Hi, after changing back to blender 2.26 (thanks, Fligh %!) everything runs cool and I can go on with my television weather map. But there are still two problems with this project; maybe some of you can give me a hint:
#1
I want to make a camera flight cross the weather map. I need the town’s names always facing the camera and – that’s the hard part – keeping their sizes relatively to the screen. Just like when you switch on “name” to your objects and move thru your scenery and the names always face the viewer and keep their sizes. Any Idea how to manage this in blender?
#2
For the weather map I need a font with special symbols, because it is a German map (you know these letters with two dots above their heads). Do you know where I can find such fonts usable in blender?
You can make your own fonts. There are a number of font creation programs available. The best one I found is Font Creator 4.0 by high logic, but unfortuanately it is a 30 day trial. Probably sufficient to create more than a few fonts though. I never quite got around to putting mine to serious use before it expired, and while theoretically I could still use it, i did click on the ‘I agree’ button, so I will be uninstalling it. There are also a number of free font libraries out there, and numerous programs that are truly free, that will create simple bit map fonts.
BTW, you can size fonts in Blender no problem. Also, if you want to fool with them, you can hit ‘AltC’ for the convert menu, convert it into a curve, and then ‘AltC’ again, to convert it to a mesh.
PfaEdit is a free spline font editor (for scalable fonts) that exports TTF, OTF, or Postscript. It also imports images and can trace them if you install Autotrace. It requires Unix or Cygwin (I must say, compared to other programs, it works nicely under Cygwin). http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net
#1 Tracking the text to the camera.
Select text, select camera, Ctrl+T (make track).
In AnimButtons (F7) you can set the track axis.
The sizing problem, probaly best is solved with a python script which sizes the text relative to the camera distance (Shouldn’t be that difficult, but I can’t code.)
#2 You can take any ttf font with German characters (ö ü ä ß) from your office application or elsewhere (assume you are German, so you should already have these fonts). Just use the select font button once you added a text object. If this doesn’t work in 2.26, use 2.28a to write the text and append these objects to your 2.26 scene. Eventually, you have to convert the text to curve or mesh (Alt+C; one or two times, respectively).
#1
You can put the camera in ‘ortho’ mode, which remoes all perspective effects. I don’t know if you want the map underneath to have perspective or not, but that may be something to experiment with.
In editbuttons with the camera selected, press the ‘ortho’ button.
There are also a number of free font libraries out there, and numerous programs that are truly free, that will create simple bit map fonts.