the long creation of the decks

Ok, on to my own work now. I have been finishing of the decks and the mixer and all is going well, nearly done.

On the mixer I want the beat bar lights to actually light up and be as animated as beat counter lights are in real life. I have been trying to fathom the best way to approach this and went through a few ideas before finally settling on an idea. So before I tell all on my plans here are the ones I have been through so far.

1. I was going to use Photometric Free Point lights, add a volume light effect so you could see them glow and animate them on and off in sequence, the same as I intend to do with the light above the dance floor. The reason for wanting to use these lights is because they have the ability to glow in a rectangle and in a confined area, matching exactly the lights that would really exist there.
   
   This idea fell flat on it face with a bloody nose very quickly with no chance of suing the local council for wonky paving slabs. Two reasons here. 1) Just adding one of these lights with the volume light effect took the render time up from 2 second per frame to 45 seconds per frame, an unacceptable mark up and I can only imagine what would of happened if I added all 16 that I need! 2) Animating 16 lights on and off in sequence over every frame would have been a logistical, time consuming nightmare.
   


2. Idea 2. I created an opacity map to make the area of the light totally see through. I then put a coloured block underneath so it could be seen through the holes created by the opacity map. Using the material ID properties I added a glow effect to the coloured box to create a simulation of light but not real light, this should speed up rendering time. The box didn’t glow! It turns out that Max is unable to render a glow through an object, even if it is see through. The reasons behind this are complicated but in the simplest possible terms, 3D Max adds a glow after rendering the scene and it adds it to what it ‘can see’. As the object is only see through it still exists and is still in front of the object with the glow, therefore Max can not see it to add a glow to it.

One thing I had to consider was the way that I was going to animate the lights on this box up and down. I thought about using a black box animated in an up and down direction over the light box and use it as a mask. But more on this in a bit.

3. The next logical option from there was to cut the mesh for the individual holes so that the glow could shine on through, and that is just what I set about doing. After slicing a whole load of new faces and deleting the relevant polys,
   
   the glow shone through proudly. Still a problem though, the glow was white and unrealistic. I could have changed the colour of the glow using the effects settings but I would have only got one colour, and there are three on the box so using just one colour would not have worked. I went through the phase of thinking about using three different coloured boxes but this would increase my polygon count and meant adding three glows instead of one, increasing the render time.

So after all this I came to my final solution, to use the glow function in the video post. In the video post you get a lot more control over the glow. I set the glow up to glow the same colour as the colour on the box and this worked perfect. The polys that remain in between the lights on the mixer block the glow creating the illusion of individual lights. I have managed to create light without using any lights, thus speeding up my render time. This means that I will have to set up to render my final animation through the video post but I have had a lot of experience here so I don’t anticipate it to add much to the setup times.

Just one thing remains, the animation of the ‘on off’ of it all. I was still considering the mask trick previously mentioned when I thought “that will look fake, I will have to animate both channels separately and the mixer is actually on an angle making the animation up and down slightly more complicated.” “I know, I am going to use an animated material!” This is something I have never done before, excellent, I will learn it then. I plan to use a carefully timed AVI of this image where there are black lines jumping up and down the left and right,

when put on to the box under the mixer it should appear as though all the lights are operating independently of one another, I hope. I will get back to you on that. For now I need to have a quick try, if it works then I need to decide on a track and try and time the AVI to that track.