How do you make geometry text for normal map baking?

Geekson

Hey guys! I faced with some annoying issue in 3ds max while making floaters for my highpoly. I use Text tool, then bevel it and apply chamfer modificator. If I do quiet large chamfer it starts to look ugly, when I do little it looks acceptable, BUT: after exporting it to Substance Painter to bake normal, or any other 3d package, it still looks ugly. I believe it's because of the awful topology of the cap of text, and I tried to fix this with Quadrify Mesh modificator, but the result wasn't good. 
And i saw a lot of nice highpolies with geometric text. So, how do you do this?

Synaesthesia

I just use NDO to add text to my bakes. It's not geometry, of course, but it's definitely a lot faster than trying to wrangle 3D text into behaving.

Geekson

Well, if I could edit several maps at the same time, i would give it a try, thanks) But i'm still obsessed with the idea of geometry text

Scruples

Manual triangulation of the N-gons or if you added the text in Substance you could edit several maps at the same time.

cptSwing

Possibly helpful (nb, I did not make this):

musashidan

Synaesthesia said:

I just use NDO to add text to my bakes. It's not geometry, of course, but it's definitely a lot faster than trying to wrangle 3D text into behaving.

+1 for Ndo. 

OP, why are you obsessed with geo floaters for text? The end result is essentially the same. And what do you mean by 'if I could edit several maps at the same time' ?

Don't know if you have access to Zbrush but this could be done with polygrouping/creasing/dynamesh combos. Also, Fusion 360 would be great for this.

When you export this mesh the giant N-gons will be auto-triangulated by the engine and give unpredictable results. I assume you want a rounded bevel. Using Chamfer and/or Quadify mesh is not going to yield good results directly on the Textplus.

Because of the limitations(dev oversight)  Textplus only bevels the giant n-gons and not the edges resulting from the extrusion, which is not very helpful and really should be a feature.

What you can do is a quick bit of manual work:

Set your bevel to convex and adjust the depth and width.

Set the push amount to round out the bevel

Convert to poly or add an edit poly mod

and now the manual work.........

Double click all the corner edgeloops that didn't get beveled from the extrusion(this will select exactly the edges you want as the selection stops at the n-gons)

Apply a chamfer from the edit poly, or use your stack and add a Chamfer mod with 'Selected edges' as the target.
Also, instead of Quadify Mesh mod, use the Turn to Poly mod and set it to 4 edges. This will maintain the existing topology but quadify the n-gons.
Although the above only takes a few minutes and is non-destructive because of the modifier stack, the problem is that you will have shading errors because of the giant n-gons. Some more manual work will probably be required by adding some strategic edges to clean the topo/shading.

If you have access to Ndo or Zbrush you can get better results, and faster.

defragger

cut out a section where the text goes.
Write the text as 3d object as you already did but dont chamfer. Export it to ZBrush and dynamesh at a high resolution. Polish it in ZBrush so everything is smooth and rounded. Bring it back to Max and use proOptimizer to bring the poly count down a little bit. The whole patch becomes a floater. Not only the text.

Or simply dont do it in 3d and use nDo on your final baked normalmap! By far the easiest way. You do everything like usual and only use ndo for some final touches on normalmaps where needed. There are some small issues to that but it doesnt interfere with my workflow.

Geekson

Thanks a lot for replies guys. 

Scruples said:

Manual triangulation of the N-gons or if you added the text in Substance you could edit several maps at the same time.

I have quite a lot of text objects to do fix manually =\ Substance is a good variant, but I should make a mask for every text object, then export it to SP, etc. And, as I know SP, there is no option to paint on curvature map. Is it correct?

cptSwing said:

Possibly helpful (nb, I did not make this):

Thanks, I didn't know about Sweep, it might be useful.


to musashidan:
I actually use Zbrush sometimes. The second image from my first post was directly from Zbrush.  


In this case, text and cap will have one material. In other cases, I need to separate text from base mesh to make the fast mask in SP. And this is why I wanted to make floaters. 

defragger said:

cut out a section where the text goes.
Write the text as 3d object as you already did but dont chamfer. Export it to ZBrush and dynamesh at a high resolution. Polish it in ZBrush so everything is smooth and rounded. Bring it back to Max and use proOptimizer to bring the poly count down a little bit. The whole patch becomes a floater. Not only the text.

Or simply dont do it in 3d and use nDo on your final baked normalmap! By far the easiest way. You do everything like usual and only use ndo for some final touches on normalmaps where needed. There are some small issues to that but it doesnt interfere with my workflow.

Almost good) 

Well, too many votes for nDo, I definitely should give it a try. I hope it has trial version)
Thanks for help guys, probably the geometry text isn't the brightest idea) 

EarthQuake

+1 for nDo, it's way, way faster than modeling it, and much easier to change after the fact. If you model the text in 3d, and then realize you've made it too small for your texture resolution or whatever, you have to go back to the highpoly, edit, rebake, possibly even retexture for that small change. Not worth it.

Scruples

I have quite a lot of text objects to do fix manually =\ Substance is a good variant, but I should make a mask for every text object, then export it to SP, etc. And, as I know SP, there is no option to paint on curvature map. Is it correct?

You can convert a mask to normal map and build the curvature/AO from the normal map and automatically add them to the original textures. Add a uniform color to control the diffuse tint and more! (jazz hands).

The only thing it's really missing is a way to generate the text in-program, and they've been promising that for 2 years now.