In building the circular collision music visualizer which I blogged about yesterday, I became mildly obsessed with the lighting effects on the circles, which led to another short set of experiments.

My first step was to simplify the music visualizer, so that I could focus just on the lighting. I wanted the lighting to be dynamic though, so I kept the light intensity keyed to music. I played around with a lot of different ideas for lighting effects, finally settling on a combination of a bevel filter, an inner drop shadow, and a stretched / rotated / blurred shadow sprite - all of which are affected differently by the intensity and distance to the light. I also added a radial gradient behind the light to make it more dramatic. The result was LightTest1.

I also built a slight variation, LightTest1a, that modifies the intensity of the light based on its proximity to the cursor, so the user can control the brightness.

Finally (thus far), I made the circles move based on the volume of the music, which created a somewhat hectic but mildly interesting visualizer in LightTest2.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going to go with this from here. I'll release some of the source code next week. I'm also planning to do a similar article(s) covering my recent sphere experiments at some point.