Making a Lightshow - Creating a Functional Light Rig

Lighting rigs play a large role and are an important component to a lot of modern media experiences. They are utilized in concerts, theatre performances, and even night clubs. Although they provide a variety of ambient effects and lighting, the rigs don’t innately know where to point the lights and when to change the colors. There exist entire programs and routines that dictate all of the movements and that program is what this particular project was focused on.

The Problem:

Light rigs are not often manually controlled by people, depending on the scale and budget of the production. As such, the focus of this project revolved around creating a routine light show for a looped EDM snippet, with emphasis on the lighting changes as well as the dance floor to sync up to the music.

The Process:

Diving into this project I learned a great deal about locators and aimers and how they can be used for mapping the spotlight directions in a 3D space. Being able to utilize all 3 dimensions for the rig was massively helpful in creating a unique and energetic light show to match the electronic music provided. 

Animating the dance floor was a great exploration of how to exactly animate textures, and getting into some of the more complicated aspects of Maya. I also adjusted the specular lighting and reflections within the non-illuminated squares of the dancefloor.

The Results:

In the end I was able to create a vibrant and dynamic dance floor, complete with its own animated light rig above. This program lays the foundation to actually program a similar rig in real life if I ever land an opportunity to do so.