3D Text - there must be a better way?

JonnyRay

As part of my '68 Charger project, I wanted to make a custom badge for the front grill. At first I tried using the 3D text option in Hexagon, but it seemed like it was creating a much more dense curve than what I needed. So I created a reference image and formed my own badge by extruding faces to cover the text. While I'm happy with the results (see attached), I think my process could have been less manually intensive, but I don't know how. What I did was...

1. Created the "Beast" word in Paint using the standrd Brush MT font face
2. Brought it into Hexagon and created a flat object which covered the word in quads
3. Extruded the quads straught outward in the Y dimension 
4. Manually tweaked every vertex on the new front face so that it moved inward toward the centerline of the stroke for the letter
5. Looped my new front edge and created another line just inside it for the inset
6. Pushed the innermost faces backward in the Y dimension to inset them from the edge

It was that step #4 that took an inordinate amount of time. I tried all the scaling options I could think of, but they all wanted to move vertices toward the center of the object, so like my inner loops say within the "B" would get skewed toward the center not tapered toward the center of the brush stroke like I wanted.

Silver Dolphin

Have you tried the 3D text creator in Carrara? Or in Blender they may have better tools. Oh by the way nice job on the beast looks great.

mach25

Use lines +surface tools instead, I am currently using lines + combination of thickness tool which I turn down thickness to very small + lots of scaling

Maybe tool that use 2x 2d lines would work best, one line follow

WendyLuvsCatz

in Carrara you can also use Philemo's free cutouts and blimps plugin then export an obj of it to Hexagon 

JonnyRay

@SilverDolphin and @th3Digit : Doh! I don't know why Carrara didn't occur to me. I have to keepthat in mind for next time.

@mach25 : Tracing the centerline and using two copies with different thicknesses would have been a good idea too. I spend so much time in vertex modeling I forget sometimes about lines and surfaces.

 

mach25

I tested with my latest meshes that are made from lines and its possible to mark upper or lower part with line/quad+"Loop" and can be manpulated to different size etc

maybe ruled surface to connect two different lines with minimum points in lines to get it right with least amount of work with fewest points to move,followed by smoothing/adding quads to get it round and smooth letters

 

JonnyRay

Even though it might have been inefficient, the logo still looks pretty good on the grill too. :)

In case you're wondering, the lines in the grill are texture maps (diffuse and displacement) not actual geometry. I felt like that would have been too many faces for too little benefit.

Wee Dangerous John

Jonny, as far as I know no-one has done a tutorial on making maps for Hex models - Fancy doing one ?

Great render, hence my query :)

JonnyRay

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to write a tutorial on texture map creation. :) This one was pretty simple since all I really needed was a grayscale map that would control the strength of parts of the chrome shader and the same map acted as my displacement. But I can at least talk through what I did to make it work.

The one I'm doing for the tires is a lot more complicated. :)

mach25

I gonna share my experience on hexagon unicode/carrara unicode text, I already have several foreign language packs,at first using 3d text it seem like it didnt work,because all I got was the usual rectangles when you have no installed chinese,I copied and pasted unicode characters from another text editor app

but after that I discovered you must not forget to change the font to one of the asian fonts that appear after you installed language packs,after that it works and shows up properly