Emboss Text in Blender | Hard-Surface Tutorial

what's up everyone today I'm going to show you how to engrave text and blender super easy process let's get started so here's the default scene what I'm going to do is press shift a and then add in a text icon will tab into edit mode and then we can make this text whatever we want I'll just make it say blender why not and we'll go back into object mode maybe just move this over a little bit and as you can see we have some text but if we go into edit mode it's still a text object so we need to convert this to a mesh and once we do that you're going to see the topology is extremely bad and triangulated so to fix that and make it a little bit more nicely connected to minimize potential issues we can go to the modifiers panel and add a decimate and I'm also going to turn on the wireframe view just so I can see the wireframe and we're gonna change the decimate over from collapse to planar so that way it works on that flat planar surface and you're gonna see that immediately cleans up some of those issues there and at this point we can just go ahead and apply the decimate modifier you're going to see that's a lot more cleaned up now we probably have way more vertices for the curvature than we actually need so usually what I do is I first select everything press f3 and then search for merge by distance and then what you can do just adjust the merge by distance now don't go too high or it'll start collapsing just increase it ever so slightly by holding the shift key and dragging and right when it collapses just go back a few steps and then that's going to just capture any of the near-miss vertices next thing we're gonna do is press the X key choose limited dissolve and that's just going to clean up some of the vertices that are really packed together and you can adjust that with the angle here I usually increase this until the quality gets really bad like this and then I just go back a few steps just so that way we can retain some of that quality there and at this point we have a lot less vertices to work with which will minimize any problems in the future now we should be good to go at this point to engrave our text we can always make adjustments again in the future if this gives us some sort of problem so I'm going to select the text I'm going to just reposition the origin to the geometry okay so it's in the center and then I'm just gonna rotate this actually I'll just leave it where it is and I'll put it on the top here but if you want to make it on the front face then you're obviously going to have to rotate the text accordingly but in this case I'll just scale it and I'm going to engrave the text on the top of the cube here you can do it on the side you can do it really wherever you want it doesn't matter so I'm just going to pull this guy up to the top now we're going to add a solidify modifier so go to add modifier solidify and we'll just increase the thickness until it is you know a good amount right around here should be okay maybe 0.25 and then just to clean up the jaggedness of this thing we can right click shade smooth and then give it some auto smoothing so now it's a little bit cleaner so let's put this inside long button let's put this inside of the cube maybe to around here and this is the text we're going to engrave into our mesh so I'm gonna select the cube here and then go to add modifier and on this we're going to choose a boolean now if you want the text to be engraved as in has it have to depth like a hole almost we're gonna keep it on difference if we want it to go outwards more of an engraving effect we can change this to Union that's what I'm gonna do so I'm gonna change it to Union and then choose the text as our target object you're gonna see this looks absolutely terrible no biggie we're just going to disable the text from the viewport up here a little bit better but now we need to shade the cube smooth and then turn on our auto smoothing option to kind of make that look a little bit nicer now it's technically engraved at this point but it doesn't look realistic so we're gonna add a little bit of bevel to this so we're gonna go to the modifiers panel and then below the boolean we're just going to add a bevel that should automatically place below the boolean and you're gonna see we get a little bit of bevel not too much first of all the limit method needs to be set to angle so we're not beveling each individual edge or getting a bevel based off of an angle and you're gonna see it's not actually beveling right now so to fix that we're going to turn off our clamp overlap it's gonna go crazy don't worry we're gonna suggest the offset we'll pull that down to zero and then if we hold shift and increase it you can see it looks a little bit nicer so we're already getting that nice engraving effect now it's usually a good idea to turn up the segment count to around three or five I'm going to opt for five and to get rid of the bad shading we just turn on hardened normals and just like that we have text engraved in here the bevels capturing the light very nicely and you can adjust the offset to whatever you'd like now some of you are probably going to ask about the topology this does of course create an gonns if that's the case and you don't want any guns you're gonna have to either bake out a normal map or do some crazy retopo with the text begging out a normal map is probably the best option but if you're just going for a basic render in topology doesn't matter too much keeping it just how it is right now is more than enough you don't really have to make any changes at all now some of you depending on your text you might still have artifacting issues like this and you can fix that by either adjusting the bevel amount so that way that area isn't intersecting you can just adjust it or what you can do is watch my video on fixing artifacts and learn some different strategies to fix