Making a Line Light render like a Neon Light

[VinceHollywood]

Hey all, I am trying to make the line lights that I have made as safety lights for the seating in my theatre look more like neon lights glowing from the line itself instead of radiating so much into the space. Does anyone know how?

Vincent

[Pat Stanford]

How about not making them lights at all, but just lines/tubes with a color, and a Constant Reflectivity shader. Adjust the transparency to get the "glow" you are looking for.

[cad@sggsa]

That is a great way of minimizing drawing size aswell, substituting lights with a coloured panel.

[VinceHollywood]

Ah that is a great idea, I am really starting to enjoy this Vectorworks community. Now here is the stupid question, what do you mean by a constant reflective shader. Do you mean I should find a suitable texture from my resource browser and try to play with it until I get the look I want?

Thanks in advance.

[VinceHollywood]

Hey Pat,

forget my above answer, I totally figured out what you were talking about. I went into the Resource Browser and made a new resource for renderworks textures and got exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

[Pat Stanford]

Create a new texture. In the Edit Texture dialog box, you get pull downs for Object Color, Reflectivity, Transparency and Bump.

Set the Color pulldown to Object Attribute so you can change the color in the Attributes Palette.

Set the Reflectivity pull down to Constant.

Set the Transparency pulldown to Plain Transparency and then click the edit button and adjust the slider to get the desired effect.