Daft Punkin- Animated LEDs

I wanted to animate the LED face on my Daft Punkin in Maya. I had no idea how to do that. After being stumped for a week or so, I cracked it. The solution was distinctly lo-tech.


I made a 50x50 grid of evenly spaced spheres and projected UVs on them.

I then made a series of animations, blue-graded them and pixelated them to 50x50 pixels.

When I applied the animated map to the grid of spheres, each sphere's uv got a single pixel.

Finally, I cranked the spheres into shape, rendered that sucker and added some sweet, sweet stock footage of smoke.

Blaaaaaaarg!!!