Motion Design Artist Ed Brown is convinced that there will be a flurry of rainy urban scenes coming, that will have a neon sign or two in them. Thanks to a lot of inspiration from a series of recent films to draw from that all have, to some extent, that aesthetic.

Getting ahead of that curve, Ed Brown posts a beginner’s / intermediate tutorial that features creating and animating a neon sign within Cinema 4D. It’s a long one too. It covers the entire workflow from creating line art in illustrator that will be used to generate 3D shapes in Cinema 4D, to making blends, sweeping splines, spline wrangling and setting up the animation with some Mograph tools.

Of course finalizing the whole scene is also covered by rendering with Octane and compositing with After Effects. Basically, everything you need to know about making dystopian-style neon signs.