So I´m new to Blender but eager to learn!
I´m trying to make a 3D-object from a logo. Using curves I traced the logo from a referance image and converted it to a mesh. I now have an outline of the logo with edges and vertercies but I am not able to fill the outlines or extrude for that matter. I´ve wathed a bunch of YT videos and it seams pretty strait forward but it´s just not happening for me. Could someone please help me with this? I´m clearly missing something.
Adding a link to a screenshot of what I have so far.
Do you ever plan to animate this logo, deform it in any way? How to go about filling in faces in between the vertices/edges depends on what you later want to do; it’s more labour-intensive if you want to deform an object because you need to create detailed and regular geometry to do that well, ngons don’t really work in that context. You’ll need to create opposing pairs of vertices that line up nicely and then create a face between each set of 4 of them, and so on. There are ways to speed up face creation, and ways to create well-spaced vertices, but I’m not gonna get into that if you don’t need it.
If you only ever want to display the logo with a nice material and lighting, then you can be quick and dirty about it; you just have to work your way around holes (if there were no holes, then you could just select the entire outline and press F for one giant face, but no such luck in your case). Select big chunks of vertices (or edges) that lie opposite each other and press F to create a big ngon face between them. Do that until you’ve filled in everything you want to have a surface. Afterwards you can select those faces and extrude them all together.
(I gotta say I am not in favour of the quick-and-dirty method, I always rather create good topology, but I’m kind of a perfectionist and don’t mind doing more work than I absolutely have to. IME the better the topology the easier it is to make changes later, but if you never plan on changes, eh, you know?)
If you go back to a curve - raise the Resolution Preview (in the images others posted - just under 2D / 3D). Not too far. 18 or so should do it. That will take the ‘steps’ out of your image so its all smooth.
Thank you for an informative reply. I intend to add details to the face an animate it. I tryed inporting an SVG and it sort of worked, but I got a much cleaner outline fewer vertecies by doing it manually.
I will look into what you said.
Thank you.
You can re-convert mesh to curve. It converts to a poly curve which you can then change to Bézier in Edit Mode (Curve → Set Spline Type → Bezier).
I tend to leave things as curves for as long as possible – change with curves is much easier than with meshes IMO. As two people above showed, dealing with holes is easier with curves too.
And you can determine a lot about how detailed your mesh is after conversion by decimating or subdividing the curve and setting the resolution.
Creating good topology is bound to be overwhelming for a beginner. Grant Abbitt has a good basic tutorial (not curves). I don’t have time right now to look for one with curves; maybe tonight, or somebody else will help.
All it takes is about 10 minutes of actively engaging with the site (upvoting artwork, commenting, even just reading threads), and you should have a high enough “trust level” as Discourse calls it to upload more than one image and entire files (5MB limit).
OK. So I was able to extrude the curve, but still couldn´t fill it. I went over looked closer and found a gap betwean vertcies and added a path to close it.
But then it got weird…
OK…
First - make back ups. As you work if you are swapping curves to mesh, make a duplicate. Move the duplicate into a backup collection that is not ticked in the outliner so it is not visible or accidentally selected. Just so you know - in the Save window (Or Save As) you can click the Plus Sign on the right side of the name entry box to add a 1 (or 2, 3, 4 …) to the end of the file name. Useful if you are about to make big changes that Undo will not resolve next time you open the file.
In edit mode select all and press M > By Distance. Down the bottom it will say 850+ vertices removed.
Back in edit mode, now its visible again. The double vertices were cancelling each other out (z depth, z buffering) so blender did not know what to show.
There is a HUGE gotcha to learn here. E to extrude carries out 2 actions. Not 1. It duplicates then it moves. So to correctly undo an Extrude you must Undo twice.
A quick visual lesson…
This only connects one way - up left. Blender is showing you errors. So there are two vertices there. ‘Doubles’. Clues like this are built in to the UI. More so in the mesh than curves.
Back to Mr Nevermore…
Its important to keep the scale at 1,1,1. This affects scaling, motion, gradient textures, animation, export for printing etc…
Select and Ctrl-A > Scale. (Object Menu > Apply).
If you scale in edit mode you avoid this issue.
Duplicate (Shift-D). M to move > New Collection named as you like. Untick that collection to deactivate it.
Select the original again.
Right Click > Convert > To Curve.
2D, Fill Mode > Both, Active Spline > Tick Cyclic U.
Tada…
Right Click > Shade Auto Smooth to get the sides nice looking.
Add some extrude in the curve settings.
The Bevel in the curve setting is awful - it grows the mesh. But add 0.0001 with 4+ Resolution.
If you are converting to a mesh…
Remove the Bevel, and set the Resolution Preview to 1. Otherwise you get a super dense mesh.
The first thing to do after converting is go to edit mode, Face Menu > Beautify Faces. This will fix a lot of the long skinny triangle faces. And do a M > Merge by Distance
If you want a good mesh clean up tutorial try the text editing series that Ian McGlasham is doing. Starting here
If anyone can fix this for me and then write down whar you did I´m willing to pay for it. Siriously.
I´m not a rich guy, just awfully frustrated
EDIT:
The link is the same but my previous posts are flagged for some reason so I don´t know if you can see them. Not able to post another link so never mind
Thanks for all your effort and help!
I really appreciate it!
Common problems arise between Vertex and Vertex.
If it’s hard to fix or if it doesn’t work out,
drawing a new one on a blender will get much better results.
(Simple Vertex is also easy to manage.)
Or try Addon
Release the agglomerated vertex by aligning the vertex at regular intervals.
But I don’t know if it will be a satisfactory result.
Can’t read flagged posts, so can’t get at the link at this point.
I have no idea why they were all flagged; I saw them and there was nothing objectionable. Maybe it’s a random vandal – @moderators, could you please check this out?
I was finally able to fix it. I had to merge several times in order to get rid of the double vertecies. By zooming in I was able to see that I still had doubles after merging. Thanks guys for all your help. I learned a lot from this!
points…