those from that video not going to cover it in this one I'll link it in the description so planar surfaces are the easiest to work with and if you can avoid it I'd avoid working on curved surfaces because they're a lot harder but just in honor of the subject I am going to show you how to do it on curved surfaces although the effect is not going to be as clean so I'm just going to re-enable the text and just duplicate it maybe just move it over here and just rotate it 90 degrees and I'm going to engrave this text here into the side of a cylinder so when I press shift a and then add a mesh cylinder 32 vertices is fine just move this over move it back a little bit actually right here it's fine then I'm just going to right click shade smooth and then give it some auto smoothing so that way it's not jagged anymore and now what we're going to do is engrave this text on to the side of the cylinder following the curvature so first things first let's select our text here we're going to remove the solidify modifier we don't need it anymore and reason for that is we need to project the text onto the cylinder somehow and we can use a shrink wrap modifier to do this so we'll just add that on to the text our target is going to be the cylinder and it's going to go crazy it's not going to look good so change the mode to project and then choose Z and choose the negative direction yours might be different values you might have to mess around with these a little bit but in my case it is Z on the negative direction and now you're going to see this projects a lot nicer so at this point it's super easy to get the text engraved we just need to make sure it has some sort of thickness so we're gonna apply a solidify modifier and just adjust this outwards make sure the solidify is after the shrink-wrap otherwise it's not going to work and right around here is probably okay and in some cases your text might get a little bit wobbly and jagged and just not look really good and if that's the case you're more than welcome to change the mode from project over to target normal project and that should clean off any of those issues as well so whichever one looks better is the one you should use for shrink wrap I'll leave it on target normal project this seems nicer and then at this point once we've added our solidification we can adjust it to our liking and then apply the shrink wrap modifier and now we just simply move the sky backwards into the cylinder and we're about ready to engrave the text so let's select the cylinder here add a boolean I'm gonna choose the text as the target object and of course I want the text to go outwards for the engraving so I'm going to change this to Union and you're gonna see it starts kind of intersecting so we need to turn off the original text object we'll just turn that off in the viewport here as a matter of fact I'll just turn off both of them and like I said the curvature is not gonna be very happy with the engraving effect so we can do a few things to clean up the artifacting but first things first of course one that nice bevel effect so let's add a bevel modifier change the limit method to angle so that way only the areas within that angle are going to be beveled not every single edge like so we also need to turn off that clamp overlap and then just adjust the offset maybe to around here and then increase the segment's a few times then just get this bevel where we'd like it now the first thing we can do to clean up some of the shading is turn on hard and normals that'll help it a little bit but still not as good as it could be so we can also add some loop cuts to kind of constrain this should be the stretching issues so if we tap into edit mode we can't really see where we need to place these so just for reference I'm gonna turn the text back on and now if we go into edit mode we can kind of manually place these with ctrl R we'll add one right at the top and then add one right at the bottom and then if we go back and turn off the text you're gonna see that kind of constrains the shading to a more localized area so it's not as bad if the shading is still absolutely terrible another option for you is to turn on the text and then to just move this into a slightly different position that might clean up some things a little bit more doesn't always work but it's always worth a try in my case we have minimal shading issues it's not too bad at all so I think it looks pretty good and of course another option is to adjust the amount for your bevel so that way you don't get any sort of crazy shading issues so right about here should be okay it doesn't look too bad not the best but curved surfaces are really hard to work with when you engrave text so this is about as close as we're gonna get shading wise it's not terrible but it could be better and like I said for this reason I would suggest baking out a normal map I'll link a really good video on how to bake out normal maps in the description by royal skies LLC he makes some fantastic content it has a really short and informative video on baking normal Maps which you might enjoy so that's it that's how you engrave text nothing super complicated like I said if you're just going for a render you don't really have to worry too much about the topology if you do need to worry about it bake-out a normal map it's gonna help you in the long run that's it for the video if it helped you thumbs up would really help me in the YouTube algorithm anyways I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 89,045

Rating: 4.9377527 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, engrave, text, hard, surface, modeling, tutorial, non, destructive, boolean, carve, union, bevel, 3d, cg, guru, josh, gambrell, wooden, rain, tips, tricks, beginner, intermediate, cut, holes, fix, artifacts, shading, issues, slice, operation, clean

Id: l2TGOElE_1c

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020