Hi, booleans and bevels dont really mix. Boolean bevels and fonts are even worse.
There is however another way. That I think will work better for you,
adaptive subdivision with a texture… Only works with cycles in experimental and only shows up at rendertime.
Unlike boolean, its non destructive.
I know I have some examples on this very site, but Im buggered if I can find one atm…
Hope that helps.
I can think of yet an other solution. Instead of doing the bevel physically, you can use the bevel node in the material to fake the effect even on the messiest of objects (provided you use Cycles to render).
I’m currently digging on the “displacement” modifier, and will probably end up using a texture to simulate the engraved text.
My computer is suffering with this method (blender tends to crash when I subdivise too much) but it’s gonna work
Only heavily subdivide it where the text is. That will be nicer for your computer.
I would do the earlier options with boolean - but rebuild the letters to make them lower poly.
Watch this series to learn how to make low poly, but high quality text…
He is a good teacher and has 20+ years experience. Most of his videos would be good learning for you.
The primary issue to learn about here is that text straight from Blender’s text tool has horrible topology for deformation, booleans, and bevels; it usually resulted in a frustrating struggle session when I was new to this. Now I always rebuild my text by hand first – the tutorial Matakani linked to is a good one. This is labour-intensive, however, and unless you need close-up beauty shots, it’s probably easier to use another method, like faking it in the shader like etn249 suggested (I haven’t tried @AlphaChannel’s method because my old computer can’t handle adaptive subdivision).
Thanks for all your inputs. Remeshing by hand is not an option for me, as my purpose here is to automate the full process. However, the remesh tool looks promising and I will need to test this approach again
Meanwhile, I an able to generate displacement map via script
so I will try to automate the normal baking process I saw here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPpdgjXqIAM&t=328s
Thanks again for all the help, I love this project <3
I quicly tryed the remesh modifier, it looks promising and weird at the same time:
at first, promising :
then, applying the bevel it looks weird :
But yet, final result is interesting:
Edit: I’m playing around by remeshing the plate,then the text, then using the “merge vertices by distance tool” with varius distances for the remeshes and merges. Beveling is still bad, I have not found the proper recipee yet
If you are beveling a mesh with small polygons like this, you will have to limit yourself to a much smaller bevel, so the polygons don’t cross each other.
But even a small bevel is useful and increases the realism of a solid object.
Even without any chamfer, the result is better since i remeshed the text before applying the boolean :
