This is a test of a flickering-monitor effect on the Mission Control Room set. Created for the "Lunatics!" animated pilot ( http://lunatics.tv ). It's really just a 2-second test, repeated 20 times, so you have some time to look at it.

I'm not 100% sure whether I want to use this or not. Flickering like this is more characteristic of CRTs than LCD monitors, but it kind of looks a little more "alive" than a static shot. (Of course, there will be some people in the final shot).

The monitor screen are textures with emission settings of course -- a few are AVI video textures. The flicker is achieved by animating a property on a control object (an empty) which is not rendered. I found out that attempting to use a Material property or a Scene property WILL NOT WORK, due to bugs in how drivers are updated in Blender 2.7x. So it's necessary to use an object with custom properties as the driver source. The "emit" property of the screen material is then driven from this with a simple expression. That way, only the one object property has to be animated (it's a 4-frame animation cycle). The same property is also used to drive the intensity on the bluish hemi lights associated with each set of monitors, which accounts for the reflected light on the desks (and also walls and ceiling).

The model was created by Travis Souza based on online reference photos from the Mission Control Center in Moscow/Star City and updated console designs by Terry Hancock. The chair is by Lekanus@BlendSwap (PD), although this is a low-poly version revised to match our NPR rendering style. Materials, textures (including animations created in Synfig), lighting, and rendering by Terry Hancock.