how to turn on the lights

[kubo]

This is a small tip, some of you might have already figure it out, or even found a better solution, but for those of you that haven't it might come handy, or even better you might find some other neat uses that you can share.
Just recently I had to do a video for a client. As usual it was some archviz stuff, a residential building. The client wanted to start the video showing the building coming up to life from night to sunrise. The sunrising part was easy thanks to the scripts, but a residential building waking up means, amongst other things, lights turning on and off inside the rooms, street lamps turning off, and so on. So I gave it some thought. Right now we don't have a way to control the light power from our modeling app to Octane. So I thought I needed a dimmer or switch of sorts. Then I thought of the efficiency parameter of the emitter materials in Octane. There you could add a value but also an image.

So why not create a gradient map, assign it to the light mesh and animate it over time from black to white when I wanted to switch on the light and inverse to turn it off. Well, I did some test to see if it worked, and of course it did.
So then I went back to my modeling app, created 4 different materials (so I could have different temperature lights) assigned them randomly, then I animated one of the instances and randomly moved the key frames along the timeline.

uvmap.gif (8.85 KiB) Viewed 2538 times

Then I exported a middle frame to octane keeping in mind a couple of those lights "switch" position and tweaked the material till it looked good.

and there I had my building waking up!

azu_anima_0163.gif (523.48 KiB) Viewed 2538 times

this is just a small crop of the final 720HD frame rendered for 2048 samples in PT for 6min
It looked great (thanks to Octane mainly) and my client was really pleased. If they put up the video somewhere I'll add the link, meanwhile I hope some of you find it useful and you are welcome to add any extra tip to help us all get the most out of Octane.
Cheers
Kubo

[Jaberwocky]

Great tip

would never have thought of that one.

A good bit of lateral thinking!

[ttaberna]

Very usefull tip for archviz industry!!
Thanx

[niuq.cam]

Thank you. Very useful. It give ideas !