Start light animation

Just after the shot of the pods floating at the start line the camera will move to the the start lights these wil light red one at a time and then go green to start the race.

To create the lights I created a cylinder  and then squashed and stretched it to create something more like an aircraft wing.

I then created some pills from the extended primitives menu and positioned them equally across the wing. I then textured the wing with a marble texture and then created a plane which I then rotated and then gave a sky texture too.  I then angled the mesh's so that the view would have would be like the pod pilots looking up at it with the sky behind.

I then had to texture the pills that make the lights. To texture these I tried something a little different, from the materials editor I chose the architectural materials this is because you are given some extra control of the materials and how they appear when rendered. I wanted my lights to have a bot of a glow to them so in the architectural material panel I adjusted the Luminance up too 500. In hindsight I could and should have taken it a bit higher.

Below image shows the selection of architectural material

 

Extra material controls available in the materials window when you select architectural materials

Finally the created materials that I applied to the scene

When it came to animating the colour changes on the start lights I ran in to a bit of a problem. 
No matter what I tried when it came to getting the pills to change colour the materials would not be changed by the time time. After trying many different things I decided that I would export each image as a 800 X 600 BMP file and then include and animate them with the timings I wanted when i came to bring my project together in adobe Premier.