I’m using Blender mostly for VFX and a tiny bit for designing parts for 3D printing and I have been wondering for a while about the text engine. 2D text for motion graphics works fine but as soon as you go 3D, it’s a mess. The meshes, Blender creates from text objects are made of triangles “across” instead of rectangles or triangles truly following the contours. If you use more “artsy” fonts, the result usually is total chaos and you have no choice but to model the text mesh by hand - which takes a lot of time and makes everything fairly inflexible (no editing the text, etc.).
Not to mention that the 3D meshes Blender creates from text objects usually don’t work well with modifiers, let alone scripts like cell fracture…
Has anybody ever looked into improving the text engine? Is the matter on the developers’ radar? Or is there maybe already anything out there that could help?
To me Blender uses quads everywhere and handles even the most “artsy” fonts I could think of very well.
Could you show an image of the problem you’re facing ?
Sorry I forgot that you converted the text to a mesh.
It is true that Blender’s text converter could use some more tesselation options. But there is a very simple workaround.
According to your image I assume you didn’t Remove Doubles (in Mesh > Vertices). Remember that when you convert a text to a mesh, the top and bottom parts are separated. You can see it by selecting one face and hitting Ctrl+L to select the linked faces and G to move.
But even by removing doubles you can have problems because the triangle tesselation is not joining the nearest vertices, which makes it more unstable.
To have a better tesselation here’s a simple thing you can do :
don’t extrude nor fill your text before converting it (set Fill to None under Shape) so that you have only edges when converting
in Edit Mode select everything and hit Alt+F (Mesh > Faces > Fill). This tesselates by nearest vertices.
perform a Limited Dissolve (in Mesh > Cleanup) with a very low angle like 0.05. This should make nice ngons
Another option (because you can’t have too many) is to remesh the text.
After extruding and converting the text to a mesh, add a remesh modifier.
Make sure to uncheck “Remove Disconnected Pieces”.
Then increase the Octree Depth until you get the desired level of detail.
the only way that works is in fact the Remesh modifier with a high octree depth. And even with that I couldn’t get a perfect cell fracture. I tried a dissolve modifier after that, followed by a triangulate and a tris to quads and got a decent looking tesselation, which gave better cell fracture results but still with some errors. But a few boolean modifiers on the cells that didn’t cut properly would solve that.
Don’t forget to mark your thread as solved if you think it is (edit original post > go advanced > Prefix)
Maybe half solved :D. The workarounds works but it’s still a workaround :). The text conversion engine could still use some improvement as you remarked yourself :).
