Perfect for advertisements, logos and animations! This tutorial teaches you useful techniques such as modeling with curves, creating a glow effect and making a curve emit light.
Today we’re going to learn how to create this cool neon sign:
The tutorial will take approximately 30 minutes to complete, and you will learn the following:
- Modelling with curves
- Make a curve emit light
- Isolate a render layer
- Using glow and glare effects
Ready? Let’s begin…
Creating the Neon Tube
Add a Bezier Circle and move it to last layer. This will be the radius of our tube.
Add a Bezier Curve to the first layer, and make the Bev Object “Curve Circle”
As you can see the result is circle is far too big for our curve, so enter the edit mode and press Alt+S to scale it down to a more realistic size.
Forming the letters
This step is by far the most time consuming task. Using your path forming skills, form the shape by adding and arranging handles to suit.
If you are new to curves, you might like to check out the BlenderWiki curve guide.
But if you want to wing it, these are the important keys to remember:
Ctrl+Click – Add handle
R – Rotate handle
G – Move handle
Ctrl (whilst rotating) – Rotate in increments of 5 degrees.
Repeat this for the rest of the letters. To save time, try duplicating the first letter and moving the handles around as needed.
Half an hour later...
Adding the neon material
Select your first letter and add a new material as follows:
Rather than selecting each letter one by one and applying the material we are going to use the ‘Make Links’ function to save time. Hold down Shift and select the rest of the word, making sure you select the first letter last. Then hit Ctrl+L and click Materials from the popup menu.
Because the word ‘guru’ in our sign is a different color, we are going to be assigning a different material to the blue one. Select the first letter and add the blue neon material we just created. Click the number next to the material name to make it a single user and rename it to PinkNeon. Then change the color as follows:
Just like we did above, hold down shift and select the rest of the letters in ‘guru’ and press Ctrl+L and select Materials. Each letter should now have a material and be looking something like this:
Creating the highlights
To give the neon tube a more three dimensional appearance, add two spotlights and position one above the words and one below the words as follows:
Set the energy for the top spotlight to 0.9 and 0.4 for the bottom spotlight and select ‘Layer’ for both. This will make the spotlights only affect the neons, instead of the entire scene.
Making the Neons emit light
Add a lamp and parent it to the first letter by first selecting the lamp then the letter and hitting Ctrl+P. Select the letter and go to the Editing Panel (F9) and select ‘CurvePath‘
Clear the origin of the lamp by pressing Alt+O. The lamp should have snapped into place at the start of the curve.
With the lamp still selected go to the Object Panel (F7) and select DupliFrames and set DupOff to 1
This will create duplicates of the lamp along the curve. The DupOff value decreases the number of those duplicates by half so there aren’t so many.
Go to the Shader settings (F5) and change the color and energy settings as follows:
Make sure you click 'Layer'
Now if we render the neon against a plane we should see a faint glow.
Perfect!
Repeat this step for all other letters. Then select all the lamps you just created (making sure the lamp you created first, is selected last) hit Ctrl+L and select ‘Lamp Data‘. That will make every lamp have the same data, so if we want to change the lamp settings in the future it is a lot easier.
Finally move all the spherical lamps to the second layer. The first layer should only contain the words and the spotlights we created earlier.
Your scene should now look like this:
Creating the scene
The scene you want to create is entirely up to you, but mine was essentially two planes, one for the floor and one the wall. For added realism, I also made a metal frame and added some cables as well as black neon backing tubes, but this is optional. Once you have your scene setup the way you want, move everything to the second layer so that the first layer only contains the neons and highlighting lamps.
If you want the exact textures I used for the wall and floor you can download them here: Floor texture – Wall texture
Your scene should now look like this:
Creating the final composition
Click the Render Layers tab in the Scene Panel (F10) and change the name of the scene to ‘Neon’.
Add a new scene by selecting ‘ADD NEW’ from the drop down menu. Change the name of this layer to ‘Scene’. In the second row of layer boxes, deselect the first layer and select the second layer instead.
We are now going to switch over to the node compositor, so change the 3d view to the ‘Node Editor‘.
