Is their a way to bend one object around another? Example: I made a shield, now I’m making an emblum to lay against the shield. The thing is, the front surface of the shield is arched but the back of the emblum thats gonna be sticking to it is flat. Is their a way to bend the flat part of the emblum to where it will fit against the arch of the shield? I mean is their a way to do it without unevenly distorting the emblum???
Thanks. I appreciate any help.
well, you can cheat. make the emblum thick and then sink it into the shield. it will be flat tho. to bend it you will have to bend it. there is no emblum bending tool that I know of. you have to divide it up a few times (click twice on Subdivide) then look at it end-on and use proportional edit mode (O) and grab the center vertices and move them up. So in like three mouse clicks you have a bent emblum.
The emblem is a texture, I presume? You could just use a flat map input to an empty, as shown here:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Map_Input
Sounds like you might want a more general overview of textures. Depending on the shape of the shield you might get less distortion using UV mapping. You can find out all you need to know about texturing here:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Textures
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Ah… I guess the emblem is not a texture? You might consider using a texture with normal or displacement mapping.
Nope, its not a texture. Its a fully 3D object that already has subsurfaces added to smooth it out. Thanks for ya’ll’s help though. I’ll try it.
I’m gonna try that too. OMG, thanks man. I didn’t even think about that. 
You could use a Curve Modifier, or Warp: Shft-W which is tricky as it warps relative to the 3D Cursor. Cambo also has a ‘Shrinkwrap’ script.
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STATUS: 6 ways up to this waypoint. and counting. or have we exhausted ourselves?
Warp is a really nifty tool if you think of it as more-or-less bending the shape around a log whose center is the 3d cursor. The input is kinda wierd though, and it dosn’t like taking negative numbers with the mouse sometimes, so you may have to tweak with it and test keyboard input . . .
Good grief all. Just use a lattice. Once the curve is right, apply the deformation.:rolleyes:
Hope this helps.
Duh . . . I should really go take a look at that.
…
Dude.
7 ways and evidently still counting.
7 ways and evidently still counting.
Good old fashioned proportional editing.
8
sorry bugman, beat ya to it (idea#2). so the score is:
sigh so, once again, Fligh is the winner, with Roger and Bugman tied for second. (and I can hear those rocks rattling around in Bugman’s head as he searches for yet another way…)
ooh ooh I know - make them a free mercenary without an emblem on their shield, and thus DO NOTHING. does that count?
Ahem, normal mapping and displacement mapping are two different things, y’know.
And there’s always BUMP mapping (yet another, fairly crappy idea for a solution to this problem…)
What’s that I hear? Trumpets? Playing the Theme Song to “Rocky”? Pour moi?
Seriously, though, if anybody hasn’t already seen it, the Puzzle Ball video tutorial by Hazard is a brilliant little modeling tut which uses warp extensively to create a “Wikipedia” style puzzle ball. Really good stuff for anybody wanting to map flat mesh shapes onto a curved surface:
http://www.ibiblio.org/bvidtute/
(Bottom of the page)
For irregular shapes, you can softbody the object to be warped and make the other a deflector, then bake the softbody and apply the shape at the correct frame. Of course it takes some tweaking and you need to change the axes temporarily. This method worked great when I needed to crush in the roof of my lovely Honda Civic model with a steel girder (for a now-defunct movie project 
).
Also, there may be an interesting method hidden somewhere in the retopo tools… Check this out:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-297613529041280875&hl=en-CA