I haven't been able to keep up with the current release of AM. I am still using v11. I have modeled a fire truck and would like to know if there is a way to craft realistic, rotating emergency lights, such as the red and blue ones found on police cars and other emeergency vehicles. Is there a tutorial for that, somewhere? I would want the full effect, that is the lights would come up, and light up objects around them, etc. I imagine that it has something to do with volumetric effects, and probably a combination of other actions. I just have not played around with it to see what works and what doesn't. If anyone has suggestions, I would appreciate them, greatly.

I did some rotating lights on my Star Trek enterprise model a long time ago. I used several kliegs, bulbs, and actions to create the effect. It worked very well. Volumetrics are not necessary since you don't want to simulate a lighthouse effect, or do you? Do a search on the forum for rotating light or similar and you should come up with something. I don't have time right now to go into it other than to say , sure it's not too hard.

Adding a light to a model is easy.

RMB in the model window and choose new>light

This will also create a new light in your objects folder. Select it in the objects folder and you can set its properties including color and type (you probably want klieg).

In the model window you can move it around and rotate it like you do a bone .

In the PWS you can make it a child of another bone. A rotating bone, perhaps...?

I know about how to add the light and I am pretty sure that the klieg type is the best for what I am seeking to do. The problem I am having now is that, say the light color is white, and the "glass" color that the light is projecting through is red. I am not seeing the addition of the red element to the beam as it casts its light outward. I have been working with the properties of the glass, which I am not even sure that I have set correctly to simulate properly. What I am seeing now is a shadow cast over half the light, obscuring the full circle. I am wondering if this has something to do with translucency, refraction, which I have set to 1, or density, which I have set to 0. I am continuing to play with it until I have something that is close to what I am looking for.

Click to view attachment


In my test, the kleig light must have

Options>Cast Shadows (ON)>Type>Raytraced


set in its props.


The default "z-buffered" shadows wont' take on the color of transparencies they pass thru.


(Also, the ground object must have "cast Shadows" ON to show shadows from single thickness patches.)

I'm presuming there's a good reason not to just make it a red light.

The goal is to simulate the colored plastic of emergency light bars. I could make it a red light but I wouldn't get the filler I am looking for. I got the effect I was looking for, finally, but I had to do a new model with just the light bar. No matter what I have tried, turning off reflectivity, adjusting transparency values, etc in the actual fire truck model I am still getting, what looks like a shadow over the bright part of the light, but I get a perfect reflection of it on the surface of the model, itself. Maybe the patch count is too high for the renderer to calculate everything it needs to so it's missing somethings but I don't think so. Either that, or my machine is just not capable of doing it. If I turn off, hide the rest of the model and just work with the light bar, it's fine, but it won't do what I want with the whole model unhidden

you may need to post a pic or a prj. I'm not sure what you are trying for.