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Airport Name Signage with lights

Evilrash

Evilrash

Messages
50
Country
bahrain
Couldn't find any thread on it so posting it here.
How can I model airport name text in blender and use that having lights in it.
All I know is the name can be brought in using DECAL properties and throw external light on it. But now I want to put the lights to glow in the block letters.
Example such text in below mentioned picture.
1705172139156.png
 
You could create an emissive texture like this.

Sign.png
 

Attachments

  • Sign.zip
    3.2 MB · Views: 1,416
I did this in Photoshop like said above the same bmp except bright colors like shown. Then in Model Converter X you add the emmisive texture to the object which is the sign.
 

Materials

docs.flightsimulator.com docs.flightsimulator.com

The SDK has documentation on materials and I think it's important to apply material appropriately. Decals were created to make aircraft details sharper without adding large quantities of texture overhead. I believe decals have an emissive channel, but I believe that is intended for instruments to be controlled by the aircraft XML. Perhaps it also work like emissive textures, which overlay the albedo "automatically" at night conditions and emissive textures are what the SDK informs to use for scenery objects.

When I make an object like yours, I try to use photographic textures as much as possible. For me, it is easy to turn a day texture into a reasonable semblance of night, you can design it such that it works in congruence with any attached lights you add, which are good to use because they provide volumetric lighting well. You don't even necessarily need an illumination source for them.

pdx9.png


For the row T hangars and the parking lot further back, I just created library objects that were rows of lights, only the light itself as a "wash" and I positioned those around the scene. Similarly along the back of the big square building, whereas the close side right corner has an emissive texture showing. A lot of the time in MSFS, you can make an adequate night scene with few night textures.

In your situation, for example, I would probably just use the day texture for the main building, model the sign as 3d, or at least a distinct polygon plane. For day it would be the same texture as the building and the night texture would be emissive, which is why I uploaded it so you could see how I build them and I'd also experiment with illuminating the back side of the sign to see if I could create a little light wash from it.

Fuel Station.png


You could do similar with colored lights. Here's a couple of examples, the texture is transparent, you can see I forgot to put a "reverse" face inside the one light. The night texture is colored and we can also place a light and we can boost the emissive factor, I think the limit is 4 or 400%.

LM.png


I have a philosophy to keep me in line that it is a flight sim, if I can't see it from the cockpit, we're probably ok with just a nod to eye candy.
 
Not sure why you are using Decal. Standard gives you control of the Day-Night cycle, which you might want. You can use an emissive color or a PBR Emissive texture. You might also want to make the colored text faces assigned as a separate mesh. Then controlling the color and emission is a bit easier.
 
rhumbaflappy said:
Not sure why you are using Decal. Standard gives you control of the Day-Night cycle, which you might want. You can use an emissive color or a PBR Emissive texture. You might also want to make the colored text faces assigned as a separate mesh. Then controlling the color and emission is a bit easier.
Click to expand...
Wait, so you're not supposed to use decals for things like signs? I think I've been using them for several signs where I have a transparent background and I just noticed that you don't get Day Night Cycle. So I take it for scenery one should always use Standard with Alpha mode Blend, there's no advantage to a Decal?
 
Decal material is meant to make decals, so "coplanar" faces
It is just more optimised to avoid layer fighting
 
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