CompuServe Messages

Richard, The background on the Time Logo is tricky. Its a rippled mesh with a texture map applied, and auto reflection. The light from a spot has to hit at just the right angle to give it that translucent quality, otherwise you just see the applied texture map. Its really bending the software in that what your seeing is reflected light, which means the angle has to be just right. A few degrees off one way or the other and the effect is lost. Regarding beveling, you want to use Bevel in the lofter and insert vertices in the path angle. AE was lofted with 5 sections, one section ramped up and one down from zero at roughly + 5, but that depends on the size of your text. The important thing is that these ramp values you want to keep at around a 30 degree angle. So that when you apply _auto-smoothing_ the angle is not so steep and gives you that nice curved look. In other words its a function of smoothing which as it happens defaults to 30. The other thing has to do with the size of the text. Thicker text (ie more surface area) works better than thin, and looks better proportionally. I use optimize afterward to remove the extra cross sections which are created in the process. -JE