Hi,
I’m trying to find a good way to create neon lights.
Ideally I would like tubes, like a sign but I keep having problems when trying halo textures or particles.
With particles only the verts seem to produce, I can’t get a band of light the same size. Tried the Face, Bspline buttons in the particle buttons.
I have seen many people accomplish this, but I have no idea if it’s using a plugin or whether this fx can be created in Blender alone.
Any help would be greatly recieved,
Sonix.
Don’t know if I completaly understood the problem.
To make a neon light I’d use a curve and duplicate it.
The first is beveled with a circle to give the shape of the glass.
The material is similar to a glass texture, exept that the blend --> sphere texture (nor coordinats, zzz) has negativ alpha (alpha button 2 times) to give a diffuse appearence at the edges.
The second curve I’d convert to mesh and give it a halo texture with appropriate size.
To overcome the not equal spacing of the vertices (out of curved lines), I’d subdivide it a few times and than remove doubles e.g. 0.1. This should give an approximately spacing of the verts of 0.1. Again subdivision should give a smooth halo line.
hmm you say you tried particles… try giving it a halo texture. then put down the alpha value and up the add value. that usually works for me but some tweaking will be needed. (also try playing around with the hard value).
d52477001
spur of the moment neon-light tutoial
err, neon glow tutorial
assiming blender proficcency
make neon lamp curve, by adding text, or by method of choosing
duplicate, and put one copy on layer 2, the other on layer 3
create a plane to put behind the text, and subdivide it numerous times
for the curve on layer 3, go to the anim buttons and press curvepath
while your at it you can add a curve ipo that travels linearly from frames 1 to 100 along length (speed animipo)
split your layer-3 curve into multiple pieces, one for each neon tube
add a lamp onto layer 3
tweak it so that it only lights inside a sphere, is dim, and make it a small sphere
make linked duplicates for each neon tube, and make their parents the neon paths you have created on this layer
for each of those lamps go into the anim buttons and press dupliframes
tweak the settings (mainly dupoff) so that they are (approx) equally spaced (the dup lamps for each neon tube)
select each lamp, and make the duplicates real with control+shift+a
move the duplicates to layer 4
view both layers 1 (the plane) and 4 (the lamps)
go into shaded mode (control+z)
tweak the lamp settings to your liking
press the make vertexcolors button in the edit buttons, and the vcollight button in the material buttons with your plane selected
(done with glow)
for your neon tubing create a small beizier curve circle
exit edit mode
on your tubing curve (or text) on layer 2, make the bevOb (edit buttons) that curve circle
tweak the size of the curve circle and of your neon tubing curve to your liking.
render (again)
for all of the effort I put into this you can see the final result at:
http://www.geocities.com/z3r0_d/files/neon.zip
tordat and d52477001, thanks for the advice, but I’m still having probs getting the particles to behave. 
z3r0 D, excellent method, thanks very much for the Blend file, really appreciate it.
Sonix. <<<<Scurries off to try neon methods…