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Illuminated Text Effects - 2D & 3D

I want to talk about illuminated text. This is another aspect of three D that really you just never could do before. Okay, let's get get my wood texture. There it is. All right, So this is one of those things where I was like, every night and I'll challenge myself. I'll go and I'll see something image or a poster that like And I'm thinking, I wonder if I could do that in three D and photo shop or even in voter shop at all. So in this one, I wanted to create a neon light effect, which I've done a lot of times using some Blair styling tricks here and there. It's getting but never really gave me what I wanted. Um, you have You actually have the ability of creating illuminated objects in three D and photo shop. What I'm gonna do here is set some text here and I need to find my Neon fought here less so Yeah, What? It wouldn't would actually inspired me to see if I could find this fun. I don't think I still have it. But was the some of you remember the movie cocktail with Tom Cruise? Remembe...

r the logo was the cocktail with the pink neon, every like that. I was like, I think I could do that. I don't know why that one popped in my but I said yes. It's gotta happen. So thanks. We had a scripted fun. That was I hadn't set up. Oh, there it is. Cool. All right, So we'll go cocktails. The name of the bar in the movie Cocktails and dreams. Uh huh. So all right, let's do a little bit of formatting closing the current in a little bit. Make the letters a little bit more connected. Make that ampersand a little bit smaller. Nudge the lining up here a little bit. Just doing some quick formatting. There we go. I am. It's gonna give it a little bit of rotation. Actually, no, I'll do that when I create a neon. So that is set. Now we go to three D new 30 extrusion from selected layer. Now, the problem I was thinking that we're out of the bat is neon is round, so I wasn't able to create, you know, like a living effect or revolving effect was gonna have to kind of trick it one way or another. So what I did was going here and let's first, we have to get rid of the extrusion altogether to rotate the view here. So there you can see the shadow. Now, let's take care of that first less so in the three d panel Select environment. We'll jump in here to the properties and go down here and set the shadow 20 there again. So, like the text optic itself. Now, when I go in here and go to the extrusion setting right here and we're gonna set that to zero no extrusion at all, then once we have that when a reset my view here camera. Now I want to go in here and select the front and back of the Texas. All we're seeing gonna be seeing at this point is that front facing the back face, I'm gonna select front inflation material here, hold down the command key or control of your own windows and select back inflation material. So selection both going to go into the diffuse property here And let's set that to black. We're gonna actually add a texture, found us a moment. But with those two elements still selected, we said the diffuse to Blackman Increase the shine and reflection a little bit so we can see the fault IBL, which we're gonna change. But least we can see the dimension now re select the main text objects here in a three D panel. We're gonna go into that cap setting. This is where we did the bevel and the inflating earlier. But now I'm gonna take the strength and push it a lot higher. But I'm also gonna take the angle and max it out, too. And what that's going to do is it bulges out the front face of that text and gives me kind of like 1/2 sphere. But I wanted to do it to the front and the back so you can actually go up here at the very top of that cap setting panel. You've got the sides right now, it's set the default to just affect the front. But we're gonna go in effect front and back. The now is gonna increase the strength and a little bit more. And now we've got more rounded texts bulging front and out. What that's going to do is it by bulging out increasing a service area. Yes, it looks like the rounded tubes of neon, but it also increases service area. When I get it to omit light, it's gonna go in those all of those directions instead of of being a flat face that would just emit light in one direction. So we're increasing the surface area and the range that it's emitting the light here. So I'm gonna go back and hit the default camera, bring it back to the front view and we're going here now and select the front and back inflation. I actually don't do the front one first. I don't do that same time. So what we're gonna do is like I was talking about earlier with adding, When you're creating metallic surface, you need the base color. The based a few scholar to be black in creating an illuminated object saying principle here, we need to make the diffuse black, however setting the diffused color here, the swatch just doing it right here works fine. If you're going for any other effect when you're adding illumination, you need to add it as a file to go there to defuse property and do a new texture. And since it's just gonna be a base color doesn't need to be huge. In fact, I'm only gonna make this 1 500 by 500 pixels. And you can see there is the text Mr Wells talked about earlier This that wire frame visual aid. You can actually change the color of it, depending on the background. But there it is. So I wanted to place elements around the text that gives me a visual aid on helping placing them. But in this case, all we're gonna do is just fill the image with black clothes and save the changes. We don't see any change here, but it is setting it up so that we can set up the illumination. Since I can't see it, I'm gonna go and do it to the back as well. Let's go in and new document. Fill it with black clothes. It area now gonna get again. Hold on the command key in select both the front inflation material and the back inflation material. We're