I am trying to create a saturday night fever style of dance floor under my character.

I am thinking of simply using the timeline to change the colour every few frames. There are quite a lot of squares and this would take me some time to do.

Is there an easier way of doing this? Is there a way of making each square randomly change colour throughout the animation? Possibly using the same four colours?

you could just use spotlights and give them a certain colour
useful if you want your character to also lightup those colours too
but if not then you can just put the spot lights and the floor into a seperate render layer

just keyframe the light's colour.

as for making it random my guess is you'll have to start writing some scripts in python or MEL
although i don't see the need in making it random if you keyframed the spotlight's colour

actually... keyframing the light's colour every 24/30 frames (assuming you want the light to change each second) would become a real pain in the ass, esp if your animation is really long...
so, writing a script in MEL or python would probably do it quick and fast (i'm guessing... since i have no idea what python and MEL can do in Maya)


oh wait, you can mmb drag keyframes and it copies it to a new position in the time line
although a script would be quick, if you dont know how to script yet then just key four frames, one for each of your four colours and just click and drag with the middle mouse button (if you're3 using a mac then i can't remember what the equivalent is since they only have one button) to the new frame and the keyframe gets copied

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
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I've poked at MEL here and there out of necessity (it was either that or punch my monitor). Of course if you don't use scripting its going to take longer, I should think you can do it manually by setting some stepped keyframes for lets say the first batch of colors then go to the graph editor, select the curve and set it to cycle post infinity so it keeps repeating.

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- Genny
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