Synthwave – Neon 80’s – Background

What started as a school project pretty much became one of the more recognised background in the Synthwave world!

As some might know I am a huge fan of Synthwave, Vaporwave and the general aspect of the Retro Neon 80's. So much even that I love to incorporate the style in whatever possible, especially college assignments. This started as a first attempt to a 15 second 3D scene animation.

With the creation of this rather fast created 3D scene I also rendered out a simple background for personal usage as I actually quite liked the result.
With a bit of tweaks in Photoshop and a better starry background, I then created a very lovely Retrowave background as following:

Synthwave - Neon 80s - Background - 2K

As I was quite content with this result I eventually decided to share it as well on DeviantArt where it got very popular to the point that it was a very known background in the Synthwave world! Even if you Google Synthwave today you'll see this background pop up somewhere!

4K Version

With the tremendous amount of comments and requests to make a larger version for Print and 4K, I eventually remade the background for these two purposes, and while I couldn't create a 100% exact replica or just upscale the original, I do find the recreation a big success as it also gains a lot of personal improvements that slightly bothered me in the first version.

Synthwave - Neon 80s - Background - 4K

This 4K version can now also be found on DeviantArt and you can even get the assets like the 3DsMax and PSD files, together with an uncompressed version of the image!

Marmoset Version

After that I also recreated the scene and brought it over to Marmoset Toolbag 3 whit a pretty nifty yet different render result:

Synthwave - Neon 80s - Background - Marmoset Toolbag Render

And also swapped out the background with some other adjustments to get the full revamped Synthwave and Retrowave look I was going for!

Synthwave - Neon 80s - Background - Marmoset Toolbag Render Revamped

The scene itself can be explored right in your browser:

In the end I'm pretty content with this background, and while it is actually pretty simply created, I am planning to re-create it again in the future but this time in Unreal Engine 4!

Either way for those who loved this background, I do hope you'll like this 4K release even more!

However I will have to mention that if you want to use this for your projects or something else please request permission first.

And keep in mind that this work is licensed under a strict Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

More information about this license can be found on the Copyright page.