How to control Lights and materials with drivers
This is a great to tutorial to introduce you to how Drivers work in blender.
Drivers are basically using something else to control another thing, and in this instance we are using an empty to control the color of an emissive material and the color of point multiple point lights so that we match the light and material color of the point lights with the emission object or text.
video tutorial:
The effort of doing this is so we can create an illusion that the text is illuminating the scene since blender’s eevee render engine does not support mesh lighting like cycles so we need a way to fake light the scene
How to use drivers in blender
- select the light and go to the light properties
- right click on the color option
- in the options menu, select add driver and open the driver editor
- expand the point light and you should see the RGB color componets
- select each component and in the driver property select the control object and the type
- now you can move the control object and the color should change
- repeat these steps for the different color components
- and you have successfully added a driver to control the light color
- you can now do this for other properties like energy