the opponent of lt. lou, the protagonist in my upcoming short is nothing else but a traffic light. as they will interact quite intensely, i decided to rig it, too. this time it was really easy: spline ik for the pole, point-snapped joints on the upper light-”eyelid”, a little control interface for it with cluster, a little skin painting, done – took me all just 4 hours, great! i can now also control the light intensity through the scale of my control interface, which comes in very handy as it also controls the light bulb material (ambient and incandescence) through driven keys. maya is really wonderful with all its nodes & attributes – just connect anything with whatever you like. here’s a portrait of the traffic light showing its sweetest side:
the only small issues i had was the handling of the lattice deformer which i had to separately point constrain to the pole’s topmost joint, i couldn’t just attach the lattice and the base at once. still a bit confusing, but it works perfectly fine now.