Neon Workshop

This workshop is for the groups that are going to be using neon lights for their asset packs. However, our group doesn’t need neon lights as our asset pack genre doesn’t require it. However, some things are still useful to know; such as how to make something from Maya glow in Unreal Engine.

For this workshop, we modelled a simple flat rectangular shape in Maya and added a image to it. We imported the image from canvas, using a collection of Asian lettering. The image was black and white. Next, we transferred this model into Unreal Engine and went into the Unity tab to give the shape certain properties such as what colour it has and how much it glows. This will give it the neon effect.

We did the same thing for the pink border and gave it a neon effect too, using Alt + drag to duplicate, we scaled the object up to get different variants of the neon sign we are creating.

Creating Variations

To create more variant other than a size difference, we can go back into Maya and change the UV map of our model. This will make the text of the sign change as the image we used for the sign’s texture is various texts.

Further more, we can change the colour of the sign to something such as cyan using the same Unity tab we did before in Unreal Engine.

Next we are going to try and creating a rotating sign. To do this we need to go back to Maya and create a cylinder shape.

We add the text to the outer face of the cylinder and once again move the model into Unreal Engine. Here we use the unity tab to add a glow to the text and change it’s colour using the maps.

We can add a tab called ‘panner’ in this window. This allows the image to rotate. You can also change the rate at which it rotates. We changed it from 1 to 3. Then, the text begins to rotate.

Conclusion

I think the Maya stage of this workshop is pretty simple. Just model the kind of shape you want to glow and add texture to it. Use an image of text and UV map it over the modelled shape correctly. In Unreal Engine , we have to add emission and change the opacity and how much the texts glows. To get a clear background, we could make the opacity for it 0%. I found this workshop good to know, however I was doing different work whilst watching Lee do this as it wasn’t immediately important to me so I missed out on some of the Unreal Engine work. The results look very promising, if I were to do this myself I would struggle with the Unreal Engine work.