#Random Thoughts & Questi
2 messages in this thread
These are a few questions I have been mulling around and have been unable
to answer them to my satisfaction myself.. Anyone who can offer a reply I
would be grateful to.
1) Not too long ago there was a message about round edged text, something I
wanted to do but so far without any satisfaction. The reply seemed more
complicated than it should be. The ads for 3ds2 I saw claimed you could do
it, but I have been unable to find any reference in the tutorials or the
reference and I have been through both pretty thouroughly.
As far as round-edged things, text is only one item I would like to do
that to, but mostly get that type of look for other lofted objects. For
example, just for fun, last week I attempted to re create the "Dracula"
logo from a commercial I saw for the movie, where the letters are wet and
bloody-looking on a marble background. Getting the Dracula logo into 3ds
was simple, the problem I ran across was I attempted to use the Deform
tools to try to stretch the letters to look like liquid beaded up, the
outside of the letters stretched out fairly close (though not quite
exactly, but was willing to accept it since the whole project had no real
point to it anyway, other than to see if I could do it or not), but the big
problem was that the inside of the letters stretched out in the same
direction as the outside- exactly the opposite of the way I wanted. Am I
going about this the wrong way? What am I missing?
2) Whilst attempting to loft something in the lofter (Where else?), It
informed me that all layers must have the same # of vertices before I can
loft the object. Is this something that can be eventually be changed, or is
it the only way it will work. Seems to me it would be much more flexible
without this restriction, but then again, I am new to all this and may just
be my ignorance in the process.
Tim,
1) If you want to create rounded (tubular) text like the image of the "A"
that I did for the 3DSr2 ad, it's very simple. Just make a path out of
single lines of the text, and loft a circular shape through that path.
However, if you want to create lofted text with rounded bevels, you have to
do it by drawing a rounded bevel, while making sure that there are enough
interpolated steps in the area of the bevel to approximate the curve. I
haven't seen the Dracula logo yet, so I can't specifically comment on how
that shape should be made.
2) The lofter requires that each shape along it's path have the same number
of points so it can create splined interpolations of those shapes for the
object skin. Although we can't think of any way to do this kind of
interpolation without this requirement, we're going to do some things in
3DSr3 that will make it easier to work around that limitation. (enough
said)
– G