Does your client want “that light grid look from all of the music videos a little while back”?  FINE…but you need to scroll a bunch of text through it…which means you need to be able to switch in new text on the fly.  PROBLEM…until now.  You would have to fake the lights using some sort of animated texture map.  That’s not a bad solution until you need to get CLOSE to the lights and then they’ll end up looking like crap.  Using the Volume Effector from C4D’s MoGraph module you can model dynamically, leaving your text in a procedural generator (Text Object), ready for changes.
In the first part of this tutorial we’ll go through the theory and setup the basic MoGraph model and get it running.  In part two, we’ll work on actually modeling the lights and the rig to get a good-looking final model.

STEP 01: The Bulb

Create a simple sphere object and make it very small.  We’ll also reduce the number of segments to something low so we won’t slow down our viewport.

STEP 02: The Rig Holding the Light

Create three cylinder objects and offset them behind our sphere.

STEP 03:  Grouping the Objects Properly

Then add the three cylinder objects into the group.  (This is important so that our axis center for the group remains at the sphere’s center.)

STEP 04: Matrix Object

Create a matrix object from the mograph menu.  (You could just use a cloner object, but we are going to be linking multiple cloner objects from this matrix object, so if we need to change any of the characteristics of the matrix object, it will update in both of our cloner objects.)

STEP 05: Cloner Object

With our bulb group selected, create a cloner object while holding down option (this will make the new cloner object a parent of the bulb group). Under the cloner object’s attribute settings change the mode to object and drag the matrix object into the object dialog box.

NOTE: After creating the cloner object, I realized that my cylinders we too fat and short.  I changed their settings a bit. (this is why procedural objects are great!)

STEP 06: Our Text

Create your normal text object with a text spline and an extrude nurbs.  In the extrude nurbs settings change the movement to 0m. We just want plain flat text.

STEP 07: “Lights On”

Duplicate our cloner object and then delete all of the cylinders.  Also make the radius of the sphere smaller than that of our bulbs.  (These spheres will be the bright spot inside the bulbs that are “on”)

STEP 08: Volume Effector

With our new cloner still selected, create a new volume effector from the Mograph menu.  In it’s settings, drag the text’s extrude nurbs object into the volume object dialog box. At the bottom of the attribute menu check the Visibility checkbox to on.  (This will make it so our “on” bulbs only show up where the text intersects with our matrix objects (kind of like a boolean object, all of the other “on” bulbs will be hidden.)

STEP 09: Some simple textures

First we’ll make a transparent texture for the outer bulbs (use a Fresnel shader for more realistic transparency. Then make a luminescent texture for our “on” lights.

Apply them to our objects and hit render.  We’re done.  We now have a lighting grid that we can still edit whatever text is being illuminated.

In part two, we’ll work on giving the bulbs, lights, and rack models a little more detail to add some style.  I hope you’ll check it out.

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