Flashing lights with robot speak
 

Is there a simple way to do this. I have a robot in a Lightwave scene and have used objects as simulated lights on the Robot.
At the moment I have been using the envelope graph to adjust the brightness to give a flashing appearance, but its hard to get the timing right with the words, that the robot will be speaking.
rendering tests is time consuming. Is there a better or simpler way of doing this? I'm fairly new to lightwave and use version7.

genesis1

In the graph editor you can select the intensity channel for your lights, go to "modifiers" and add "audio channel." This lets you add noise to an channel based on an audio clip and might give you something like what you're after.

How well it works depends on the quality of the sound file, and the dialogue being spoke, as well as the setup you're using.

I'd be inclined to try something where the inner lights were set to control the outer lights via "channel follower," again found under modifiers in the graph editor. Something like as the lights move further out from the center, they "follow" the next light in's intensity by like 90, or 75% or something. Doing this would give you a fall off as the light moves out from the middle so the corners of the mouth aren't as intesense as the center.

Alos you don't have to render it out full everytime, there's a number of options there. Quickshade being one method to greatly reduce render times if all you're doing is rendering out something for timing tests.

The best method tho, since renders don't have audio, is to generate a preview in Layout itself, this is usually pretty quick and plays back your audio with the preview.

Flashing lights
 

Thanks all, for the reply. Have had some success with adding audio channel in modifiers, but found it too sensative. So I went back to doing it manualy and making a timing sheet on paper on where the emphasis was in the speech, so I could plan out where the flash should be and how long it should last. Still quite fiddley though.

Thanks to all.:beer: