From Nike to Chicago Bulls, over the years I've seen many corporate logos turned into neon signs. Many of them im 3D. Since I'm a big fan of Panda Express of course that post here on Behance caught my eye and I thought I'd do a little exercise and replicate that in 3D with Cinema4D. I couldn't resist and also animated the entire 3D scene and also made some Neo Soul LoFi beats with a touch of asian sounds in Ableton Live to try and reflect the combination of chinese kitchen and souther california with a custom audio score.
disclaimer: The original post was from Designer Jeffrey Dirkse (https://www.behance.net/jeffreydirkse). I take no credit in actually designing this neon sign. I simply imagined a workflow where a concept designer is providing a final design and I'm tasked with building and animating a 3D scene around it. Which is a common workflow for a 3D artist. Again, everything you see here is created by me, but the original design is the creative work of Jeffrey Dirkse.
The Process
I needed the paths to create the fluorescent tubes so I had to do some work in Adobe Illustrator first. The most important thing was to place strategic cuts where I wanted to bend the tubes as sween in the original design reference. Rather than the scissor or knife tool in Illustrator I'm a big fan of the shape builder tool to place precise cuts. just a matter of personal workflow preference I guess. Just easier to find the remaining pieces.
In Cinema4D it's pretty straightforward polygon modeling the individual pieces like the screw & plate as we as the cables. For the tubes however I had to come up with a little trick, as it's not possible with Redshift render to cranck up the emission value to make the tubes glow, but at the same time retain that saturated red color. When the tubes were bright enough they turned almost white. So the solution was to duplicate the fluorescent tubes, one for the actual visible tube and the other not visible in render to use as an object light to illuminate the wall and adjacent objects. That way I get both, that nice red glow and a saturated red color on the tube itself.
Sound Design
Since I'm trying to come up with custom music myself within my limited range of music production I asked myself what a custom audio cue would sound like. I tried to combine the chinese heritage with the southern california history of Panda Express. So I played some neo soul chords on the piano and arranged it with some asian sounds in Ableton Live. Finally a good reason to use a plug-in within my Arturia V collection I have which is called 'Augmented Yangtzee', which emulates chinese instruments with a moder touch.
Initially I also wanted to add some SoundFX like the tube glitch you can see in the final animation. But since I'm uploading this to Instagram as well I didn't want to ruin this if someone wants to re-use the audio in their reels.
