Light painting: there’s something that never gets old about waving lights around in a long exposure photo. Whilst most light paintings are single shots, some artists painstakingly create frame-by-frame animations. This is pretty hard to do when moving a light around by hand: it’s mostly guesswork, as it’s difficult to see the results of your efforts until after the photo has been taken. But what if you could make the patterns really precise? What if you could model them in 3D?

[Josh Sheldon] has done just that, by creating a process which allows animations formed in Blender to be traced out in 3D as light paintings. An animation is created in Blender then each frame is automatically exported and traced out by an RGB LED on a 3D gantry. This project is the culmination of a lot of software, electronic and mechanical work, all coming together under tight tolerances, and [Josh]’s skill really shines.

The first step was to export the animations out of Blender. Thanks to its open source nature, Python Blender add-ons were written to create light paths and convert them into an efficient sequence that could be executed by the hardware. To accommodate smooth sliding camera movements during the animation, a motion controller add-on was also written.

The gantry which carried the main LED was hand-made. We’d have been tempted to buy a 3D printer and hack it for this purpose, but [Josh] did a fantastic job on the mechanical build, gaining a solidly constructed gantry with a large range. The driver electronics were also slickly executed, with custom rack-mount units created to integrate with the DragonFrame controller used for the animation.

The video ends on a call to action: due to moving out, [Josh] was unable to continue the project but has done much of the necessary legwork. We’d love to see this project continued, and it has been documented for anyone who wishes to do so. If you want to check out more of [Josh]’s work, we’ve previously written about that time he made an automatic hole puncher for music box spools.

Thanks for the tip, [Nick].

Turn a Circuit Playground into a light-generating "paintbrush" for long-exposure photography.

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The post How to Easily Build a “Light Paintbrush” appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

This laser light painting setup can even control the camera. But it probably will not work with your average point-and-shoot. The exposure time used is somewhere around 2 seconds long, a feature which is hard to find on anything but DSLR cameras.

The setup relies on a red laser diode to do the painting. When viewed in real time you only see a dot tracing out a cryptic pattern and occasionally switching on and off. But with a long exposure the intense light persists to achieve an image like the one seen above. Note the ghosting around the rig as it has moved while the shutter was open.

The Arduino controlled device consists of a base which pivots the diode horizontally, with a servo for aiming on the vertical axis. Since the sketch is divided up by letter, we wonder how hard it would be to adapt this for use with a point-and-shoot? Perhaps you could capture one letter at a time and layer the frames in post production?

It seems this is a lot easier to build than some of the LED plotters we’ve looked at. If you do make your own don’t forget to send a link our way.

With this POV light painter, you can paint the town red or any other color that suits your fancy. The LightScythe is a 2-meter long POV tube made up of multi-color LED strips.  POV stands for Persistence of Vision which describes how our eyes see motion blur when an object is moving quickly.  In this case, it enables us to see a message written with light.

An image is loaded onto a laptop which converts it to serial data, then sends it to an Arduino which controls the lightbar. A camera is set for 10 to 15 seconds of exposure, during which time the user walks across the frame, painting the image to be caught by the camera.   Check out the full build instructions.

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