Hey Everybody! This Blender tutorial is an overview of everything
I know about 3D text in Blender. Likes and new subscribers are always appreciated. Let’s go. In Blender, text is its own object type. In object mode, you add text by pressing Shift+A
and choosing the object type “Text.” The text appears with the default word “text”
displayed. Like other objects you can rotate, scale and
move the text using the shortcuts R, S and G. The text is 2 dimensional to start with but
we will change that. To edit the words of the text, we press “tab”
to go into edit mode. But edit mode for text is a little bit different
than with mesh objects. Edit mode is where you can use your keyboard
to type the text. So no other shortcut keys will work in this
edit mode. Backspace will do what backspace normally
does and then you can type your text out. Press tab when you’re done to go back into
object mode. With the text selected, we have a new text
icon in our properties panel. The icon is a picture of the letter “a.” This is where all of the options for the text
are found. At the top, we can give the text object a
name. We can set a resolution for the text. The text is a type of curve object that uses
points and higher values will give you a smoother look. But, the default is usually fine. When fast editing is checked, the text will
not be filled while you’re editing. The fill mode is whether you want the front
or the back of the text filled in. You can also choose none or leave it at the
default of “both.” This will come into play when our text is
three dimensional. Texture Space, I honestly have never had to
use for anything and I’m not entirely sure what it does. Luckily this auto texture space box turned
on by default seems to mean you don’t really have to mess with it. Geometry. Now this is the good stuff. Offset moves the curve in relation to its
normal but again, I’ve never messed with this either. It’s extrude that actually creates the depth
of the text to make it three dimensional. Taper is pretty tricky to understand, but
you can add a separate curve and manipulate the curve to control the taper of the text. It’s confusing. I’ve never used it and have never felt like
I had to. I would just ignore this. But bevel is super useful. You can give your text a nice little bevel
around the edges. Depth is how deep the bevel is and resolution
is how many segments are in the bevel. Higher resolution is more geometry but it
will look smoother. You’ve probably been wondering how to control
the font of the text. Well, the next tab is where you do that. Blender makes this more confusing than it
needs to be in my opinion. There are four different font areas to load
in fonts for regular, bold, italic, etc. All you need to worry about is the regular. Just ignore the rest. Clicking on the “F” drop down box will
show you whatever fonts you have loaded into this .Blend file. Which, by default will only be the Blender
default font, called BFont. To load more fonts that you already have stored
on your computer, click the folder icon. If it doesn’t bring you to where your fonts
are stored, you can navigate to where they are stored on your computer. For Windows users, there’s a default font
location where all the fonts that come with Windows are stored. It’s usually C -> Windows -> Fonts. As a side note, you can go into your preferences
in Blender and under file paths, find the path for your fonts. You can give Blender a default file folder
to look for fonts in the future. If you’re looking to use fonts that you
don’t already have, there are tons of free places to get fonts. But I’m going to plug Envato Elements because
that’s where I get mine. Envato Elements is a single subscription that
is very affordable and gives you access to millions of assets including stock images,
stock video, graphics, textures, video templates and a ton more including 15,000 fonts for
commercial use. I have an entire video on Envato Elements
and I’ll put an affiliate link in the description. Anyway, when you download a font from somewhere,
throw it into your default font folder and it’ll be with all your other fonts. Notice Blender gives you a preview of the
font if you have the view set to thumbnails. So once you’ve navigated to a font you want,
it should display. Remember we are ignoring this bold and italic
stuff. Whatever you put in the “regular” box
will be used. Under transform, we can adjust the font size. Shear is the slant of the font. A positive shear will slant it to the right. A negative will slant it to the left. Object Font is interesting but probably more
advanced. In short, you can use objects in your scene
as font characters. You need to follow specific naming instructions
though. This is.. for another video. Text on Curve allows you to have your text
follow a curve. Let’s do that. But if you’ve made it this far, a like on
this video would be huge. Thank you. We need to add a curve into our scene. Let’s press Shift+A and add an object. And then choose Curve – Bezier. A Bezier curve has been added to the scene. I’m going to press “1” on the keyboard
to see the front orthographic view of the text. This is important. Let’s select the text and go back to the
“text on curve” option. Now, we can choose our Bezier Curve. The Bezier curve is affecting the shape of
the text, but the curve doesn’t line up with the text. This is because I rotated the text when I
started. With text, it won’t allow us to apply the
rotation like it does with mesh objects. So, I’m going to select the curve in object
mode – not in edit mode - and rotate it along the appropriate axis so that it’s
facing the same direction as the text. Now we can see it better. With the curve selected, we can enter edit
mode and adjust the points on the curve. The text will follow. If you haven’t used Bezier curves before,
this can be confusing. But with one of the points on the curve selected,
you can rotate it, scale it and move it to get the curve how you want it. You can also extrude a point with “E”
on your keyboard. The text will follow the curve shape. I definitely recommend doing all of this in
an orthographic view. Under paragraph, we have somewhat standard
paragraph settings. We can adjust the alignment. We can adjust character spacing. If we had more than one word, we could also
adjust the word and line spacing. Text Boxes – I haven’t figured out what
these are for or how they work. Alright, just a few more important things. Some of the settings in this font area can
be animated. For example the extrude setting. In frame one we can hover over the setting
and press “I” to add a keyframe. We can move to a different frame, change the
setting and add another keyframe. Now when we play the animation we can see
it. We can add materials to text objects like
any other object. But, we are only going to be able to add one. You can keep adjusting settings as you go. But at some point, you may wish to convert
this text object into a mesh object. Maybe you want to add different materials
to different parts of the object. There are other reasons you may want to do
this as well. To do this, you select the text and go to
Object – Convert – Mesh. Once you convert it, you really can’t go
back and change anything though. And you will have lost any animation keyframes
you added in the text properties panel. So, you really only want to do this if you
have to. But now our text is a regular mesh object
with vertices, edges and faces. The geometry is usually pretty dense and messy. Either as a text object or as a mesh, you
can add modifiers to it. Like the wave modifier, the array modifier,
the curve modifier and more. And that is just about everything I have for
3D text in Blender. I hope it was helpful. If so, giving the video a like is hugely appreciated
and I would love to have you as a subscriber. I’ve got a few links in the description
for products I think Blender users would like. My name is Brandon. I’m a digital artist. You can follow me on Instagram or check out
my website at BrandonsDrawings.com. Thank you and Stay Creative!
