Topic: Place text on face

[Mark]

How does one place text on a Face? Can it even be done? I tried making a new UCS ( 3point ) but that didn't work out to well. What I'm trying to do is place some text on the skin of a 3D model of an airplane. The model is made up of 3D Faces.

[daron]

Did you use text with thickness? The only other way I know is with solids, not surfaces.

[Guest]

Does '06 have DYNAMIC UCS (I don't think it does)?  That would be, by far, the easiest way!

[Josh Nieman]

Made of faces?

UCS > Face

Try that one.

I don't know what you're using the text for, but if it's for rendering, you're not going to see it at all.  You'll see the filled areas in letters that have a closed loop (Like O,R,D,A,Q,B, etc) but the text does not render.  If that's what it's for, I can give further suggestions for what I'd do.

If it's just for a 2d or hidden view in a viewport then it'll work.  You're right, you have to have your UCS set proper.  The text will always be placed at Z=0 when you first create it, normally.  So if you move your UCS to the face, it'll work.  I'd pursue trying to set your UCS better.

Also, I often use UCS > ZAxis to set my UCS, and then rotate it as needed if the X and Y don't come up in the right direction.  They normally come out in 90degree increments off, if they are off, though, so it makes it easy.  Of course it could be a bit weird if you have oddly aligned tesselated faces.

[Josh Nieman]

Does '06 have DYNAMIC UCS (I don't think it does)?  That would be, by far, the easiest way!

Yea it has ducks, but... eww that's icky.

I hate DUCS.  But I guess it would work.  I find it so wishy washy flip floppy that I would get so frustrated trying to get it to look at the right face in the right direction or whatever.

[Mark]

Well I think I got it....

I don't know what you're using the text for, but if it's for rendering, you're not going to see it at all.  You'll see the filled areas in letters that have a closed loop (Like O,R,D,A,Q,B, etc) but the text does not render.  If that's what it's for, I can give further suggestions for what I'd do.

I'm not sure were I'm going with this at the moment, but I'd like to see how you do that one day when you get a chance.

[Josh Nieman]

Oh ok, a basic planar face, great.

For making the text show during render you can either explode it and make regions out of it (if it's a TTF font, when exploded it'll create several closed polylines or regions or faces... I can't remember which... they all serve the same purpose for this instance.)  If it's a font like RomanS where you have simple lines... that's a little harder to do, you'd have to create a thickness by offsetting those lines and then make a region out of them..

Once you have text as regions, you can then extrude it a certain amount and subtract that from the piece you're putting it on.  Once you have a subtracted mass from the (in this case tail piece) you can then paste a copy of the text solids (oh yea, did I forget to mention, make a copy before you subtract?) in that void, thus filling the removed mass with new mass... you can then place a separate material/color to the text solids and it'll look like painted on text.

THAT... or you can leave it as a region and place it on the face, but without thickness, Autocad will often fail to properly render the text... it'll get all sorts of lines and breaks in the color where the surface behind it is showing through.  This occurs because a surface has no THICKNESS, and thus if you place it on the same plane as something else... they are occupying the same place in space, and Autocad, not knowing which is on top (since neither, really is) doesnt know which to show.  Hence giving the text a thickness.

Or you can simply make the text into polylines and give those polylines a thickness.  I'm not sure if you can attach and render a material/texture to them at that point, because I have not used this method like that, but it's common for simple solid text.

Hopefully I wasn't speaking too confusingly... sometimes I can't find the right words... I'm more of a speak-with-pictures guy.

[JDMather]

Does '06 have DYNAMIC UCS (I don't think it does)?  That would be, by far, the easiest way!

Yea it has ducks, but... eww that's icky.

I hate DUCS.  But I guess it would work.  I find it so wishy washy flip floppy that I would get so frustrated trying to get it to look at the right face in the right direction or whatever.

Nope, wrong answer. 
DUCS was introduced in r2007 along with all the other new 3D stuff.  I love it by the way.  And it is easy to toggle on/off where it gets in the way.

And UCS ZAxis was not added till r2007 as well.

[Josh Nieman]

oh snap.

Sorry 'bout that, then.  Coulda swore it was '06.

[mjfarrell]

I think that to place this text (material) on that face one could create a(n) image with transparent background, and then map this materiel to that face, and never fuss with the UCS or the ducks.

[Josh Nieman]

I think that to place this text (material) on that face one could create a(n) image with transparent background, and then map this materiel to that face, and never fuss with the UCS or the ducks.

Good idea... I guess I was assuming that if you were going to use materials at all, there'd already be a material used for the plane's skin, so you couldn't doubleup the materials.  Of course you could always do the same thing with the opactiy map and have a surface or thin solid just on top of the tail.  I've done that for signage before.

[deegeecees]

UCS > O (bject)

will set the UCS to the orientation of the object you select.

As far as getting text to display on the object when rendered, you may have to create a bitmap and map it to the object.