Neon Light Tutorial
By Jamie Hamel - Smith (Inspired by Brett Lewis)
Tutorial
Greetings fellow 3D Attackers! Judging from the name of this tutorial I’m sure you already know what we are going to do. The trick in this tutorial that I am going to show you is how to use the “Proximal” shader to create some interesting effects.
object in the Proximal shader properties. So, that should give you good understanding on how the Proximal shader operates. Start by opening the “Start Scene.c4d” file. The scene consists of a camera, 2 lights and a brick wall. The camera has a protection tag on it to prevent you from accidentally moving the camera. Start by creating a SweepNURBS Object, a Text Spline Primitive and a Circle Spline Primitive. Set the Radius of the Circle Spline to 3 and make both Spline Objects children of the SweepNURBS Object.
There are few ways to create neon lights in 3D; using many lights along a Spline is one, and another is to use Radiosity with a luminous material and let the global illumination system calculate the glows for you. The forementioned techniques can take a much longer time to render than the technique I am about to show you. While this is a “Cheat” and won’t give you the absolute best result for neon lights, it is a very speedy workaround and in my opinion, the results look great! The great thing is that when you are done with this tutorial you will be able to use the Proximal shader for all sorts of other things! So, let’s examine the Shader in question a little bit. In the CINEMA 4D Shader menu, you will find the Proximal shader under the effects submenu. (I am using CINEMA 4D R9 for this tutorial. The Proximal shader is in previous versions, but it may have been called ‘BhodiNUT Proximal’. Refer to your users manual to see where your Proximal Shader is) [Image-01] The shader works by creating luminous points where the origin, points, edges or even polygons of a reference object get close enough to the surface of the object that the material with the Proximal shader is applied to. The following images show a simple example of the Proximal shader in action. The first image shows a luminous spot where each point of the orange plane is,
Image 01
the following image shows the exact same scene but with the “edges” option enabled [Image-02] [Image03] In this case, the ground plane
The Circle Spline should be above the Text Spline in the hierarchy. Now position the SweepNURBS Object so that it is visible in the camera view. The first thing that I do when creating a sweep is to check the interpolation of the splines. The default interpolation is actually quite high. Switch to a wireframe view and notice how dense the mesh is. Select the Circle, and in its object properties make the Intermediate Points “Uniform” and set the number to 1. This gives you an 8 sided circle to work with which is a much more manageable number of sides for this object. Your scene should now look
Image 02
Image 04
Image 03
has the material with the Proximal shader applied to it and the orange plane is defined as the reference
9
like this; [Image-04] Now we can rename the Sweep object to something a little more relevant. Something like “Sign Text” should suffice. I’m not really that happy with