HOW DO I SYNC MUSIC WITH BLENDER?
Raphaëlle Abras, Paris
With the advent of web 3.0 and new, better-performing virtual reality headsets, entertainment is changing, and it’s not uncommon to produce virtual gigs you can enjoy from home. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a simple way to get parameters from any audio to produce lighting and movement effects that sync with music in Blender, without the need for any external software.
In this render, I first created a simple stage using basic shapes, then assigned some materials, and lastly added lights and the crowd. As soon as you have your environment, we can focus on the process of getting the data from an audio file.
Let’s start animating a light of any kind; spot light, point light, sun light, and so on. In this case I decided to just use point lights. Add your light, head to the Editor panel and select it. We need to insert a keyframe at frame 1 of the Power of the light by right-clicking on the parameter and choosing Insert Keyframe.
Moving to the Graph Editor panel, we have to select the animated parameter, in this case Power, and click on Channel followed by ‘Bake sound to f-curve’. Now select the audio you want to use, and once done you’ll see a curve, which is the song converted into a graph.
Depending on the song, you may need to increase the effect of this curve, which can be done by again hitting Channel and Un-bake Curves. The curve will now be editable, allowing us to press ‘S’ and ‘Y’ to scale it and increase the effect; I suggest scaling up around 10 times the default.
To finish, we have to add the actual audio. Head to the Video Sequence panel and, always starting from frame 1, add the same sound you used for the light. If you now click play, you’ll see the light emission increase and decrease with the beat.