to go over here to this illumination property right under the speculum highlight I was talking about earlier. So you click on the elimination swatch and where it's gonna go ahead and make this the pink neon we all know in love, but it's applying it to both the front and back. Now you'll notice once you apply the color, there's an intensity slider of here. If I dial that up just a little bit, you notice it does it in stops kind of photography. You're increasing the amount of light being emitted despite increasing Ah, stop or two. I'm gonna go too far. There. There we go. So now if I go in, grab the current view and rotate this around Now we're seeing it admit light from the front in the back, but we don't know it's emitting light. I'm only telling you, it is. It has to reflect on a surface in order to have that illuminated effect. So that is where the wood background texture comes into play. Here, I'm gonna go in to my layers panel, and it's gonna make a duplicate of that background layer. I'm gonna make it a three. I want to put it in the three d space. I do not need to. It creates an extrusion. No, it's it's unnecessary to extruded and create a Volume three d object because we're only gonna see that front face anyway. So to save space and processor speed, what is going to if we make it a three d postcard? So go to three D new mesh from layer postcard. This essentially puts that texture in three D space, but it is still a flat two D image of my going rotated around there. You can see So this is really helpful if you want to put, you know, like a sign or a graphic on a element in a photo that's slightly off angle or some like that really handy in doing something like that. But in this case, we're just using it as a background element. So we hit the default camera. Bring it back to the front view. Now here's a critical point. I need to I need these 23 D layers two or three D objects to interact with each other. I want to place the text above the wood sector so that he admits, than the unlike on the back of the wood on the back praise on the front face of the wood. It won't do that until they're merged into it. The same three d layer in the layers panel now way have to separate three D layers, which means we have to separate three D environments. We need emergent together. You could merge them the very same way you merge to regularise and Photoshopped. You have a top player selected. You can simply press command e merges it down. Photoshopped will recognize that it is a three D layer and combined them accordingly. However, whatever lighting or elements, it's ah specifically lighting Whatever lighting elements are applied to a three d layer. When you merge one layer down on the other, it will assume the properties of the lower layer, especially with lighting. In this case, I've already set up the lighting on my knee on layers. I'm actually gonna bring the texture the wood sector above the neon for the moment. Then I'm an emergent down by pressing command e. We're gonna maintain the lighting we've made on the objects and it applies that texture to the background there. So now if I grab my current view, it's fused them both together, gonna protruding through there. But the beauty is even though we've merged into a single three d layer as you can see right here in the layers panel in the three d panel. There still two separate objects so I can grab the text and use the widget to pull it forward right in front of the wind texture. So I still have full control of of these elements in the three D environment. Even other emerged in together so I could move around. You can see now it's just slightly raised above the texture. Now we need to essentially turn the lights off. So we go into the environment property, turn off the the IBL. We don't need it. And in the infinite light, we're gonna turn it off as well. We're actually now, let's not turn it off. Rather, let's dial its intensity down quite a bit. And now if I start Orender actually, no, I gotta go. Just the background. We need to set up the wood texture to receive reflections. Right now, the reflection property is zero. So I go into the three d panel. So, like the background copy match, which is in this case, the wood texture, so we'll just call it would back. So, like the mesh property give it a little bit of reflection. Don't go crazy. You don't want to be shiny. Would we just want to give it enough to it will receive the light. So to keep the shine really low and keep the reflection pretty low as well. I mean, I'm also gonna go here to this ambience setting and dial that down as well. Make it much darker. Now, if I start Orender, we're always gonna make makes a justice. We should see our light. There it is. So are light. Not quite as intense is I wanted to be someone making some adjustments. I can see what I got to do here. Now I'm gonna hit escaped to stop the render. But the first thing is that shadow. I don't need that shadow happening here. So I'm gonna go in that shadows being cast by that infinite light that default infinite light has been applied because we turned off the IBL. We're not even using it. So select that infinite light. I don't want to turn off the infinite line. I do want to have some ambient light in the scene. However, I don't want it to cast the shadow. And this is something that you just can't do in real life. Go right in here and turn off the shadow lights still on. But no shadow. And I'm also gonna go back in there into the text, go to the illumination properties. I'm gonna dial up the intensity. Actually, I don't need to do it to the front face. We're really only seeing the reflection on the back, so I need seem to go to the back. Inflation. It's really dial that out. And now, drummer, I'm actually use my rama. Rotate this just a little bit. Here we go and start the render again. We should see a much brighter elements. No. So there you go. Now there's something else happening here. Can you see it? Rotate the view here