Low Poly Lettering

MikeF

Is there a simplified way to create low poly lettering using the text tool in maya?

Rite now the only way i can think of is to start with a box and get extruding, but fonts are so much more convenient

Seaseme

You could just make it planar and weld any unnecessary points, then extrude or whatever you want. You could try Poly-Reduce also, although I find that it will give you some pretty mixed results. Best bet would just be trying to merge unnecessary points together I think.

Sage

Just trace the fonts or reduce them.

greuh

It is so painful to use the text tool in Maya lol.
I can't begin to guess why it hasn't been upgraded since so many versions ago.

There's definitely no magic trick though, but you'll sweat for it ahah

I usually get the text I need as a polysurface, get into edge mode and select all the edges of a letter and delete them. Maya won't delete the border edges leaving you with a single poly for the whole letter (n-gon). But be careful not to delete edges so the letter will become a hollow polygon.
Then you'll either have to clean the extra vertices all along the border edges or go the lazy way and do a merge vertices and try various thresholds.

extrude only once you have a clean enough 2d text.

Joshua Stubbles

The way I did it in for Catalunya was floating polygonal geometry that had a generic tiled texture on it. If I used alpha cards the texture would've had to been huge to get the same level of crispness as the textures around it.

Canden Picard

I know this isnt my post but its a related question: When I make text in max, I always get hollow geometry How to you make solid font?

kodde

The Surfaces module of Maya, go to menu Surfaces > Bevel Plus. It's a lot better for making 3D-lettering in Maya compared to the regular Extrude. You can set it to Polygon output and specify either amount of sections or face count. Never really got the face count to match the specified number though.

Joshua Stubbles

Canden - it creates splines by default. So you have to convert the spline text to editable poly.

MikeF

very good tips, thanks everyone. I ended up using kodde's method, which was perfect for getting a good low poly base to work with and optimize.

Thats an awesome trick vassago, i've always wondered how most racing games had such large sections of really high res tex like that