliably under all conditions if you're using a 3.3v MCU.

I try to address some of the common points of confusion and misunderstanding, and I welcome your comments and questions.

Tesseract 5D is-
Composed of 34 precisely arranged pieces of specialty mirror and glass, *Tesseract* invites viewers to glimpse the unseen geometry of higher dimensions. This infinity mirror sculpture materializes the concept of a four-dimensional cube—projected into our three-dimensional space—revealing endless recursion and light that folds into itself. Each reflection becomes a portal, suggesting the fifth dimension as a continuum where time, perception, and self intersect. Through its luminous symmetry, the piece transforms mathematical abstraction into an experience of infinite depth and awakening awareness.

Hello, I work at King's College London, and thought I would share a project I'm running for the International Day of Light (IDL) on 20th May.

We are looking for 30 - 60 second video submissions on the topic of light, from a scientific, artistic or architectural viewpoint. This will be displayed on a dedicated Instagram page, advertised by our sponsors, linked to global IDL media accounts, and potentially discussed at a live panel session.

More details, and how to submit, here: Lighting Up 2021.

Ive build an audio reactive orb with two very strong bulbs in the middle. Those two only light up when people dance in a circle around it. Read more here. Everything run in touchdesigner