Simple oscillating (rotatin back and forth) light actor

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.

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.

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.

[Video][2]

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.

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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