I’m trying to produce a wedding title clip and I need to replicate a wedding ring that has text engraved on the inside of the band. I figured I could do this by extruding the profile of the band, using text and mesh booleans to create the text “engraved” on the inside, and then warping the whole thing into full circle.
I have not been able to make this work in Blender 2.31. Using the boolean Intersect and then pulling away the text object doesn’t seem to leave an indentation as I had expected.
What’s the easiest way of indenting the text into another mesh in order for it to look like it was engraved?
If you use a greyscale image with black text and a white or grey background and UV map it to the mesh, then add the image as an 'Image texture mapped to ‘UV’ (sounds confusing I know) you can make a fake displacement map of it.
Or you can use the ‘Truedisplacement’ python script to do the same thing.
Or, one of the most recent preview builds has displacement as a procedural texture option.
Basically the first will be easiest for you.
Do the UV mapping. But this alone cannot do the job.
Add a material
Add a texture
Choose ‘Image’ from the list.
By default the mapping is ‘Orco’.
But you need it to follow the same map coordinates as the UV so change it from ‘Orco’ to ‘UV’
Turn ‘Col’ off and ‘Nor’ on
Crank up the ‘Normal’ slider till the effect is what you want.
if you need more mesh detail (only moves existing verticies) there is a new option next to the subdivision-surfaces settings for the subdiv type, the default is catmul-clark, a non-smoothing method is called “Simple Subdiv.” (it is like the specials menu subdivide). Usual preview and render settings apply as per before. You can use the val slider (next to the map-to-channels) to adjust it’s effect
isn’t Normal Mapping in Blender the same as Bump Mapping?
At any rate, I hadn’t even considered this when I was trying to figure out how to do the engraving (I mostly use Blender for additional video special effects; I seldom use it for modelling). This worked out quite nicely, thanks.
Now, for the next question (and this probably should be a separate topic): No matter what I try I always get a material that looks more like plastic than like metal. I’ve been through the tutorials (Chrome objects) but nothing I try is very convincing. Any suggestions?
The easiest solution would be to use blender’s new raytracing feature. There is pleanty of information available in the forums, so I won’t go into any more detail. You may want to try using env maps for the reflection, they are faster than raytracing(in most cases) and the result is pretty good. Env maps are also the preferred method if you don’t have a world to reflect, because the reflection can be faked with a static image or even a simple blend texture.
PS Normal mapping, or bump mapping just effects how an area is shaded, displacment mapping actually creates new geometry.
blender.org is for development and unless you understand the programming, code-archiving paradigm you won’t find much there in the way of resources.
www.blender3d.org has lot’s in the way of resources, but only for released versions and since a version with raytracing has not yet been released you won’t find it there either.
Using a texture image of text to fake an engraved effect on an object (the way it has been discussed here)
Using the same technique to fake the same effect on a text mesh
Basically the same thing because the image is used to fake a normals map onto a mesh (without changing the geometry). This is all set up before rendering and will work in the scanline renderer or the raytracer (or any renderer for that matter)
The raytracer will only differ in the fact that if geometry in close proximity to the effect is enabled to recieve reflections (a plane that the ring is resting on) then it (the plane) will reflect the ring with its ‘engraved’ text.
but how can I make engraved text with raytracing???
The answer then is: ‘make’ it with an image texture (or the displacement option) in the texturing part of the pipeline and ‘see’ it with the renderer(raytraced or not)
Here’s a new(bie) twist. I’m trying to remove text, converted to curves, converted to mesh, from another mesh plane. I want holes in a plane the shape of text so I can use halo lighting effects to shine through the holes. I seem to have problems getting this boolean operation to work. I have tried SetSmooth for the text mesh. I have tried a flat plane and flat text. I have tried an extruded plane and extruded text. Does anyone know of the easiest solution? Should I export my mesh letters as (DXF/OBJ/3DS) and perform the boolean in something else, then import it? Do I really need a hole there? I am assuming transparency won’t work for halo lighting.
I have moved some of the mesh “letters” around to achieve a small caps text style (BLENDER AUTHORS , NEW FEATURE PLEASE SOON?!)
Why don’t you just join the text as a curve object to a square (bezier circle, Vector handles). Then, the auto booleans of curve will take care of the cut.
My original plans was to use curves as you described but I ran into a problem. I created the square bezier curve, converted my text to a curve, joined the two together and extruded a small amount for the depth of the engraving. I then converted that to a mesh and created mesh cube scaled to the right dimensions for the rest of the ring. Joining this all together gives a rectangular beam with the text engraved. So far so good.
When I went to warp this into a ring, I got very strange results; despite subdividing the mesh a number of times the mesh wouldn’t warp cleanly. I tried a number of variations on this theme, but just couldn’t make it work.
I’m happy with the results from mapping the texture to the normals. I made a simple scene with the ring sitting on an almost indigo surface, set up the reflectivity just a small amount and raytraced it. My wife took a look and wanted to know if I had scanned in my wedding ring (I did the test by “engraving” what’s on my own ring), so I think this is good enough!
None of the versions I currently have installed (2.28c, 2.31a, or the beta) will let me warp a curve. Instead of warping around the cursor, it warps in the same plane of the curve.
For example, if I add some text, convert the text to curves, and then warp the curve, the text alters position on it’s own plane. In other words the letters shift in 2D and not 3D.
Please try it and let me know if this works for you.
