4.1 How to Create a Neon Light Sign

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Rainy Window Effect Course. In this lesson, we'll learn how to create a Neon Light Sign for our background. So let's go ahead and double click on the background composition here. And we want to create a Neon Light Sign for background in this area here. So in order to do that, we want to click on the Horizontal Type Tool at the top here to create our text. And then we're just going to click anywhere on the comp to type in whatever you want your text to be. So I'm going to type in rain effect here. Like so. And let's move that to the bottom here like that. And now to edit the look of your text including the font and the size, you want to use the character panel here. And you can open up this character panel by going to window and selecting Character here. So let's go ahead and change the way that this looks. So with the text selected, let's go ahead and change the font in this drop down box here. So let's change it here like so. And then with this, we can also change the alignment of the texts. So in this paragraph panel, let's go ahead and align this to the left. And if you don't see this paragraph panel here, again, just go to Windows and then select. Paragraph, like so. Excellent, so now that we've got our text here, we want to go ahead and make it a color. So in order to change the color of our text, make sure that the text is selected, and then over in the Character panel here, we can see that we can change the fill color and the stroke color here. So let's click to change that. And let's go ahead and change this to a nice bright orange color like so. And now let's click to activate the stroke color, and click this and we're going to change this color into a nice bright, reddish orange color, like so. So now that we have color selected on our text. Let's go ahead and select the selection tool at the top here, and move our text on top of this dark background, so we can see it's a little bit more clearly. And we can also go ahead and change the width of our stroke. Just to make our text a little bit thicker, so let's zoom in here and let's change the width of our stroke to maybe 2 or 2.5 just to make it a little bit thicker and then just zooming out here. We want to create a sort of neon border around our text here now, as well. So making sure that we don't have the background or the text selected by clicking outside of the box here like that. We can now go ahead and go to the Shape tool at the top here click and hold to bring out all these shape options and we're going to select the rounded rectangle tool. Now, with the rounded rectangle tool selected, we want to draw a rounded rectangle around our text, like so. And now that we've drawn the rounded rectangle let's go ahead and change the properties of this, so up at the top here, we can go ahead and click the Fill, and we can change this. Let's go ahead and change the fill by clicking on the text, not the color. So we want to click on the text here and change the fill options to None, like that. And then with the stroke here, we want to change the stroke properties. So let's go ahead and change the stroke properties to a solid color, like so. And we're going to change the color to the same color as our neon light. So we can use the Eyedropper tool for this. So select the Eyedropper tool, and let's go ahead and use the same orange color for our stroke like this. Click Okay. And we want to change the stroke to something like, let's say, six pixels wide. Cool. Now, I'm just going to change the text and make it center aligned instead. I'm going to use the selection tool to move everything in place, just to adjust the shapes layer and the text to something that I want. So just clicking on the shapes layer here. And just adjusting it and making it a little bit smaller to fit our sign. Cool. And then once you've done that, once you're happy with the way that your sign looks, let's go ahead and change both of these layers to 3D layers. So in order to do that, you want to click on the cube sign here. And making both of these layers into 3D layers. And then we're going to select both of these layers like so, and make a precompound of this. So right click and precompose. And let's go ahead and name this Sign with all attributes to new composition and click OK. And this will make it easier to edit the text if we want to change it later on down the line. Now, on the neon sign compiler here, we wants to change this into a 3D layer as well. So let's go ahead and click on the 3D icon. And we also wants to click on the collapse transformations icon here as well. Let's go ahead and click on this, just so that we can see the transformation box around our sign. Now, we're all set to start moving our neon sign around so that it better fits inside the sign of our background here. Now to do this, we'll need to use a combination of the Selection tool which is found at the top here and also the Rotation tool here as well. Now, because we might be switching back and forth constantly between both tools, it might be easier to use the shortcut keys on the keyboard. So we can use v for the Selection tool and w for the Rotation tool. So making sure that we've got our sign comp selected. Let's go ahead and spend a bit of time moving the sign around here until it fits inside our sign up background. Let's go ahead and do that. So just rotating it here. Little bit like so. And just sort of moving it around the plane, so that fits inside. So you can see here you can use the nodes here on the corners. To change the way the sign looks, just to stretch it a little bit and I'm pressing w on the keyboard to move this and just rotating it until it fits. Now I just stretching this back again like so. Cool. So once you're happy with the way it looks, now it's time to start adding the effects of our neon sign. So let's go ahead and right click on the layer here, and we're going to go to layer styles. And let's go to Bevel and Emboss. And this will add some depth to the neon sign. Let's go ahead and open up Bevel and Emboss here and we want to bring up the highlight settings. And bring down the highlight opacity down to about 50%, and the shadow opacity down to about 50% as well. Now let's go ahead and add a drop shadow to the sign. So again. Let's collapse this and right click on the layer, go to layer styles and add a drop shadow. And in the drop shadow properties, let's open up this up here as well and under the, let's find the distance. Let's put the distance to about 20. In fact, that's a little bit too far so let's bring that back a little bit. So let's bring it to about ten and let's change the softness of the shadows as well by going to size and then just changing the properties to let's say about 20. Let's bring it back down to 15 just to make a little bit sharper, and we can also go ahead and change the opacity. So, let's bring the opacity down to say about 40% on that, in fact, let's bring it back up to 50. Cool. Now let's add a fill effect by going to Effect. And let's find Generates, and Fill and we want to change the color to a gray. So let's go ahead and collapse our drop shadow layer style, and let's go to our effects in fill. So let's go ahead and change the color here, and change this to a darkish gray color, like so. Cool. So this will be the neon light tubes as they're turned off and let's go ahead and reduce the color a little bit in the Emboss options. So go back to Layer styles, go to Bevel, and Emboss. And we want to change the highlight color here from white to a lighter grey color, like so. And you can also adjust the highlight opacity here, as well. So we can change that and make it a little bit softer. So that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to create some glow effects and some flickering lights for our neon sign. See you all there.