Decal Text Tool?

adam crockett

I'm looking for a text tool that, instead of creating geometry or spline letters, creates flat planes textured with alpha letters from a decal atlas.

I've been googling for a bit and haven't found anything like that. With the frequency of Alien Isolation/Star Citizen decal workflows, I figured someone would have made something like this by now. 

I need to texture a lot of aircraft control consoles, and I want to reference an alphabet in a decal atlas instead of creating an atlas of ALL the words on ALL the consoles. 

Eric Chadwick

This seems like it would be do-able with MCG in 3ds Max.

adam crockett

I thought so too, but I can't even figure out how to do a text entry field. I've literally never messed with MCG before so I'm at a disadvantage. I could probably figure it out, if anyone can suggest some MCG nodes to take a look at. 

kio

so you basically want a font atlas and a 3d placeable text mesh, which generates the planes of the letters on the fly? and is also projected to a  surface ?

adam crockett

kio said:

so you basically want a font atlas and a 3d placeable text mesh, which generates the planes of the letters on the fly? and is also projected to a  surface ?

yes, I mean I already have a texture containing the alphabet in a particular font. I want to type words into a field, like a regular text tool, which then spits out a series of planes, whose UVs are respectively positioned over the correct letter in the atlas. I'm not sure what you mean by "projected to a surface". I'd manually drag, snap, and place the new text decal object myself. 

Noors

Could you provide your atlas or atleast its layout ? i can cook something i guess. Won't be like blender decal machine tho .
One thing coming to my mind, is that fonts have letterspacing parameters (aka kerning) and it wont be respected. So you may have "unatural" space between letters.

kio

if you want to dig deeper into this topic here you have a free bitmap font genereator which also writes out the kernigs:
http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/

adam crockett

Here's an example decal-phabet. I truncated it down to just the letters, the rest of the negative space is actually for dials and  other markings. I tried to upload a tga with an  alpha but it wouldn't let me. Just copy the layer to the alpha channel I guess. 

The Kerning is a legitimate concern. I figured there could be a slider that spaces the decal geometry apart to simulate kerning, if need be.