Click the button with a picture of a face on it. This will switch from Material Nodes to Composite Nodes
Delete the connection between the layer and composition by dragging your mouse over the connection. Then add two blur nodes (Add>Filter>Blur) with the following settings:
Merge the two blur node effects by connecting them to an AlphaOver node (Add>Color>AlphaOver) and set the Fac value to 0.60
Add a Glare node (Add>Filter>Glare) and connect it to the renderlayer with the following settings:
Now we are going to connect the Glare node with the output from the two blur nodes, so add another AlphaOver node and set the Fac value to 0.50. This will make the blur glow effect not as strong:
Now add a Mix node (Add>Color>Mix) and from the drop down menu select Screen. Then connec it with the output from the AlphaOver node, and the output from the render layer.
Now add an RGB curve (Add>Color>RGB Curves) and create a slight ‘S’ shape with the curve. This will increase both the brightness and contrast, giving it a more vivid glow.
We are now going to adding the render layer which contains the Wall and Floor. So go to Add>Input>Render Layers, and change the active layer to scene.
Now add an RGB curve (Add>Color>RGB Curves) after this layer and bend the curve down slightly in the middle which will make the scene slightly darker.
We are now going to connect the two scenes together, so add another Mix node (Add>Color>Mix) and again, change it to Screen from the drop down menu. Connect the output from the two RGB curves like so:
For an added touch of step we are going to add a lens distortion node (Add>Distort>Lens Distortion). This will mimic a reversed fisheye lens and add some slight chromatic abbreation. Connect the output from the last AlphaOver node to the lens distortion node and apply these settings:
Connect the output from the Lens Distortion to the Composite node and your composite is complete!
The finished setup (click for big)
Now go to the Scene panel (F10) and hit ‘Do Composite’ then render! If you can see a blue background at all, then you will need to change that to black in the World settings panel (F5).
If you enjoyed this tutorial, please leave me a comment. If you got stuck at any steps along the way let me know and I’ll be happy to help.
Space>Add>Curve>Bezier Curve.
well, where do i find the “curve and surface” menu for the 2.54 beta release?
How could one convert a text to a poly mesh???
Did you use 2.5 for this?
how to move the circle to last layer
how do you import composite nodes from an other .blend file
Can you make a tutorial, or how could i make it to where the letters come up at different times? Like as in when you turn a neon sign on and it it makes the buzzing noise and some letters come on at different times.
@jack
Select the circle then M .
@gary
Go to your new file and then File->Append. Find your old Blender file and find the composite part of it.. idk if that’s the right way.
When I rendered the image (F12) the sign i made appears to be laying on its back
this is great, I like it. .
waiting for the next awesome tutorial. .
could u do the lamp data first then dupe a lot of ‘em then change the settings
cant i not just type in a text and make it glow just like this? is that possable? I would realy like to know that
DUDE, nice tut, but umm. I have a pretty decent computer and is it suppose to lag to hell when rendering it?
Because if I attempted to make a game with simular graphics would it lag to hell on me?
(my comp plays WoW on fair graphics without lag at all, and good graphics with the odd flicker now and then)
How on earth did you create that by hand?
Is there an easier / faster way to create it?
( I did read the first comment, but that’s pretty much chinese to me :p )
thanks for the info : ) * *
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smiley!!!!!
Can you make a remake of this tutorial in Blender 2.5?
Every time i try to create the lamps, the rings always show up. Please help. Thanks
And remember……….Blender’s epic
André Hey could you do this tutorial for the blender 2:56?
this is great, I like it. .
waiting for the next awesome tutorial. .
I’ve got 2.56 beta release. I can’t make the neons emit light ;( Where can I find ‘curve path’ for the curve? I’ve got only folow, stretch, bounds clamp, radius, offset children.
I turned on one by one to check if some of it would work. ;(
Please HELP !
Hi, plese iskise me for english but i am not very well.
were i can get this bacground
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did this before in 2.4x. got lost in doing this in 2.5x though, couldn’t find the dupliframes part, though. where did those buttons go? thanx for this and other great tuts.
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I want to add a flicker effect using the f-curve noise modifier, however the above tutorial totally messes up the random noise effect. Is there any way of having the lamps flicker and then follow this tutorial? Or alternatively is there any other alternative method of adding a flicker?
Thank you, that gave me the idea for an intro on youtube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX57wnp5GOg