Chunky 3D Text

wozabee

I'm sure this one must have come up before.
Just been experimenting/practicing with wrapping Sketchup's 3d text with Chris's Shape Bender, and rounding the corners off etc, seeing just how smooth I can get rendered 3d titles (using Twilight).

As I understand, Sketchup uses the existing windows fonts to generate these shapes, but always facets them quite severely, capital "O" being about as curvy as it gets, with only 40 segments.

Other text in Sketchup displays just fine, but I guess it's being generated directly by the original font.

Besides just reconstructing the generated 3D text completely, can anyone think of any "jiggery-pokery" that might up the segment count of Sketchup's 3D fonts and get them nice n' smooth?

Cheers folks,

Woz.

d12dozr

Using Fredo's Bezier Spline plugin...
Generate the text with zero thickness, then select the arcs, right click -> Convert to Catmull Spline

wozabee

THANKS Marcus!

Worked a TREAT!

I just tried one letter as a test (Garamond, with all its lumps n bumps).
With not-too-much-effort looks like one can certainly rebuild those chunky clunky letters into divine Hollywood ones!

...Although, I'm still wondering... whether somewhere way deep down in the bowels of Sketchup there's a way of making it NOT make them so "Facety"?

I assume all True Type fonts contain their own line & bezier Curve information about their outlines for each and every letter, which Sketchup currently currently seems to chop up with a machette to make things nice & simple.

Somewhere there must be an instruction that can be ...ummm... altered, to make this chopping-up finer?

Here's a quick rendered test pic

boofredlay

I modified this S real quick using 2 iterations with Artisan then used the Cleanup script to remove coplanar lines.

wozabee

here's a last test using the "Catmull Spline/Round Corners/Shape bender" method rendered with twilight.

Would reeaally like to get to the bottom of how to stop the fonts being made soooo chunky by Sketchup in the first place though.
I'm sure it would be handy sometimes (not to mention saving a whole lotta time).

Woz

d12dozr

Glad it worked, but that's the only way I know of - if you do find another way, let us know!