just a little bit so you can see we're getting this kind of mirror reflection of the text on the wood ticks on the wood surface, which obviously we wouldn't see unless it was, like gloss like a polyurethane finished would, which in this case, it is not so. We need to adjust that. So a couple things I wanna do to that texture, they're gonna help that. Let's go back into the fault. The first thing is right now that would texture. Even though it's in three D environment. It's still a flat image of a wood texture. We want to add a but meant to that member of the but meant we added to the text. We put the little dings in it. We're going to the same thing here. We're gonna use the existing wood texture. So with the wood background selected or the mesh the record for the wood wood background When you go into that properties panel, go to the bump property and we're gonna locate that same image right here. Background copy. We're essentially applying the image itself to itself as a bump map. I'm gonna take the bump map amount and dial it up to about 25. You can see that the text got a lot rougher. You don't do it. Can you see that you couldn't go to extreme secrecy. So there you go. So you see, I got really rough there. Don't go quite that high. Let's go with about 30. But doing that alone ruffins the surface we were We were reflecting on a flat image of a wood texture. But now we've rough ended up with its own but map, so we should see that a lot more disruption in that reflection of the light. So if we go to turn the angle here, start Orender, we're probably going to see a little bit of a mere reflection, you see, Now it's now it's broken it up quite a bit. That's largely because of that that bump map still of a somewhat mirror reflection. I probably could dial down the intensity of the light as well. But what I want to point out here, let me reset my view. So when I go and deal, let me go into that back inflation and what's dial back that intense a little bit. But what I want to do is in that wood texture. Once again, I'm a select the mash property over in the Properties panel. This is where we adjusted that bump sitting right here just below reflection. There's a setting called roughness, and I think this is misnamed. I don't think this should be called roughness. It should be called, you know, blurt your like reflection blur or something like that. Dialing this up basically dissipates the reflection, leaving it at zero if you so. If you got that reflection 100% and leaving the rough zero, you get a 1% mirror reflection by dialing up the roughness, you're essentially breaking up that effect. You know, if you ever see photos of products and you see the reflection of the product and kind of as a fade to it as it goes down, that's essentially that. The effect of creating with the roughness lighter, the higher the roughness setting, the more faded it gets on the reflection. In this case, I'm just doing it to help lesson the kind of mirrored effect that we're getting on the wood texture here. I'm gonna put it around and then once again I would start a render. Do you want to keep the ambient lighting the scene as minimal as possible? And I'm probably dial that back down a little bit more. But before you get too excited adjusting the settings, sometimes it's a simple matter of moving the text a little bit further away. We are in three D, so we can essentially just pull this text a little bit further away from the wood background, and now it has a longer distance to travel to the wood background, so it's gonna lessen the effect over there. You can see that now, of course, it is grainy. It's gonna be Granny for a little bit as it progresses. But when it gets to the final, render that When I originally did this, the render took about 45 minutes. No, actually, it's probably, I think, was less than that. It's more like it's like less than half our longest render I've ever encountered. Um waas on a show you real quick. I often get answered this Ask this question. But this This was one of those things where I was like, You know what? I wonder if I can do this. You know that that is 100% 3 D from scratch and Photoshopped that took about an hour and 1/2 to render. But it's completely made up from scratch, using seven of shapes, extruded shapes and elements combined together. This is you've seen me doing and creating a full element like this is one of those things where I wonder if I could do it. I still have no idea how to teach it. Still working that out, But I'm gonna have ah, have editorial dancing. But that's but that's just it gives you the idea of how ambitious you can give us. You can see how the render gets norm or progressive. It gets more refining. Obviously, that's very bright, and I need to adjust that. But that is pretty much creating illuminated text elements. Two questions quick. One. What Commander used to start the render? Okay, Yeah, good question. You have to, ah, two ways of going about initiating the render. You can go to the three d menu and to simply choose Well, here's his resume render, but it's just Brender would say, Render three d object right here. The keyboard shortcut, as you can see, is all these it. So it's shift option Command are or windows of the shift. All control are, yeah, so it's four keys. Thanks. And the second question is the difference between roughness and refraction in terms of dispersing. That backlight refraction is if you're dealing with a transparent element when you look through it, you'll see distortion as you were like you look through glass, you know, like the water affected in earlier. I'd probably take that a step further and distort the wood texture behind it. That's refraction. The roughness determines how clear the reflection is probably one way to put it. So if you want to get a much softer, fading reflection, you'd set it to a higher roughness. Settings. Dispersion versus distortion would be a way to think about it Pretty much, Yeah. Good call. Thank you.