#Etched Letters in Stone
4 messages in this thread
Can anyone tell me how to create the effect of letters etched in stone? Thanks,
Mitch
There are three ways I can think of right now.
The easiest would be to creat a bump map with the letters being darkest, and
the "stone" part being lighter. That will cause a receeding effect in the
final object. This is good for straight on shots, but if the camera comes in
at an angle it can look cheap. That's where method no. 2 comes in:
Create the outline of the stone in the 2d shaper, and place the font you will
loft inside of this. Then bring the whole thing into the lofte and loft as
desired. Next, go to the 3d editor and creat a box, place it on the backside
of the 'stone', and voila!, you have letters etched in stone. This method
comes courtesy of Greg Pyros, although I may have bastardized the process a
little.
For greatest detail and control, however, the best bet is to loft the stone
shape separately from the letters, so you can create individual deformations,
then boolean subtract the letters from the 'stone'. Just make sure your
objects have enough vertices for the boolean to work.
Happy etching!
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
Thank you very much for your answers, they are very helpful and I appreciate
your time to explain them.
I spent some time working on the bump map approach, creating the dark text on a
stone texture in a paint program, them bump mapping the results onto a box slab
in the editor. This never revealed the results I wanted lo I tried hard.
The second technique of putting the font inside a slab then lofting it
all makes neat sense, but I found later that it was more interesting
looking (and easier <g>) to have the text floating in front of the
stone. With the text a plastic texture and a spot light with shadows
on in front of it, a soft shadow is projected onto the stone (now
wood actualy) that is breathtakingly neato rama.
The last approach you mentioned, making indivdual letter objects in the shaper
and combining them with the background slab in the editor has turned out to be
the best results so far.
But Id still like to learn how to get small etched text like in metal. For lots
of text that would be a lot easier to create.
Thanks again for your assistance.
Mitch
bunp maps work really well. but the best way is to create your text
in 2s shaper. loft it in lofter. in 3d editor if your stone is flat,
just positon the text on the stone slightly sbmerging it in the stone
and adjusting the scale for proper fit. do a subtract boolean
operation, text from stone. if the stone is rounded or has a curved
surface. use object bend to bend the text to the same curv of the
stone surface and adjust its scale for proper fit. move the text
slightly submerged into the stone. do a boolean of the text from
stone. in boolean operations you need to have your surfaces full of
faces. for this use object tesselate seeting (0) on your objects.