Yesterday we started off another TotD series, this one dealing with Glowing Signs.  Allen Ball at Taggart Foster Currence Gray Architects really needed a solution for both the Illuminated Sign and just simple glowing letters.  Yesterday’s TotD went over creating a light fixture and using a image based material to essentially create an illuminated sign.  Well, what if you have something much more simple than that image.  Just letters for instance!  Glowing letters, you see those all the time.  There is a great little way to create letters that glow!

Creating the Glowing Letter Material:

1. Create and place your model text for the letters for the sign.
2. Go to the Materials Dialogue.
3. Create  new material.
4. Choose “Replace” in the “Render Appearance based on” section.
5. I choose (once again) the “LED Green On” material for a few reasons.  The main reason is the self-luminance parameter that is available for this material.
6. The parameters you want to pay attention to here are:
   1. Color: the base color of your material.
   2. Transparency: controls the amount of light viewable through the material.  1 = 100%
   3. Self-Luminance: the amount of glow the material gives off.  There is a custom option where you can set your own luminance if desired.  Play with the other parameters in this section as well.  The color temp is the initial color temperature of the material.  5500K is brilliant white.  The filter color is the filter you will be covering the “light” with.  Red in this case for the red letters.
7. When you render this, you want to be sure that Artificial Lights are on, otherwise the self-illuminating materials will not render properly.
8. As you can see, just like the previous glowing sign tutorial, these parameters will take some tweaking to get just right.

This one is much more simple than the Light Fixture technique, but you can see how it will also need as much tweaking as the previous method for image based signs.  I hope this has been helpful to your Revit ventures!  As always, thanks for stopping by, have a great day and please come back again for another Revit TotD!

As always, you can see this tip in its entirety with images and video at: http://revittotd.com/07/464

-Carl