as the title says, does anyone know an easy way to model standard text that is either raised or lovered into a surface? such as the punched out text used on dog tags.
Meaning it has to be the same mesh with a smooth transition.
thanks
If I were you I would rather use a displacement texture, but you can still use text. With the effect you want, you need to use the boolean modifier. The Boolean modifier can take the text object you make and subtract that mesh from the dog tag. Thus you get an indent in the dog tag.
doh, just watched a tutorial on the boolean modifier and I still didn’t think of it… so thanks for reminding me and I’ll give it a shot.
well that didn’t work, blender crashes as soon as I choose object in the modifier…
any other suggestions?
I’d use gat19g’s suggestion. I just tried it out using a black and white image of the text that I want to emboss. I made the text white on black and I blurred the edges in the image to get a little shoulder on the text. Then in Blender, I made a plane, subdivided it and in the texture panel I applied an Influence>geometry>displace of 0.100 for raised letters and it looked pretty good.
As far as the Boolean modifier goes, when you say blender crashes do you mean it just doesn’t respond or that it literally stops working and you get that “not working” message. If it isn’t responding and you get that “not responding” message, Blender didn’t crash. When you use the boolean modifier blender all of a sudden has to calculate through two meshes using algorithms. It is very cpu intensive. I have had high res meshes which took hours before blender would respond.
However, I still am in favor of a texture displacement for this job.
the “blender is not responding” window pops up, so perhaps it might work if I just give it some time. So insted I tried using displacement, wich worked better than I had hoped for, thanks!
Cant you use the text tool and bevel it and convert it to a mesh and delete top part and fill the spaces in between?
Yes, but that is way to much work. If you want a High res mesh then that’s allot of quads and tris to fill. That would only work with a very low res mesh, like for a game. Besides, it is just better to use the Boolean or displacement, sense you will get more accurate results with less chances of something messing up.
This tut maybe helpful http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/04/08/tip-floating-geometry-with-normal-mapping/