Neon Light Tube

[KyriakosCY]

Hey guys, quick technical question... If you were to create a neon light tube in sketchup/octane would the best method be to create two tubes one inside the other (the inside one to be smaller in diameter), the outer to be a glass material and the inside one to be an emissive material..? I am trying this but I am not getting the results I was expecting...

Any help will be greatly appreciated..!

[Seekerfinder]

Hi kyriakos,
What are you trying to create? Signage or a luminaire? Or something else?

Usually just creating a blackbody diffuse material on the geometry works well for me. Due to the emission and the bloom effect you typically don't get reflections so no need for a glass tube. If it's a very low level emitter it might be different (but that's more typical with old style filament lights). In any event, with glass make sure fake shadows is ON. And always check the normals - direction of faces.

This is all quite basic stuff which you probably know but you're not giving us a lot to go on.

Best,
Seeker

[KyriakosCY]

Hi,

Sorry for the delayed response. I was so preoccupied with making the scene that I forgot to check back with the forum. I ended up doing it in part using photoshop, but I was trying to get results like the ones towards the end of the following link http://fontfabric.com/the-kabel-font/

I could not get the light to emit a silhouette of the letter on the wall plane and however much power I was giving the lights I could not get any uniform light casting on the wall without blowing out the whites. Even though I have finished this project now I would love to find a way to do this for the future...

Cheers!