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MOOOORE 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?) 


Files

Quickly Animating Complex Neon Signs

Comments

Anonymous

Heh, nice

Anonymous

Sweet! This is helpful! Thanks Ian!

Anonymous

Oh that’s nifty I see why you are jazzed.

Anonymous

awesome man!

Anonymous

Reminds 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

Anonymous

Brilliant!

Anonymous

Love it. I can definitely see myself using this in a future project!

Anonymous

Awesome! 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.

IanHubert

Oh 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).

Anonymous

Nice! Thanks for advice. I'm thinking about buying a Sony A73. A7s3 is awesome too, but it's over my budget.

Jan van den Hemel

Very 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.

Anonymous

Absolute genius!! Thanks for the tip!

Anonymous

Please do a tutorial about compositing. Always love the filmic colors and grains of your videos. <3

IanHubert

Oh! 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.

Anonymous

This is awesome.

Anonymous

Brilliant!

Anonymous

wow this is extremely useful, thanks

Anonymous

This is so cool, thanks as always

Anonymous

GREAT 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?

Anonymous

You'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.

Anonymous

I'm gonna make so many obnoxious theater marquees

Anonymous

Whoop 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.

IanHubert

Oh 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!

IanHubert

YESSS 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?"

IanHubert

yeah! 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!

Anonymous

Alright, 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!!!!

Anonymous

Gosh 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?

Anonymous

I'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

Anonymous

Have 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.

IanHubert

Yeah! 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?

Anonymous

Welcome 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

Anonymous

Sure 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% =)

Anonymous

THIS IS AMAZING!

Anonymous

Damn @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!

Anonymous

WOW...your way doing it really awesome Ian

Anonymous

Hey, is 'magic tuna' anyhow related to Bucky Roberts from thenewboston? @_@

Anonymous

Actually, 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!

Anonymous

That 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

Anonymous

My brain is happy about this.

Anonymous

Hi 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!!

Anonymous

Ian, 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.

Anonymous

Absolutely great technique! i'm very happy to joined your patreon today Ian!

Anonymous

freaking awesome