I’m trying make beveled text similar to a debit card surface but frankly Blender’s curve beveling is kinda crappy. (My logo uses a custom font that doesn’t actually exists so I’ve hand made it using curves.) It doesn’t work very well on shapes with lots of corners and I end up lots of overlapping faces and there is no support for beveling towards the center.
My question is would BMesh help with this? Does BMesh actually allow surfaces on curves and can you make surfaces between two separate curves? I’m still using 2.62 and I’m not familiar with BMesh but I’ve heard it’s a really neat feature.
You can poly model this instead of using curves. The bevel tool and modifier is not likely
to work so well if it is fairly complex. However you could select the whole top surface and inset the faces. Shortcut key W. Then change the depth and thickness to what you like. You will then have a nice even face loop at an angle like the bevel. What you do with it there after is up to you. If you want smooth curves then you will need to set the shading to smooth. Applying a edge split modifier can help with keeping sharpe edges elsewhere. Alternatively you can add in edge loops around the corners you want to ramain sharpe. You could probably use inset faces again with limited thickness and no depth depending on your logo. I can’t see your logo so I can’t really offer any more advice but there are plenty of ways to make 3d logos by modelling them.
Okay so I’m a little confused right now. There seem to be two add-ons: BMesh and BSurfaces. What is the difference? I’m looking for something to work with curves not polygons. Can either one of these do that? Does either one support actual modeling with curves?
Perhaps I should clarify a bit. I have vectored a logo in InkScape, saved as SVG and then imported it to Blender. Now I wish to bevel the curves.
I’ve attempted making ngon faces from the text and then using various inset add-ons but none seem to work properly at corners or they crash Blender.
Filling a space between two curves could also work. Any way to do this?
When you asked about Bmesh in your first question I thought you knew what that was. Anyway Bmesh and Bsurfaces are not the same thing. Bmesh itself you don’t need to worry about. Its new in Blender but not an add on, its just a redesign of Blender and how the modelling works. For example you now can use faces with more than 4 edges etc. (You can search this and read up on it if you are interested).
Bsurfaces is an add on however it isn’t gonna be much use to you for what you need. I suggested poly modelling it as you refered to Bmesh but it would be an easy way if you were comfortable with modelling.
Take a look at this tutorial. I found this by searching on google so there is help out there.
Just note that this relates to Blender 2.4 and the interface is different. You may need to check shortcuts on the blender wiki if there are differences, should be ok though.
I’ve tried just about everything and nothing works as it should. I’ve tried manually modeling the bevel but ngons get severely distorted at some parts. I’ve tried modeling the thing with curves which still required me to convert the entire thing to polygons before I can apply any beveling. The closest I got was a polygon mesh with a bevel modifier using manually set weights but even that gave me distorted results as the bevel was not even close to being even and all ~90 degree corners had overlapping faces. I think I’ll start to look into other programs for making this. Perhaps a sculpting program could do this smoothly.