I've been hard at work on my next tutorial on making indicator lights and just wanted to fool around with them before posting the tut. Let me know if you think they look ok or not and I may the comments to make my final revisions.

They look really good. Are those the correct colours in the states? The middle colour is amber in the UK.

That did come out nicely!



Those are the correct colors for older lights. Newer ones have slightly different colors to aid the color-blind - some bluish tint in the green, and amber instead of yellow. The red is also more of a reddish-orange. Traffic lights in TX are also mounted horizontal. Every state has slightly different rules and standards... but none of them have the red-amber combo light.

Thank you Merrak. I was thinking the red needed to have a little orange in it. Maybe even a little darker in the ON condition. I dunno about Amber tho. If you look up the hex for amber you get either FF7E00 which is really orange or "Automotive Amber", FFE816 which looks like it has a lot more more yellow in it. The latter may work for the yellow light. As far as the green (bottom) it's pretty pale and looks almost white when they are lit up on most of the traffic lights here in Texas. Maybe it's just me and my old eyeballs.

I'm still futzing around with the layers and modes and opacities trying to find the right combination for each color to make them all look right before I try and post anything. This sucker is a monster tutorial. Definitely advanced due to complexity not to mention length.

For the color of the lights you could:
a) Take a picture (or find a picture) of traffic lights and pick the color from the picture
-or-
b) Decide that you are making a piece of "art" and choose a color that you like.

In my opinion, both options are "correct".

Here is a page from the Wisconsin Driver's Handbook (a downloadable pdf).
The color is "representative", not photo-realistic.

The lights look great. The only thing I can see different is maybe a bit longer delay between lights. However file size might then become an issue.

I'm pretty certain the animation can be slowed down without changing the number of frames.

@bkh1914, I agree with your second choice, it is a piece of art and it doesn't matter if it is a bright yellow or orange, Here in Canada, it is amber but it looks good to me the way it is.
You can slow the speed by going to animation > settings > and change to replace and set your delay to a higher number and experiment until it is the way you want when you playback

I don't think anyone would care too much if the shades aren't precisely correct (except maybe a traffic engineer). I didn't mean to come across as picky... I was just answering Erisian's question about what color the lights are in the US