BACK LIT LETTERING?

[simbob]

Can anyone advise me how i may achieve back lit lettering effect for the signage on the front of a shop.

I've tried applying an 'emit light glow' texture to the rear face of the letters and some reflectivity to the surface behind but get nothing at all

[PVA - Admin]

What rendering mode are you using? You will have to use the Renderworks modes, OpenGL doesn't yet support glow textures. Also, Indirect Lighting must be enabled in your render settings as well.

This doesn't explain how to create backlit text exactly, but it does cover the creation and use of a Glow texture, it may be useful to you:

[AlanW]

You can do this be using area lights.

Create your text and Duplicate and extrude one and convert the other to polylines and then you can convert this to an area light.

Extrude the other one and sit it directly behind the extruded text.

Push your area light up to about 3500 lux and render in final quality renderworks to get the effect.

HTH

Edited April 29, 2015 by Alan Woodwell

[simbob]

Thanks, i'll give both of those a look, i have the glow texture active, maybe it's just not bright enough - seems to be a common problem!

[AlanW]

Hi,

Am not using glow texture only an area light

will post image

Edited April 29, 2015 by Alan Woodwell

[Kevin McAllister]

How about something like this. It uses the glow shader as mentioned. The letters are a straight colour and the logo uses an image graphic from the internet. Getting it to look good is about render mode and about contrast (ie. dark background and reflective materials to see that its glowing).

Kevin

Edited April 29, 2015 by Kevin McAllister

[Kevin McAllister]

Here's a link to a knowledge base video that recommends using glow instead of area lights and shows you how.

KM

[simbob]

Thanks guys, it's more Alan's example i'm after, but will try both approaches, this is the sort of thing i am trying to achieve...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oot9kjcvv3f1oa3/crate-barrel.jpg?dl=0

[AlanW]

What I found also when testing this if I shell the back of the letters and extracted the inside of the recess and used that for the area light I was able to have the light glowing at the wall as if the letters have a glass back, otherwise if you put a light under the letters you get the light spilling out too far.

[Guest Wes Gardner]

Here are a couple of examples. The "evolve" signage is composed of two extruded elements stacked on top of each other. The rear-most uses the glow texture on the greenish element and the forward extrude is just textured with aluminum.

I probably should have turned up the intensity of the "glow" a bit...

The fish in the night scene are handled like a gobo...

Wes

Edited April 30, 2015 by Wes Gardner

[Kevin McAllister]

So more like this?

It seems like the quality level of the indirect lighting directly affects how patchy the result is. I also increased the brightness of the glow in this example.

KM

Edited April 30, 2015 by Kevin McAllister

[AlanW]

Kevin,

Thanks for this, its a much simpler solution than the way I was going about it with yours using Glow from the texture.The result is more even as yes the line and area lights can be a bit spotty.

Thanks for this, that's what is so good about this forum, always learning.

[simbob]

Kevin,

Looks good, have you just applied the glow texture to the back face of the items? What sort of light levels are we talking?

[Kevin McAllister]

Yes, essentially the glow texture is applied to the back (technically its the bottom since the extrude was made in the front view). The glow texture intensity is set to 150%.

Kevin