I’m trying to recreate a engraved lettering style for some text. You can see a good example of it here in the latest Harry Potter trailer.
I thought this would be relatively simple. Pick a font, make a kinfe cut down the middle, pull it out, and go texture. This was so wrong.
I’ve tried everything I can think of. I’ve started with Blender text, with illustrator paths, with curves, everything. Blender doesn’t do lofting or offset extending of curves so I’ve been trying to straight polymodel it and got no where. The closest I have got is using the “Limited Dissolve” on an extruded curves that I converted to a mesh. This gives me an nGon of sorts that I can knife tool through. See here. The topology looks fine to me but it’s not fine when I render. See here. It’s like the quads are rendering as two triangles? I don’t see why. It’s just a basic glossy material to see what happens. The HDR reflections are SUPE sensitive to the roughness value for some reason, and render all funny.
I can’t seem to make my text have this engraved look, and also have nice topology and render properly. Any ideas?
P.s I want to add that I sit next two two senior 3d artists and both of them use different programs. One guys uses Maya, and after two DAYS he was able to get something that looked nice (but took forever to make), and the the other guy uses C4D and he hasn’t got anywhere. Both being doing 3D for years and years. This problems seems tougher than you first thing.
What was your process? It seems like you just modelled it by hand? I have a specific font I need to use, and quite a few words to make up. I need to be able to get this nice topology from extruding live text (or curves from illustrator).
Also, can you do a difficult character, like a capital G? This is where we struggled. Our maya guy built a G in 3 hours but that’s not really pratical.
It’s hand modeling. You might be able to convert from curves, knife cut the ridges, and use an edge split. Probably not though, the topology from curves is horrible. My other though was to fake it with a painted bump map. My gut feeling is that there is some clever way with blender to do it rather painlessly, but I can’t quite think of it right now.
Here is a file. It takes no effort at all once you get the hang of it.
Convert text object.
Limited dissolve.
Delete face.
Fill with quads.
Add loop cut, minor clean up if needed.
Select loop raise.
Thank you for taking the time to put that blend together. It looks like exactly what I want. There’s just one part i’m struggling with and thats the “Fill with quads”. Is that a button that you press, or a manual process? I can fill the face with triangles, and convert to quads, but that’s possible to do from the the first step, i.e the limited dissolve etc was pointless. Also super manual.
Can you explain how you get from the 3rd M to the 4th M in a little more details? I’ll worry about the G later haha.
I appreciate you stooping down to my novice level for this.
Manual just select two edges and press F. I just pay attention where I place those quads ( depends on the font shape) so when I add edge loop it goes in the middle. Sometimes you’ll need to subdivide the edge on one side or the other to get nice quads. It’s not hard trust me.
