I've been looking around here, there, everywhere for new materials and all and I keep finding theses material or textures that come in groups of three. The same texture (see attached), three different tones of that texture. I'm sure there's a reason for this but I can't find a tutorial or anything that explains how to use these.

Can someone point me in the direction of a 'how to' or tutorial about this stuff?

Thanks

Thanks so much!

I'm trying to find a tutorial or some sort of explanation as to how to keep file size to a minimum and performance at maximum. Can anyone help with a URL or something? Thanks.

C

@unknownuser said:

It could use some rounded edges maybe. Would be more spectacular IMO. (If you decide to do it, scale the whole thing up first, run the plugin then scale back - SU has glitches with creating very small faces)

Thanks for the suggestion.

Seems like the rounding corners doesn't like rounded edges. I've been getting some uber funky shapes.

Not bad for a first attempt at rendering I think.

Thanks again for all the help!

If anyone is interested this is what I have so far.

Now I have to bevel the edges a bit to make it a little less blocky

aia so far.tiff

aia 3d.tiff

Does anyone know if there is a ruby or something to get a lasso for selecting? If there is could you post a link?

thanks

Pilou, linea, Chris,

Wow! thanks for all the input. I can't thank you guys enough.

This is where I'm at:

After my last post I saved to from Inkscape to a dxf file and opened it up in Illustrator. After some time I got the line work to be more uniformed. (FYI, I totally suck at Illustrator and don't really know what all it can do or what even makes it different from PS)

I saved it from Illustrator as a .dwg file and was then able to import the line work into SU.

I then drew a face under the entire drawing, and 'intersected' the face and line work and came up with extrude-able objects. (see attached)

One thing I'm concerned about is the the amount of line segments. I'm thinking that I should probably find a better quality image to begin with.

Another thing I concerned about is that I can't seem to join the line segments. They're all individual pieces and I'm wondering if that increases the size of the drawing? I know this is just a small little logo and probably doesn't make much of a difference here, but could this be a larger issue if you do this same process with a larger (or multiple) images? (see attached)

Lastly, Thanks for the Wintopo suggestion linea, unfortunately in this case, "I'm a Mac". Is there Mactopo?

aia01.tiff

aia02.tiff

Export a .psd as a .dwg?! I have no idea how to do that or what kind of software I would need to do that. I was able to export it as a .dxf but SU crashed every time I tried to import it.

Thanks for the feedback.

I've turned it into a .psd (actually I turned it into other vector files too). Now what? I've tried to import it into a drawing and it still acts like it's just a .jpg. It maps onto a surface and I can't select the red elements by themselves.

I figure I'm importing incorrectly but can't figure out another way. Can someone tell me the right way to be handling this or point me in the direction of a tutorial?

thanks

C

Hello all,

This is my first post here. I've been messing around with SU for years but just recently I've been taking it more seriously.

I'm trying to figure out how to extrude a 3D object from a 2D picture [See attached] with the least amount of effort. This is to say, I'm sure I could outline each and every piece, but that would be a big pain.

Can anyone suggest to me how to best do this or what tool(s) are best for doing this?

Is there anything out there (Ruby script?) that will select just the red portion or make an outline of the red part?

Mucho thanks

C