Animated lighting - Torch and Candles

Because I wanted the scene to not just be static, I created some blueprinted models with animated lighting effects.

I wanted moving shadows ans subtly flickering light levels, so first in the blueprint viewport, I made a torch holder, a fire effect particle and two lights, one is a point light to provide the animated area shadow, and a spot light to make a directed light throw onto the floor.



In the blueprint event graph, I first get the location of the point light, then set it to a variable, which becomes the basis of the movement. On the event tick I have a world location change for the point light, where the location is set by small random values added to the current location variable vector pins. This ensures the light bounces around a little inside the head of the torch, trowing a random shadow movement onto the wall.

The intensity of both lights are also set on the tick using the set intensity node and a random float in range.



I also did this for the candles, with a very similar node set-up.