How to shrinkwrap this?

I have a fairly basic rectangle that I want to stick on a slighty curved surface. So im thinking about using the shrinkwrap modifier. However, when I apply this, is messes up the rectangle and seems to alter its shape (flatten it)
So I want to make the rectangle follow the slight bend of the surface…and extrude from that surface just a tiny bit.

So what am I doing wrong here? It seem to flatten the rectangle… and offsetting it show that its just a flat shape without depth.



applying anything with a volume to a flat surface will never work, the shirnk wrap modifier is ment to be used for retopology, snappnig flat objects to flat surfaces, or snapping a volumetric object to another volumetric object that is entirely inside of it.

if you want it to look like a sticker, then there are a few ways you can do it. personally, i would start over, because you are clearly using a very destructive workflow, with text and boolean. either that, or make sure you do it in the right order.

first you create the sticker, this can be made flat, then shrinkwrapped on to the surface, or you can create a volumetric object and simply just model it as close as you can, using a subsurface modifier to get rid of any jagged lines.

then after you’ve done this, you can proceed with the boolean operations.

also, a sidenote, watch your normals. i happen to notice that the knot on the bottom of your… whatever that thing is… has its normals inverted. look at the bottom right of your image, the thing has a very dark shading, this is bad, very bad. select it, and do W+F to FLIP the normals, or you can do CTRL+N to Recalculate the normal.

You probably have a lot of ngons there… in order for that shape to bend properly you’ll have to get rid of those and add some polys. I would use a bend modifier instead of shrinkwrap… more control that way. If you want to stick with shrinkwrap, remove most of the part of the mesh that you won’t see, then have a little bit of that back part sticking out. On those verts, create a vertex group and then use the vertex group with the shrinkwrap modifier, that way only those verts will conform to the shape.

Ah ok, thanks guys. I didnt know that the shrinkwrap isnt really suitable for this stuff. Ill try cleaning it up and use the bend modifier instead. Still learning this stuff.

And, if you have a better way of insetting text instead of using boolean…then please advise. Im not getting this to work properly with subsurf modifier … so any alternatives are welcome.

And about those dark normals… They do have a dark material applied to it so im not sture if tthat just isnt what your seeing… but ill try to inverse the normals anyway.

you better use the Boolean modifier to do it!
and again better prepare the surface to make a nice union first !

happy bl

Do not use the Bend modifier. its only suitable if the surface you want to match is perfectly round.


Ok thanks guys for the replies. Really helpfull and its definately helping me out. Great to see that this communinity is so helpfull towards newbies…

What i will do in your case, is keep only the face with with the text ( for obtain the flat surface ), w > remove double, control N ( for recalculate the normals ). if the text is extruded allready, you can bring it flat ( scale and then remove double )

Then you can shrinkwrap and finally extrude the face and text. inward ( need to apply shrinkwrap first, so keep some copies of the object ).

If the object is dont need to be “directly” on the surface, yes bolean will do the job.