Hi,
I would like to suggest a feature, but I don’t know any one who can do it…
I am using Blender to prepare data for 3D-print. I am also included in a team that works on utilities for people with disabilities. Right now we can easily write text in Blender, but…
I would like to suggest feature to make it possible to write also in Braille is a tactile writing system. So it is possible to print in 3D information for people that face problem with seeing. Right now it is “quite” user unfriendly to create printable content in Braille with Blender.
Can you help somehow or develop that kind of feature??
You can use “object font” to have more control over the geometry. Make a bunch of objects and name them <yourname>_<character>. Then, in the text object data, type <yourname>_. Go to object properties>instancing>vertex. The objects should be instanced whenever you type that character.
This feels like a case for geometry nodes… as Braille is just a 2x3(?) grid of points, you could very easily instance half spheres on the correct points, and use geometry nodes to convert a string to the appropriate point value
Thank you for your interest.
Besides I don’t know how to use nodes for now, my bigger problem is to define the request… I will try to describe the problems related to that.
The biggest problem is that even users of the English language, i.e. English letters, they do not use the same braille symbols for the same letters… It is similar with some other languages and the differences between different languages (alphabets) are even greater…
Based on the above, we come to the problem that fonts that display braille symbols usually only use symbols for one geographical area (eg braille symbols in America differ from Australian braille symbols for the same characters…).
It follows that the ideal would be to create a scheme that would be adaptable for each language.
First, we create a scheme for each language (I don’t know how it would be done in Blender) - we connect the braille symbol (the symbol we create by erasing some of the 6 offered points on the default 3d model) for a certain character (letter) by typing on the keyboard .
I don’t know how clear I was, and even less do I know if it’s even possible to do it in Blender…
The solution can be setup with any braille font as joseph said. There’s a minor assumption it presumes. And that is that all dots are of the same shape. In my test I used the braille font from dafont.
It has an outer circle and an inner one for the highlights. So per dot there are two shapes. Thats why I use a modulo by 2. If you have more or less curves per dot you might have to increase or decrease that modulo. Beside that it simply converts it. If you want to merge it with a baseplate just add a sized cube beneath before export. Most 3d printing softwares do the union step themselves implicitly.
@Charles_Weaver provided a solution for the automated braille creation process but I didn’t notice the attached file…
The only thing that still needed to be refined was to use a monospace font and to adjust the parameters for Transform Size, Character Spacing and Line Spacing…
Is there a tutorial on creating all the solutions you have mentioned. I am litterly jumping into the very deep end here. New to Blender it has only been 10mins …
