Free High quality 3D Neon Signs | Pointindex
This project was born out of another one. I was working on my Favela asset which I am going to post in a few weeks and wanted to build a sign tool that generates signs automatically. Everything was getting quickly out of hand while discovering the beauty of neon signs. I became obsessed with the idea of making a tool that can produce these signs automatically.
Starting mid 2022 and ending with a website promoting over 200 Neon Sign 3D files. In the end it is a kind of Houdini monster, but is doing stoically the work it was built for.
The entire workflow was built to produce as many neon sign 3D files as fast as possible. Beginning with the input that also has to be somewhat procedural, to the Houdini network, to exporting the geometry and vdb’s, to finally render them.
Houdini is reading the word and generates the sign for as many words as there are in the .csv file.A big part was to put all elements together and procedurally generating the neon signs out of just a single word. Making sure that elements, details and cables are not intersecting, overlapping or that the glass tube bending is somewhat believable in reality.
To make the export as easy as possible the tool reads the data from the word and finds the path where to save the sign and its elements automatically. For instance, it is searching the name of the sign in a folder, adding the specific name to it to then save everything in its corresponding subfolder.
The last step was to automate the rendering process. A little bit of python was involved inside of Cinema 4D, reading the geometry and the vdb files and arranging the position with a script to finally render all the signs.
– Irinel-
