How to Use Text In Blender for Beginners (Tutorial)

in this tutorial I'll show you how to use text in blender so if you press shift a to bring up the add menu you can go right down here and click on text so blender actually has a 3D text object so in this video I'll show you how to edit the 3D text object I'll show you how to extrude the text to give it some depth I'll also show you how to add bevels on the edges and give it different fonts and many more text settings now real quick before we continue videos like these are made possible thanks to my supporters so if you enjoy my tutorials and you'd like to help support me and this channel then some great ways to do that are by checking out my gumroot store and my patreon page so on my gumroad store and patreon page you can get access to 3D models and assets tutorial files artwork project files the different procedural materials that I create and much more blender content on my gumroad and patreon so on my gumroad store I have each product available for purchase and on my patreon page I 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thing so you select the text and then you hit the Tab Key but instead of it going into edit mode where you can edit the vertices or the geometry it's going to go into edit mode and then you can type things into the text you can also change object mode in edit mode by clicking right up here with the object selected so that text objects work pretty much like any normal Document program so if you want to select some text you can click and drag and that is going to select the text you can also click around to bring around the blue line and that is where you're going to type and of course you can type in the text and then you can hit the backspace if you want to go back and you can use the space bar now if you're using older versions of blender then when you click and drag to select the text or click around then this may not work so I am using blender 3.6.2 that's the version that I'm using and it's currently the latest stable version but if you're using an older version of blender then this clicking and dragging may not work because this was a somewhat newer feature which was added to blender so if you're using an older version of blender and this doesn't work you can still use the arrow keys to move around you can also hold down the shift key and then use the arrow keys and then you can select bits of text you can of course hit the backspace to get rid of text or you can also hit the delete key and the delete key is going to get rid of the text which is in front of the Blue Line instead of the back so the delete key it's going to delete V1 forward or if I go back here and hit the backspace you can see it's going to delete the letter which is behind the blue line and if you want to move down some text you can hit the enter key and that is going to bring it down to a new line and also if you're in edit mode and you want to select all the text you can press Ctrl a so control a will select all of the text and then if you want to deselect all of the text you can use the arrow keys just to move the blue line around to deselect everything now if you hit the tab key that will go back into object mode and then this object will work just like any normal object in blender so you can hit G to grab to move the text around you can also move it on the axes and you can hit R to rotate and S to scale you can also rotate it on certain axes so the Y the X and the Z and if you hit s to scale you can also scale it on the X Y and Z axis so it works pretty much like any normal object in blender now if I hit the Tab Key to go back into the text there are just a few more shortcuts which you might find useful so if you hit the home key that is going going to go to the very starting of your text and if you hit the end key that will go to the very end now if you hold down the shift key while you hit the home key that's going to go back and select all the text or if you're at the starting of the text you could hold down the shift key and then hit the end key and it'll go forward and select all the text so if you're in the middle here I can do shift home and it'll select all of the starting of the text or if I'm in the middle here I can press shift end and it'll select all of the remaining text but the home key and the end key will only work with the line of text which you're currently on so I can press shift n that will go to the very end and just select that bit of text but if I want to select the other text I could hold down the shift key and then I can hit the down arrow and then you can see it's going to select the rest of the text I can also hold down the shift key and then use the arrow keys to select bits of text by a single letter so I'm holding down the shift key and then using the left and right arrows just to select each letter and if you want to jump between the starting and the ending of the words you can hold down control key and then hit the left and right arrows and you can see it's going to move to the starting of all those words or control a right arrow and it's going to go to the ending of each one of those words so I'm just going to click and drag to select all this text and if I want to copy some text just like normal programs you can press Ctrl C to copy then I can click here and then hit the enter key to go down and I can press Ctrl V to paste the text so Ctrl C to copy and Ctrl V to paste now as well as copying and pasting text you can also just cut text so if you select a bit of text you can press Ctrl X and that is going to cut the text and then I could move the blue line up here above this text and then again you can press Ctrl V to paste the text now if you have a document with some text and you want to put that text into blender you can actually do that so I just have this document file right here I'm going to select all the text here press Ctrl C to copy it and then if I go back to blender I can hit tab to go into edit mode of the text and I can press Ctrl V and so it's going to paste the text that I copied from this text file into blender however it doesn't work the other way around so if I just write out some text I can click and drag to select this and I can press Ctrl C to copy but then if I click right here on the text file and press Ctrl V it's not going to paste that text so just keep that in mind so those are the basic shortcut keys so I'll hit the Tab Key to go back to object mode and then with this text selected you can click right over here on the object data properties on the side panel and I'll open this up to make it much bigger so over here we have many more settings for the text so if you want to rename the data of text you can click right here and rename this so I'll rename it to blender text and if you have two different text objects but you want to switch out the letters I can click on this blender 3D software text and then if I click right here on the drop down I can change it to this one which is the Ryan king art and now you can see it has the same name or this one here I could click on this and I can change it back to the blender text so blender will actually say save what you've written as Text data right here so if you have a different text object but you want to say the same thing you can use the same text data so let's now go over the other text settings so I'll open up the shape here and you have this resolution so if I turn the resolution down you can turn it down to one now you can see it kind of looks like this blocky text and that's