# Making a glowing night-city panel with the Neon Night Map preset

> glowing road colors on a near-black ground, poster-ready

This preset renders a dense city's road network as neon - cyan motorways, hot-pink primaries, amber secondaries, and violet side streets - over a deep navy night. It's built for UV printing on black acrylic, where you hide the background and let the gloss black substrate be the night sky. The result looks like a long-exposure photo of city traffic.

## What you need

- **UV printing:** flatbed UV printer, gloss black cast [acrylic](https://yxecreations.com/pages/acrylic-sheets) (3 mm) or black aluminum composite panel, isopropyl alcohol for prep, jig or bed registration marks
- **Sublimation:** sublimation printer + paper, **white** poly-coated aluminum panel or hardboard (sublimation can't print onto dark blanks - the navy background has to come from ink), heat press, heat tape, butcher paper
- **Laser engraving:** CO2 or diode laser, black-coated anodized aluminum or two-tone laserable acrylic (engrave-to-reveal materials suit this design far better than wood)
- **3D printing:** multi-color printer, filaments in navy plus 3–4 bright "neon" colors (silk or fluorescent PLA sells the look)

## Step 1 - Start from the preset



Open [the Neon Night Map preset](/map-designer?preset=neon-night-map). It loads Tokyo at zoom 13.3, square crop - close enough that the full road hierarchy fills the frame in layers of color. This preset lives and dies on road density: search for a city with a thick downtown grid (Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, Manhattan, São Paulo) and center on the densest interchange you can find. Stay around zoom 13–13.7; zoom out much past 13 and the width-1 violet streets collapse into haze, zoom in past 14 and you lose the motorway structure that provides the cyan accents.

## Step 2 - Tune the layers



One Solid layer group, **Night city**:

- `land` - `#0B1026` deep navy. This is the layer you'll toggle off for black-substrate prints.
- `water` `#101A3D` and `landusePark` `#11233A` - barely-lighter pockets of dark that add depth on backlit or white-substrate prints. On black acrylic with the background hidden they won't appear at all, which is fine.
- `roadsMotorway` `#00E5FF` width 5 - the cyan arteries.
- `roadsPrimary` `#FF2D95` width 3 - hot pink.
- `roadsSecondary` `#FFB300` width 2 - amber.
- `roadsStreet` `#7C4DFF` width 1 - violet capillaries. Violet on navy is the lowest-contrast pair in the preset; if your print method softens edges (sublimation especially), bump this to width 1.5 or brighten it to `#9E7BFF`.

All widths are filled ribbons, so the glow layering you see on screen is real geometry in every export.

## Step 3 - Export



- **UV on black acrylic:** toggle **Background off** in the export modal and grab the 4096 px PNG - you get transparent night, neon roads only. Also hide `water` and `landusePark` (they'd print as faint dark rectangles on an already-black panel).
- **Sublimation / white substrates:** keep the background on; the navy prints as ink.
- **Laser:** export per-layer SVG ZIP so you can engrave road tiers at different settings.
- **3D:** export the 3MF with all layers on.
- **Corner holes** in the Mounting holes options turn the panel into a standoff-mounted wall piece - [anodized standoff spacers](https://yxecreations.com/products/4-pack-anodized-standoff-spacers) in a bright colour suit this design perfectly. Skip small-polygon cleanup; there are no tiny fills here.

## UV & Sublimation Printing

### UV printing



1. Export the transparent PNG (Background, water, and parks toggled off).
2. In the RIP, place the art on a black acrylic panel layout; no white underbase under the roads gives a translucent stained-glass glow, a white underbase gives opaque punchy neon - run a small swatch of both.
3. Wipe the acrylic with IPA, seat it against your bed jig, and verify origin with a test outline.
4. Print; if your RIP supports it, add a gloss varnish pass over the roads for extra shine.

### Sublimation



1. Keep the navy background ON - your blank must be white poly-coated, and the ink supplies the night.
2. Print **mirrored** on sublimation paper at final size.
3. Tape to a white aluminum sublimation panel, sandwich in butcher paper.
4. Press with the settings recommended for your material, paper, and inks (metal panels usually press shorter than hardboard).
5. Peel hot. Expect the width-1 violet streets to soften slightly - that reads as glow bloom and honestly helps the effect.

## Laser Cutting & Engraving

### Laser engraving



Heads-up: this is a dark-background design, so raster-engraving the full artwork on wood would mean burning the entire field and leaving the roads raw - slow and muddy. Use a reveal material instead:

1. Export the per-layer SVG ZIP and toggle **Background off** - you only want the road geometry.
2. On black-anodized aluminum or black-over-white two-tone acrylic, engrave the road ribbons: the laser strips the black coating and the roads appear bright on black, exactly matching the screen design.
3. Engrave motorways first at slightly higher power for a deeper, brighter mark, then the finer tiers.
4. Cut the square outline (acrylic) or cut/shear the panel to size (aluminum).

## 3D Printing

### 3D printing



1. Export the 3MF - navy base plus four road colors is a very manageable five-filament plaque.
2. Before exporting, consider bumping `roadsStreet` to width 1.5–2; width-1 ribbons can slice thinner than a single extrusion at small plaque sizes.
3. Assign navy for the base/land, then cyan, pink, amber, and purple silk or fluorescent PLA for the roads.
4. Print face-up at 0.12–0.16 mm layers so the raised roads get crisp edges; a 180–220 mm square makes a striking shelf piece.

## Make it yours

- Dense-grid cities are the whole game: try Seoul, Bangkok, Mexico City, or Los Angeles freeway knots.
- Synthwave swap: motorways `#FF2D95`, primaries `#00E5FF`, streets `#FF6EC7` - sunset-grid vibes on the same navy.
- Monochrome glow: set all four road tiers to `#00E5FF` with widths 5/3/2/1 for a single-color circuit-board look.
- Toggle **water** back on at `#1B2B5E` for coastal cities so harbors read as negative space (Hong Kong, Sydney).
- Print on **clear** acrylic with no underbase and edge-light it with an LED strip for a real neon sign effect.
- Add a **route layer** in white `#FFFFFF` tracing a night out - bar crawl, marathon course, first-date walk.
- Switch the export shape to **circle** and add a **Hanger hole** for a neon city ornament cut from black acrylic.
- Pair with the Figure Ground preset of the same city as a day/night diptych on matching panels.

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Open the tool: https://www.mylasertools.com/learn/guides/neon-night-map
Read online: https://www.mylasertools.com/learn/guides/neon-night-map