Indented Text On A Surface In Maya
polycounter lvl 11
Ive been wondering lately how you model indented text on a surface in maya like people do on guns and such, i know maya pretty well but text is just one of the things i havent really messed with much, usually i just have floating text baked into a normal map but how do you actually have the text on a hard surface?
Replies
theres gotta be a way to do that in maya this isnt the first time ive seen it this is just the first time ive wondered how it's done, that's on his high poly it's not baked in it's modeled in, i mean i guess you could create the text and then boolean it in but that would take some major cleaning up on the wireframe so there must be an easier way
The text on the gun is not modeled in.
The text on the scope is just text extruded(at least it looks like it looking at the wires, maybe he chamfered the edges, but it´s still floating text positioned in the scope)
Best way would be to model it manually.
The get the text indented on a surface.. boolean+ clean up should work. It should not be a big problem on a flat area like the link you posted with the "wolf text". N-gons are fine if there are no obvious artefacts.
On curved surface it would be more complicated. Yeah basically want to add more geometry to the curved surface so there is less noticeable artefacts when modelling the indented text. (Would probably be easier to model that area flat and bend it afterwards.)
I would be shocked if you can't do this in Maya.
The trick is adding the lip that is perpendicular to the surface, and sloping + bevel the sides so they are captured by the projection rays when baking.
The advantage of using spline text and floaters is that you can edit it and tweak it at anytime without having to screw with the core topology of the model. It saves time, and is more flexible.
You can also use plug-ins like nDO to convert photoshop text into a normal map and add it to your baked normal map. You do have to be extremely careful with this method because it can screw up the normals and cause seams.
Or it might not calculate the normal map properly for the rotation of the UV shell and might not look right.
This is an example of an indent that has been rotated 180 degrees. If you do this with your text, your inny might become an outy. Or if you align the text before converting it to a normal map it will still come out wrong because the orientation on the final model won't match the orientation of the normal map.
nDO also won't give you exact control over the slope and bevel of the text like working with a profile spline would. It will more than likely take a good bit more trail and error with nDO.
nDO is great for working on flat planes like a sci-fi panel, where everything is facing the same direction, but once you start working on complex wrapped normal maps with rotated UV shells, its going to be better to bake it.
Also the latest version of nDO isn't free...
Should be possible, I dont know Max very well but it sounds simple enough.
You could also use a Lattice(maya)/FFD(c4d) to curve your floating geometry to match the curved surface.
Edit:
Is it intended, that both the original and the flipped ones are incorrect, mark?
http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2009help/index.html?url=Creating_NURBS_surfaces_Sweep_a_profile_curve_along_a_path_curve.htm,topicNumber=d0e231516
http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2009help/files/Creating_NURBS_surfaces_Sweep_a_profile_curve_along_a_path_curve.htm
no fucking about with it, and it is more flexible since you can draw something out by hand or use existing fonts.
I'm not going to bother installing nDO just to cook up an example but anyone who tries it will see what I'm talking about.
The example on the left (original) is an indent that was baked from a piece of geometry. It's as correct as you can get.
The example on the right is the same map only rotated 180 degrees in photoshop, which because the way normal maps are calculated, causes the indent to reverse and pop out.
I can kind of see how you might think the one on the left might be convex instead of concave, but there is only one light in the scene and it is indented.
But if it´s indented it makes sense, thanks for the clarification with the actual model my eyes see it how it was meant to be.
This ballerina thing always creeps me out, i can switch what i see, but even though i know what´s coming i always feel like WTF?!
you're not the only one lol, and ive learned quite a bit from this thread thanks guys, and thank you marine for the maya specific directions im going to have to try it, and mark these examples are phenomenal thank you for putting them together for me