Hello,

I've been experimenting with creating a simple animation in PhotoView 360 to simulate how I want an illuminated button to behave. The button would have a ring of LEDs beneath a piece of translucent plastic such that the ring would "pulse" on and off. As opposed to setting up multiple point lights, I'm trying to use an animated appearance change (specifically luminous intensity) applied to a component to create the "on" and "off" conditions.

In the first video test (ring color change 1.avi), you can see the ring change back and forth from white to blue. The only difference between the two appearances was the color. However, when the only difference is luminous intensity changing from 0 to 25 (the color blue stays the same), the luminous intensity does not change in the generated animation (see ring LI change 1.avi). It remains at the appearance setting for the first frame. By the way, I can see the change between the two appearances in the integrated preview for PV 360, but the change is not applied when the frames are being rendered out to the AVI file.

By the way, I have been able to achieve this effect by adding a separate part that covers or "masks" the ring, which is set to a high luminous intensity, and then animate a change in transparency of the mask (which, BTW, is another illumination setting) to hide the mask, thus revealing the glowing ring. (See ring mask change 1.avi.)

So to conclude, looks like you can animate (and render) a change in transparency, but you can not render an animation with a change in luminous intensity. Maybe interpolating between the frames is too difficult? I can export an animation from the SolidWorks screen (ring LI change 1 no render.avi), but not rendered.

Any thoughts on this?