Hey, I’m new to blender. I’m a UX/Graphic designer professionally but recently wanted to start getting into Game and 3D stuff.
I figured that it might be kind of nice to use Blender to make a 3D logo. I’m having a bugger of a time though.
First Try
I took a font and put it in Photoshop which I am most comfortable with. I arranged the text together in a composition. Roughly what I thought I’d like to do. My plan was to take some text, extrude it, and then bend it around a central point. Kind of like the old japanese Voltron logo:
I then took the PNG, took it to Illustrator and Image Traced it a vector format so that I could then export it as an SVG to Blender.
When I imported it into blender it came out look pretty gross. The image trace left a lot to be desired. It didn’t give it nice super minimalist vector like the original font. Instead it was super choppy. I then converted it from a curve into a mesh and then extruded it and then spent something like 6 hours cleaning up the mesh until I had a nice clean mesh. I then chopped it up sideways using the bisect tool to give it places to curve when I applied Simple Deform Bend, and then used AutoSmooth to get rid of the weird triangles in post render.
It came out look like this:
Eeehhh… not exactly what I wanted. I decided I need to change the font. The back (which I built from primitives) came out fine but the text was too hard to read.
Second Try
Okay so I’m going to try again, and this time I want things to look cleaner, so I don’t have to spend another 7 hours fixing the mesh. Also because in the process of fixing the mesh I kind of messhed up the letters, sort of squished them around too much and stuff.
So I decide to try the Text Object tool. I write out the words in a different font, and then try extruding it using solidify. This looks good, but I can’t curve a text object, so I convert it into a curve. Curve looks awful, all wonky, just doesn’t work. The font I was using apparently had some overlapping points or something. So looks like text tool is a no go? While it is text it has probably the cleanest set of points etc, I would assume exactly like that of the font itself, but in the process of converting over to curves it all goes wrong. Converting it to mesh doesn’t work either, and waiting till after conversion to extrude it also doesn’t work. Converting this text to curves just won’t work. Additionally, I can’t seem to adjust the composition of the individual letters using the text editor, like I could in Photoshop.
Third Try
Okay third time is the charm right? I decided to start over with the SVG. Instead of doing my compositing in PS, I’ll just do it properly as a vector in Illustrator. I write out my text, and I break it apart and unionize it using Pathfinder and then I save it as an SVG.
I import it as an SVG to Blender. And there it is! It looks pretty decent as a curve! I extrude it, and no problems. But if I then convert it to a mesh (which I have to do because the SVG imports each of the letters as a separate curve, and in order to apply the simple deform mod to them as a group, I have to apply a boolean unite mod, but that would require them to be meshes in order to do that ) the topology gets all messed up again. This time it isn’t as bad as when I converted from the first SVG or when I converted it from a text object. But it still has tons and tons of extraneous vertices and lines. I do not want to spend a bunch of time painstakingly cleaning it up. Is there no way I can clean this up? I don’t know much about the modifiers. I heard about remesh. Or like something like that? There’s stuff to recalculate the normals or the mesh or something? Anything that can make this stuff more regular and easier to deal with?
Bottomline
Any advice on how to do this in an easier fashion? (other than hand box modeling every single letter)
Also is it not possible to apply mods to groups of objects, instead of just a single object? Like I want to apply modifier A to object 1 and modifier B to object 2, and then I want to apply modifier C to both object 1 and 2 as a group, like a nested layer in Photoshop, yah know? Is that not possible?
Also is this just the sort of thing that Blender isn’t very good at? Should I be using some other program like C4D or 3Ds Max? I would prefer to stick to Blender since it’s what I bought my tutorials on and it also seems to be a really great all around tool, but these text problems are driving me up the wall.