Welcome back everyone, we're here at the Pixel Core Studio and we're looking at Motion, and
doing some more lighting effects.
Yeah, yeah, we've been doing a lot of stuff with lighting and I saw a question about making
neon lights in Motion, so I wanna show how to do this, there's a lot to do and I'm going
to do part of it here, but let's dive right in, I wanna show people how this works.
This is what we're going to make, is this blinking, neon, light effect against a brink
wall here.
And, we're going to use 3D text to do it.
So, what I'm going to do, I've started, I have a project here that's started a little
bit, I've got some text in here and if I bring up the heads up display, you can see the font
I'm using here is called, "Pacifico" but there's many different fonts, you want to find something
that lends itself well to neon tubes.
You can go on fontsschool.com and there's lots of places for free, commercial use fonts
that you can get.
This is the particular one I happen to be using.
And, my approach here is to use 3D.
So I'm gonna actually come a little closer and look at this right now this is 2D text,
but I really wanna make 3D tubes to put the light inside.
I think kind of literally about this stuff.
So I'm going to go to the text inspector and enable 3D text and I immediately get this
extruded kind of text.
But I want it to be round, and you can round the front edge but you still get this thickness
here, so the trick here is to take the depth all the way down to 0 and then increase the
roundness of the front edge, I think 18 works pretty well here, it give me pretty well rounded
tubes here.
It's kind of starting to look like tubes!
Yeah, the idea is to get it pretty tube-looking.
Tubular.
Something like that, something about like that.
So that gets the basic shape.
The next thing I wanna do is deal with the material and I'm going to start with a pre-set
that gets me close, so I'm going to use these materials pre-sets in the pop-up menu here
and I'm gonna go to miscellaneous and miscellaneous has some weird ones, that you usually think,
what am I ever going to use this for?
And I'm going to use the one called, soap bubble.
What would you ever use this for?
It's kind of random!
I'm going to use that and we get this cool, sort of semi-transparant look here, but I'm
just using that as a starting point.
The cool thing about soap bubble is it uses this layer property called emit which is pretty
rare, it's not used in most of these pre-sets but emit actually emits light, it makes it
basically glow.
By default, it's emitting light from a texture, but I'm just going to use a color here and
depending on what you want it to glow, I'm gonna make it kind of a red glow, and this
is going to be the outside of my tube it's not going to be the interior element of glowing
but it's gonna be the outside tube.
So I'll do something kind of red like that.
I can play with the coverage, which then blocks the tubes, which I don't want, I want some
transparency, because I'm gonna have filaments basically inside there, looks like filaments,
so I'm going to keep that coverage pretty low.
I don't need the distress, so I'm gonna turn it off, I don't need the polish, but under
the reflective paint layer, and we have many other tutorials that talk about the the details
I'm sort of going pretty quickly here because we've built up over multiple layers.
So this one called reflective paint has a really interesting property called a fresnel,
and notice if I drag on the fresnel, it basically affects the transparency and how the edges
bleed in.
So I can really control exactly, this is going to be the edge of the glowing.
Okay, so I've got these tubes, they look pretty tubular there, so to finish this part of it
off, I'm gonna go to my shortcut for filters, I'm gonna go to glow and use this new glint
filter, that came out last year which I love.
You don't need it just for text but it works on a lot of different things, yeah it really
doesn't need effect.
What I'm gonna do is make the softness, it has this glint size, but I don't want really
those streaks, I want to increase the softness, so it kind of has a soft glow, I'm going to
increase the intensity, don't wanna go too high, but a nice, good glow there, glint size
a little bit, I can play with the exposure.
So now I have this nice glowing tube and I wanna put the background behind it now this
is kind of neat.
In 3D text, 3D text doesn't really interact with environment, you can't just throw a layer
behind there, with 3D text.
So I'm going to use a trick, by creating a wall out of a piece of text.
