The decks are finised

I have finished my decks. The final method that I was going on about in the last post where I was going to make an animated material worked. While the material and the glow works the timing still need a lot of work, I think the first 4 or so beats work really well then the rest all fall out of sequence. For the sake of testing if this is going to work I am happy with the results. Unfortunately the video here has lost quite a bit of quality so some of the detail ahs been lost, things like the detail on the record and the detail on the side of the turn table that the strobe is flashing at.

To create the new material I opened a new flash document and made the stage are 15 pixels by 132. I got this size from the opacity map I made for my earlier experiments as when I was cutting the holes in the mixer that is what I used as a guide. I then added the colour and some black bars which would mask out the pars of the colour I did not want showing at the various key frames. I should probably mention that I did not actual mask the colour as in max black will not glow and there for will not show up as a light. Last thing before beginning the animation was add the sound track, this was not going to be in the final animation sequence but it enabled me to see where the music peaks were making the whole process go a lot quicker. On the animation I simply added one key frame at every peak and one in between for the lows then animated the black bars to cover what ever I desired at each frame. For the final animation I plan to actually work out how it should look a lot better.

I decided to use flash to create the material for a few reasons. Firstly I could add the music to a layer and see the peaks in the music helping me to decipher where the key frames need to go. Secondly it is capable of producing an AVI file at any size (15 x 132 in this case), if I had done it in premier pro and asked for an output that size all I would have got would of been a 720x576 file squashed to fit. Lastly because flash is easy to use for this sort of thing.

For the decks I wanted to simulate the strobe on the side. On a DJ’s turntable there are a series of small, differently sized rings of circles circulating around the edge (I know that doesn’t make much sense so here is a picture),

the strobe flashes at a constant speed and as the DJ speeds up the record a different ring can be seen to help you work out how fast it is going. Normally the strobe flashes so fast you can’t actually see the flash but unfortunately with max I was limited to one flash per 2 frames. However I still caught the essence of its purpose here but that is part of the detail that was lost when blogger compressed my video, sorry. One thing I am really please with on the record though is the specular map working well to simulate a shiny record and a not so shiny label.

I have also been working on a lot of my scene, it now has windows (although the blinds are closed) which even have the blind pull chord things, tables and chairs, photo boards for the walls and even and exit sign above the door. I realise that some of the photos are a bit dark but this is going to be a dark scene so I have been creating everything in the dark to make sure that it all looks ok when the lights finally go out.

I think I am nearly ready to begin the animation phase. Wish me luck, I will keep you posted.