Suggestion for Modelling?

[iamausernam]

I want to carve or engrave some symbols into a mesh.
I suppose I have two questions.

firstly, If I create the symbols as an image, then use displacement mapping to carve it, is there anyway to save this in the mesh for editing?
eg: make the modifications permanent? like you can do with lattices?
(i do doubt this)

secondly, if this is not possible, what would be the way to do it?
I tried making the symbols into a mesh itself, and using boolean operations to carve it out of the second mesh, all I can say is… ouch.

to give you a picture of what I want to do, picture engraving a ring.

it is too hard to edit it manually.

Can you use one mesh to select vertices on another?
like… select all verts on the carve, (somehow copy this) and select the equivalent on the object, then you could just move it up or down to actually do the carve (assuming there are enough verts)

I’m probably not explaining this very well…

maybe I should use noise… it wouldn’t be very accurate without converting the mesh to thousands of vertices.

can you do the opposite of subdivide?

[DStone]

I asked this exact same question a while earlier. You have two choices. The first is to use a texture and map it to the normals of the mesh. Create the text using a black font, add it as a texture to the ring, and map it to the inverse NOR (the NOR button will be Yellow). This doesn’t actually change the mesh, it alters how it’s rendered. There is a Blend file here. Here’s what it looks like: .

The other way is to use the new displacement feature. This actually changes the mesh.

Hope this helps.

[iamausernam]

map it to inverse nor. eeeexcellent.