Spotlight texture won't rotate.Help

How to make the spotlight texture projection rotate as i rotate the lamp. It seem to able to move on xyz and scale but no rotation.
Here is the file.SpotLigth GOBO2.blend (718 KB)

Attachments

SpotLigth GOBO.blend (715 KB)

I am not sure if that is the solution you want, but you can simply rotate the texture instead of the lamp…

  • Therefore insert a mapping node

  • change the mapping type to vector

  • play around with the rotation values


I am having the exact same issue and cannot figure out why, on version 3.3.1. Ever figure out what’s going on?

Use a driver from your object rotation connected to your desired mapping coordinate.

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Interesting, this is mostly working but the movement is distorted and only works when the spot is facing down. I’ll play around with it and do some reading though and see if I can figure it out now that stuff is at least moving.

Thanks a bunch!

image

Try it using the normal output of the texture coordinate node.

I take it you want a spinning “gobo” and a moving light. I would separate the 2 movements (in a mobile stage light they are separate functions, it is not the lamp that rotates it is the gobo)
Here I rotated the light with keyframes on the lamp.
Then I rotated the “gobo” separately with the texture cords.

And the file so you can see the movement:
SpinningGobo.blend (96.5 KB)

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Ohp this is it. I swear I tried a texture coordinate node before, but somehow this actually removes the need for the drivers as well. Thank you both so much! I wasn’t doing anything nearly as fancy I am just new to blender and playing around trying to understand it for later, but your example is also extremely interesting so thank you for that!

I’m curious why geometry normal seems to work just fine for others but for me the texture coord normal is required instead.

Working node setup in case anyone else has this issue for some reason.

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The texture normal centers the uv’s on where the centre of the light beam hits the ground
This is what you get if you plug it directly into the output node:

The geometry normal centers the uv’s on where the geometry of the lamp is (lamps do not have geomtry but it uses the lamps position in space)

That is why, with the geometry normal, things go wrong when the lamp is not facing “straight down”
To project it is better to use the texture normal.

I recommend you activate the “node wrangler” addon in preferences.

Shift-Ctrl-LMB on a node shows you the output of that node. This is great when experimenting. That is how I did those screen shots of the uv output.

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Ahhh okay, that makes sense about the differences between the nodes, that is very handy. Part of my difficulty was that the geometry node seemed to work for others but not me, and it made me wonder if something was broken elsewhere in my settings or overall setup.

Thank you for the recommendation! I have been using node wrangler quite a bit, very useful addon. I’m not sure why I didn’t think to test the vector out of the node on the spot light though, that might’ve helped a bit!

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Yes, I suppose it depends on the use case. Geometry normal does project but in a different way.

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