Okay, so what I'm gonna do is get T for the text tool, click in the canvas, and then I
have a shortcut from my Emoji symbols up here, if you don't, you can turn it on in Preferences
or under the Edit menu you can choose, Emoji/Symbols.
Either way, brings up this palate, and I'm gonna add this little square and esc.
And I've got this little square which is way too small, and I'm gonna go ahead and go to
the properties and move it in the center and go to the text inspector to the format and
I'm gonna scale this thing way up, and make it a much bigger, much much bigger object,
and I kind of have to drag it down, because I want it to fill the whole screen.
So this is something where I'm using a piece of text purely as a texture because it will
interact with other 3D text layers.
So command left bracket will move it behind the neon and then in the text inspector, for
its appearance, I'm gonna enable 3D text and then I'll go back down to my materials here,
and I'm gonna go back to miscellaneous, and this time I'm gonna chose this red brick material.
And there we have red brick, but it's huge.
It's huge.
And I don't want that, so here's another trick that you won't find out on your own very easily
but if you go down to the substance, I don't need these custom bumps, I don't need this
custom specular, I'm gonna show this substance and if we scroll down it says that the placement,
if I open this up, is called shared, because it's connected to the bumps in the specular.
But I'm gonna make it independent because that gives me scale properties.
Okay, and by doing that I'm gonna type in 25 and it just lets me scale those bricks
down to something a little more reasonable in size.
So we're getting somewhere but I don't like how they're uniformly lit so I'm gonna go
to the lighting environment for the 3D text, I'm gonna turn off the environment so it's
not reflecting an environment and I'm actually gonna turn off the lighting completely because
I'm gonna use Motion's lights, you can see in this group here I've already thrown in
some lights and if I turn those on, in fact, I'll just show you quickly.
I'll go to the object menu, I'll add a new light, and that light, I can use to pretend
to be the neon lighting up the screen.
I can make it more intense and I can color it, and that makes it look like that neon
glow is lighting up the canvas behind it.
Those are the key tricks.
I'm not going to do more in the building here, but I'll go back to my finished project just
to show you what I did to get the full effect here.
To get the neon inside the tubes, I drew with a bezier tool, paths for each of the letters.
And then, on each of those paths, I simply used an outline and then added the glint filter
to it.
So nothing different there.
And that gave me the inside part, and then to make the glow turn on and off, I added
a wriggle parameter behavior to the text itself and it wriggles the opacity, you can see right
here it's applied to the opacity so the text turns on and off and then I've copied that
onto each of these other layers here and then if we look at the lights, and I'll option-click
to open up all the layers in there, I have a link behavior applied to each of the lights
that links their opacity, right here, to the opacity of the text layer.
So they all move together in tandem.
And by doing that, the lights turn on and off at the same time as the neon, to make
it look like the neon's affecting the wall.
I added a light, when the neon's turned off, I added a light above, you can see a little
bit of light, I've got a spotlight at the top this so we still see a little bit of the
light for the rest of it.
So that was a little more work then just copying things on there but the basic technique is
using 3D text and using the fact that you can link different behaviors together.
That's a whole lot of layers, my friend.
Yes, so I think what we'll do is we'll post this so people can download it for themselves
and I think we'll have something on the website where people can get it.
If you don't use bezier paths, you can save this as an effect and use it in Final Cut.
So we'll also make version that's a little different than this so you can use Final Cut
Pro.
Excellent.
That'll give you more work when we finally deliver this MacBreak, who knows, ten weeks
from now.
It'll be ready by then.
In the links below, you should see links to Motion project, Final Cut plug-in, links to
Ripple site to get this stuff because we're happy to share with you, and maybe you can
improve on it.
And speaking of which, watch our YouTube channel, he's got a lot of great Motion content, tons
of it.
And of course, Ripple Training for feature length Motion tutorials where you learn about
3D text, particles, cameras, the whole thing.
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and we'll see you next week, in another episode of MacBreak
Studio.