Quickly Animating Complex Neon Signs
Added 2020-10-21 02:21:10 +0000 UTCMOOOORE neon, seriously Ian? YES! So I have a bazillion other things I should wrap up (robot arms and merchants and HyperBoles), but I wanted to see if this would work and it did, so I made a video because I'm jazzed.
Here's the flicker controller image, although it'd also be super easy to come up with your own on your end with custom animations, if you wanted. I can imagine, say, a flourescent light that flickers and turns off or- OH! If you animated a DIFFERENT axis, too, you could have it scrolling through every possible loop over time. But that's making things unnecessarily complex. But it's also a very easy way to add a TON of complexity to a TON of things at once. City lights turning off and on on a huge scale? Stars twinkling?
Now I have to go back and re-animate the Psychic Diner (I think I had one letter randomly flickering or something?)
Comments
The trick with SHFT-E in the timeline to continue the animation beyond the keyframes do not work (anymore?). It works fine for continuous movements etc., it doesn't do the job for animated UV's.
Willem van der Veere - Studio Friday
2025-03-25 11:24:49 +0000 UTCfreaking awesome
Ry Ken
2020-11-16 02:47:42 +0000 UTCAbsolutely great technique! i'm very happy to joined your patreon today Ian!
Sergio
2020-11-15 17:31:41 +0000 UTCIan, have you tried this with a png sequence? It works well. Last year, I had to animate a synced light show to basketball players in front of a green screen where the 3d environment needed to match the colored lights in perfect sync. Instead of animating the colors, I cropped a tiny square from a video of each of the real lights, rendered as a png sequence, and had my animated colors for the lights. I can see this method working for your workflow in various ways.
Jeff Betz
2020-10-27 20:57:44 +0000 UTCHi Carter, thanks again - somehow just reading this and giving it another go made it work for me :) To be honest I'm not even sure what I ws getting wrong the first time, as I thought I had the correct UVs assigned to the nodes that needed them, but what seemed to solve it for me was following your advice and just going in and make sure that eeeeevery vector input had was plugged into an appropriate UV node, even the ones that in my mind were not causing the issue. Well anyway, it worked and I know more about this whole thing now. Thanks man!!
2020-10-27 11:20:08 +0000 UTCMy brain is happy about this.
Tyler Adams
2020-10-26 23:45:32 +0000 UTCThat is weird! I tried just now and couldn't replicate that behavior. Are the actual UVs changing to match each other in the editor, or just the texture output you see? Are all of your image textures definitely using the right input UV? If your default UV got changed to be the new one, it'd affect anything inside the shader editor using default UVs, like the Texture Coordinate node or any unconnected Vector inputs on image nodes
Carter Burr-Kirven
2020-10-26 22:55:30 +0000 UTCActually, I got to try it and I'm still having some trouble with this if anyone has a solution... When I make a second UV Map in Object Data and assign it to a dedicated UVMap node to drive this type of effect, I don't seem to be able to edit the new UV islands without also affecting the other UVs that generate my image texture - I just keep on selecting one UV Map and switching to the other but regardless of that the two are connected when I change one. Weird! And weirder that I can't find anything online about it!
2020-10-26 16:13:41 +0000 UTCHey, is 'magic tuna' anyhow related to Bucky Roberts from thenewboston? @_@
Mornarion
2020-10-25 22:10:07 +0000 UTCWOW...your way doing it really awesome Ian
2020-10-25 07:07:52 +0000 UTCDamn @Ian you take me back to the days of learning AE through Video Copilot when I would see Andrew Kramer come up with absolutely ingenious ways of doing crazy effects from the simplest set of tools just because he thought outside the box. Turning good old fractal noise to realistic clouds or realistic water droplets and what not. You are like that "mindblowing machine9000" but for Blender!
2020-10-24 17:40:38 +0000 UTCTHIS IS AMAZING!
Danny Aldaz
2020-10-23 09:16:55 +0000 UTCSure i will, this is so useful for my job and this is absolutely the best 7$ i spent in a long time! I will go share 100% =)
2020-10-23 09:15:07 +0000 UTCWelcome Miguel, nice to have you here. There is so much cool stuff to check. If you want other people to learn about this amazing Patreon as well please consider sharing: https://twitter.com/BlenderUnit/status/1319566404069314560
2020-10-23 09:13:04 +0000 UTCYeah! That's super useful. Although with all the different render modes, I've never been able to turn it into pure muscle memory. With pre 2.8, you could just hit Z to toggle between solid and wireframe, and Shift+Z (or alt?) gave you a rendered view, but now there are so many options I have to take a half second to think about it. That was the hardest thing about switching to 2.8 for me, actually. I togged between solid/wireframe ALL the time to get a sense of where things were in 3d space, and always having a pie menu popping up threw me for a while. That said, that solid-shaded X-ray mode is so nice. It's like a perfect middle ground. Ooo I wonder if you can customize the pie menu?
Ian Hubert
2020-10-23 06:16:30 +0000 UTCHave you activated Extra Shading Pie Menu Items? You hit Z and it gives you everything: overlay toggle - rendered - solid - material preview - wireframe - x-ray toggle. It's click and swipe. Takes half a second to switch from one to the other.
2020-10-22 19:31:45 +0000 UTCI've been following you under the whole covid 19 period for learning from you, and i just figured out you have a patreon :D This is just best day of the year!!! =) You rock Ian, and you such an incredible funny teacher :P
2020-10-22 18:00:36 +0000 UTCGosh darn, I've been asking around all year for this shortcut, thank you! Now is there a way to switch to rendered mode and turn off overlays in one shortcut?
