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

Difficulty: easy-moderate (registration on dark substrates takes care). Time: 30–60 minutes for a print, 2–4 hours for a 3D plaque. Best methods, in order: UV printing on black acrylic, 3D printed plaque, sublimation on white poly panels, laser engraving (with caveats).

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.

Open the Neon Night Map preset

What You'll Need

UV printing: flatbed UV printer, gloss black cast acrylic (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. 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 in a bright colour suit this design perfectly. Skip small-polygon cleanup; there are no tiny fills here.

Choose Your Build Method

UV printing

Export the transparent PNG (Background, water, and parks toggled off).
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.
Wipe the acrylic with IPA, seat it against your bed jig, and verify origin with a test outline.
Print; if your RIP supports it, add a gloss varnish pass over the roads for extra shine.

Sublimation

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

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.