making a blinking out of range vegas sign in 3dsmax 2011 mr

[darknkreepy3#]

Creating a blinking sign of the same colored lights was something I needed to do for a RENO sign, so I built a VEGAS sign first as a test. The most important thing was to make the light look realistic, bounce, and time well as if a simple circuit was looping.

Luckily 3dsmax has out-of-range controllers that allow just this type of setup with just a few steps.

1. create 3 boxes 20w x 20l x 5h and spaced 10 units x apart.
2. change the render engine to mental ray
3. turn on global illumination and final gather, lowest quality settings, 1 bounce
4. make a new architectural material, and add a self illuminated glow=500.
5. rename the material to mt_light1 and assign to box #1
6. open a new scene graph
7. animate keyframes
0-9| glow=500
10-14 | glow ramp 500>0
15-34 | glow=0
35-39 | glow ramp 0>500

now even in the preview, the first box will go from glowing to black and back to glowing.
what you want is to loop the unused keyframe space with the rules in 0-39.

1. in the scene graph, open medit materials > mt_light1
2. find the glow parameter and select it by the title
3. choose out-of-range and try one, and a darker line will show the looping
4. preview animate and watch each type by changing it.

if you create 2 copies of the light material, and rename it mt_light2, mt_light3 you will then be able to assign each to box2 and box3 respectively. at this point you can also see them in medit materials, open a scene graph, hilight ver2's keyframes and slide them over 15 frames to the right, and you will see the loop slide in it's position. do the same for ver3's keyframes and slide 30 frames, and then you will notice they playback in a looped and one to the next style light animation.

you can then just copy and paste the lights in patterns that will loop you light animation, even assign ver1-2-3 to letters allowing them to seem to dance, or random assignment to bulbs to sparkle.

full video tutorial on youtube in the future hopefully.