Zachary Macintyre
2020-10-22 16:05:16 +0000 UTCAlright, got it!! Thanks Carter, I'm always amazed at how often in Blender there's a very simple solution like this one for problems that seem complex (well, to me). And thanks Ian, I thought I already ferociously digged into all of the videos on this page since I subscribed a few days ago but it looks like I missed some useful info haha. Keep it up!!!!
2020-10-22 10:07:05 +0000 UTCyeah! What Carter said! I think I covered using multiple UV maps in one of these tutorials (it's not entiiiirely intuitive), but I can't remember which- let me know if you can't figure it out!
Ian Hubert
2020-10-22 01:00:59 +0000 UTCYESSS I keep thinking about all the projects I've been wanting to do and now it's like, "how can I incorporate insane neon lightshows into this?"
Ian Hubert
2020-10-21 23:43:34 +0000 UTCOh cool! yeah I've been using "alt+shift+z", which I think is the default? It's a bit of a handfull, though. I realized watching the video that a lot of what I was doing would have been a LOT more clear without overlays, yeah :/ Especially with all the UV unwrapping. I should definitely re-work some of the keymaps!
Ian Hubert
2020-10-21 23:43:07 +0000 UTCWhoop whoop sweet as man. @Ian, couldn't help to notice that with complex meshes like in this tutorial, it comes in really handy to hide overlays on the fly. So, if you tick "Extra Shading Pie Menu Items" in your keymap preferences, you'll be able to hit Z and toggle overlays super quick, when they get annoying.
2020-10-21 21:58:58 +0000 UTCI'm gonna make so many obnoxious theater marquees
Carter Burr-Kirven
2020-10-21 19:39:14 +0000 UTCYou'll want to use a second UV map. One controls any normal image textures, the other gets scaled and moved around to run this effect. Inside the shader editor, you can use the UVMap node to call up whichever set of UV coordinates you want to use for any given texture.
Carter Burr-Kirven
2020-10-21 19:27:24 +0000 UTCi just got an a7iii yesterday, its a BEAUTY, enjoy.
Jimmy Deface
2020-10-21 19:01:02 +0000 UTCGREAT trick as always, Ian! Your Patreon is a gold mine! Now a question for more savvy unwrappers than me - if you wanted to use this method in combination with other image textures, what would be the best way to go about it? For example, let's say you wanted to make a video screens wall like the one Ian made a tutorial about a while back, and apply a flicker to each screen using the method shown here... Once the UVs are projected on an image, how do you get them to reproject with different scales on a blinking pattern like this one without losing the correct unwrapping of the image you want to use in the screens?
2020-10-21 17:58:10 +0000 UTCThis is so cool, thanks as always
Mornarion
2020-10-21 17:14:31 +0000 UTCwow this is extremely useful, thanks
2020-10-21 14:56:52 +0000 UTCBrilliant!
2020-10-21 13:47:17 +0000 UTCI second that!!!!!
Jared Soto
2020-10-21 11:58:38 +0000 UTCThis is awesome.
Nathan Vegdahl
2020-10-21 09:08:14 +0000 UTCOh! Linear extrapolation just keeps it going out at a consistent speed forever. In THIS case, it looks like it's looping because it's continually offsetting the UVs up across the texture forever, and the TEXTURE repeats, not the animation. Does that make sense? If you move a UV map off the top of the texture in the UV editor, it effectively just loops right back around to the bottom.
Ian Hubert
2020-10-21 08:06:58 +0000 UTCPlease do a tutorial about compositing. Always love the filmic colors and grains of your videos. <3
2020-10-21 08:02:07 +0000 UTCAbsolute genius!! Thanks for the tip!
Doug Brown
2020-10-21 07:58:47 +0000 UTCVery nice! Question - what's the difference between "linear extrapolation" and "make cyclic"? I always use the latter, I didn't know "linear extrapolation" also looped the keys.
Jan van den Hemel
2020-10-21 07:54:15 +0000 UTCNice! Thanks for advice. I'm thinking about buying a Sony A73. A7s3 is awesome too, but it's over my budget.
2020-10-21 06:24:30 +0000 UTCOh cool! Yeah, I have a Sony A73, and I love it. I'd probably get an A7s3 if I were buying one now (apparently they're pretty awesome).
Ian Hubert
2020-10-21 05:19:35 +0000 UTCAwesome! But I want to give you a question. What camera are you using to shoot vfx? I'm planning to buy a Sony full frame.
2020-10-21 04:56:54 +0000 UTCLove it. I can definitely see myself using this in a future project!
Richard Reimer
2020-10-21 04:35:49 +0000 UTCBrilliant!
2020-10-21 03:01:39 +0000 UTCReminds me of the fairly common technique for quickly putting some colour and variation on game assets - having an image with a bunch of colour gradients and quickly slap projected parts onto that. Could be combined with this one to have your all your neon sign colours in a single material instead of a bunch of different ones, and easily swap to another global colour palette by swapping out the image. Found a minionsart tiny tutorial about it actually: (looks like patreon doesn't make it a link, but you can copy it easily enough) https://twitter.com/minionsart/status/818457836007071744
Max Cahill
2020-10-21 02:46:53 +0000 UTCawesome man!
George Moise
2020-10-21 02:37:06 +0000 UTC
