Light painting is an artistic process involving the use of long exposure photography and a moving light source to “paint” a picture. Recently Josh Sheldon automated the process to take light painting to a whole new level, creating mesmerizing animations using robot control system and 3D modeling software.
Sheldon is a University of Maryland graduate who is “interested in merging art and engineering “. He completed his bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering this year and is now figuring out what to do with his life, according to his website.
In the meantime, he’s coming up with cool projects and posting them on YouTube. For this latest project, he used Blender, a popular Open Source 3D animation software, a home-made camera rig and robot-controlled lights to paint frames for an animation.
Check out the video below for a look at how Sheldon does it. Skip to 2.49 if you’re impatient and want to see the good stuff.
Creating Long-Exposure Light Paintings with Blender
Normally, when creating long-exposure light paintings, you would need to spend hours in front of a camera and manually move a light source. That mainly still applies with Sheldon’s system, but it’s a robot and computer doing all the hard work.
Automating this process with a contraption that moves the light along a predefined path for him, Sheldon can create colorful animations with a quality that could only be achieved by photographing something real.
The resulting rig looks a lot like a 3D printer. But in place of an extruder there is a lighting fixture.
Thanks to a customized control board that Sheldon built himself, he is able to control eight axes of movement — adding the camera and other objects to the light source’s X-, Y- and Z-axis movements.
If you’d like to build your own, Sheldon has gone into some detail on GitHub. But, be warned, this project isn’t for the faint of heart and requires some serious knowledge of electronics.
It’s also not something you can do in an afternoon and, although the process is automated, it takes just as much time as ever to create a cool animation. Sheldon explains: “Each of the animations I made took between 4 and 12 hours to shoot, one frame at a time. Each frame is 1-3 long exposure photographs of the machine performing the light painting.”
Check out Sheldon’s YouTube channel or Twitter to keep up to date with his projects.
Source: Gizmodo
License: The text of "Producing Animations with an Automated Light Painting Rig" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.