I want to "press some words into the sand"

Support Modeling
1

I want to carve a message into the sands of a digital beach. :slight_smile:

And I’m looking for the best way to do that. Now, it’s a short message, so I could obviously just trace over the letters, using “proportional editing” as though it were my fingertip, but I was wondering if there was an easy way to deform the surface of the “sand” by “pressing” another object – namely, the letters of the message – into it.

Not going to spend much time on this (because “my fingertip will do”), but I was just wondering if there was a more clever :slight_smile: way to do it.

2

depends how realist you want it !

on way would be to bake your text to a normal map and use it !

happy bl

3

If you don’t have special requirements for later use (animation, export, etc.):

  • Create some terrain for your sand (Landscape extension for example)
  • Add a text with a subsurf modifier and make the bottom part round
  • Add the modifiers
  • Use the text with a Boolean on your terrain

Option 2 is the use of height / normal maps combined, as @RickyBlender mentioned

4

I guess the best way to do it would be by making a mesh of the sand texture of Your beach with quite of a dense grid. I guess by adding armature on vertex points and weight painting them accordingly for each armature bone, then the armature would need to be recorded with actions to move down for every bone. Also their individual sensors should be added that would detect 4 eg. the stick or a finger that would actuate the movement of the armature bone downwards.
To be honest i think for that You would need to use Monsters attractor Monster's manic gadgets - the attractor … for something added to the thing that makes empties to spawn and respawn to mouse cursors current position after every time it is being changed if the mouse is moved for adding the actuator that would move sand inwards on the perimeter.

5

I like your idea, Xortag, but I don’t know what you mean in step #3, “Add the Modifiers.” Also, what Boolean would you use here? I want the letters to push the grid down, basically, not cut a hole in it. It’s sort of like “proportional editing but with a thing shaped like text.”

6

Add was meant to be apply :slight_smile:

Choose difference for the boolean, thats why the letters should be watertight and rounded. You could also sculpt the letters before the boolean a bit, to have a more realistic transition.

Well you could stick with the modifiers, it’s just a personal opinion to get rid of booleans asap.

Edit:

Should get you somewhere too.

7

Dynamic paint and displacement perhaps?

8

You could use another empty for the setup of attractor placed closer to the camera but a bit above the ground parented to attractor itself and use rigid body objects to drop from another layer that also could be set up to be as actuator for letter shapes thrown into scene but for that You would need to set up a static plane underneath of sand if the same mesh is not static.