I'm trying to add strobe beacon lights to the wing tips of a space ship for an animation. I just want the point of light to flash but I'm getting to much color from the light on to other surfaces. I've made the radial light in a glass globe and used volume but no matter how small I make it, is still too big. Anyone have any ideas, suggestions or experience with this? Thanks Peter

It sounds like you need to reduce the intensity of the radial light, not the size of it. If you need it bright, another thing you might try is to make a small primitive or a 2D square to block the light from shinning onto the other surfaces. I'd go with the reduced intensity. Also, try playing with the falloff and the ambiance.

Leave your light the same. Make an object next to the light to be the actual light. Turn the diffusion and ambience up to 100 each and the object will put out more light than it takes in and appear to glow. Cut the diffusion to 90 and ambience to zero and it looks like the light went off. The only other way is to render bmp frames and paint it in as postwork.

Thank you!

Actually cutting the diffusion to 90 and ambiance to 0 doesn't make it go out.

Well yes. If you want the object to be visible like the light on top of a police car you leave some ambience on or it turns black. It may not be 90 you want. You will have to see how it looks with your current light setup and decide. If you want some pin prick to completely disappear you could toggle the transparency. The thing is transparency eats more calculation time and real lights go out, not away. The other thing I advise is save a whole other scenefile now under a different name. The reason is I have animated textures before and when I delete a keyframe the motions disappear but texture animations remain. It's hard to undo changes when this happens. I'd make a file to play with where you can feel comfortable about trashing the whole thing and start over on the animation. If you decide the flash is too fast it's going to be hard to back out of a minute of frames. better to trash and restart. Save early and often.

In the light editor go to the "faloff" section and choose "squared".. then adjust the light intensity. So the light will be visible but wont lite all the stuff around... Cheers