because it just has a very low resolution but I can instead turn this up and I can turn it up pretty high you don't want to turn up too high though because then it might become a bit laggy but just turning this maybe to like a 12 is pretty good so if you turn this up it'll make the resolution of the text higher so it'll be more smooth on the edges so let's now close the shape and I'm also going to open up the geometry so on the geometry you have an extrude and an offset so I'm first going to turn up the extrude so I'll just turn this up and now you can see the text is nice and 3D now you can also change the offset here and this offset is basically going to change the thickness so I can drag the offset down or turn it up but you can see if I turn it up too big now you can see there's some problems with the tech text it's kind of glitchy or if I turn it too far down you can see it's kind of going through itself so you don't want to turn this too small or too high but you can play around with this to change the thickness of the text and also when you're using different fonts in blender you might need to change the offset because depending on what font you're using then it might look kind of glitchy like you can see there's some glitchy points here so when you do add in font if the font is looking really weird you can change the offset and that might fix the font now you have the option to add a bevel to the text and a bevel will add a nice smooth round Edge so I'm going to zoom into this text here so the first one is round so I can just turn this depth up and then that's going to add a bevel and then there's a resolution here so I wouldn't recommend turning this up too high because it might get a bit too laggy but if you want to be nice and smooth you could maybe turn this up to like an 8 or you could keep it way down to just like a two and then make sure you don't turn the depth up too high because it'll start to overlap and you can see there's a bit of glitchy areas but I'll just turn the depth to a very small number so that is the first way to add a bevel to your text however there are two other types of bevels so the other one here is the object so I'll change this to object and then we need to add a curve object that we want to be the shape of the bevel so what I'll do is press 7 on the numpad to go to top view I can press shift a and we can go here to curve and I'm just going to add the bza curve so let's now scale this way down and I'll hit the Tab Key to go to edit mode and I can select the handle here and just kind of rotate this select this handle and kind of rotate this over something like that and then I will hit tab to go back to object mode so I can now select the text I'll just bring it a bit closer and then if I click on the object right here I'm actually going to click on the eyedropper and then I can just select this curve object and now you can see that the shape of this curve is going to change the text bevel so with the Curve selected I'll hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode and I can scale it down to make it smaller and then if you kind of look at the edge of the text you can see there's some overlapping but we'll fix that but you can see how that bevel looks now because this is very very small but the text is very big I'm actually going to split the window so I'm going to click right up here when the Crosshair appears and I'll click and drag down to split the window so now this top window I can just see the text and this other window down here I will press 7 on the numpad to go to top view and I will zoom in very closely so we can edit the curve which is controlling the bevel so I can hit G to grab to kind of move this around I can select the handles and kind of rotate them and I can also scale them so I'm going to scale these up so that the bevel is bigger and then if I select both of the handles I can use the object context menu and I can click on subdivide and so I can move this handle around to affect the bevel so maybe I'll just like scale this up like that and now if I zoom in here you can see that the shape of the curve is going to make the shape of the bevel and if you do find that it's very flat or if there's some faces that are overlapping then you might just need to select the handles and move them farther up so that the bevel is a bit bigger so if I wanted like a pointy bevel I could do that so I could rotate these that they are straight and then this one here I can kind of scale down and you can see now we have a straight bevel so that is how you can use the object bevel to make your own custom bevel however there is one more way to make a custom bevel shape and that is by using the profile so if you select the text you can click here on profile and this is going to give you these curves here and also let's just turn the depth up so it's a little bit bigger so right here you can see that it's straight so it's starting up here and it's ending down here so we have a very straight bevel now there are some presets so if you click on this you can try some of these different presets you can see that's going to be a smooth one and you can also try this one here this kind of looks like the edge of a wooden cabinet and you can play around with these different presets I'm going to change it back to the default though so what I can now do is click and drag in this Square here and I can change the profile and make my own custom profile so I'll maybe have this go down and have this go way out and then I can kind of have this go out here and maybe have this go back in but this is a really easy way to make a custom bevel shape so now the text has some really cool details on the edges alright so now that we've gone over bevels let's go to the fonts so I'll click here to close the geometry let's open up the font here and there's going to be a few different font options and so you can actually add in fonts into blender so I'm going to start by using the regular one so I'll click on this file icon here to add a font now there are many different resources and websites where you can download fonts to add into blender the website that I like to use is 1001 fonts.com so I'll have a link in the description if you'd like to check out that website so here are just a few fonts that I've downloaded and here's one that I'm going to add in so I'll double click on this to add it in so now because we've added this into the regular it is going to affect all the text now you can see that there are a few glitches here and I mentioned this earlier but sometimes when you're adding in a font in the blender it won't quite work and there might be a few glitches so if this is happening you can open up the geometry here and then you can change the offset so I'm going to turn the offset down to kind of fix that and also so I don't really need this fancy bevel here so I'll just change it back to round so you might just need to play around with the offset and also the bevel depth to kind of fix any glitches that might be happening now you can also add in more than one font so we have The Bold and the italic and bold and italic so I'm going to click here on the Bold to add in another font so I'm now going to be adding in this one here this is kind of a cool one for the Bold so I'll click on this and click on open font but you can see it hasn't actually changed anything so what we need to do is hit tab to go into edit mode of the font and I will click and drag just to select the blender text so now that we've added in the Bold you can see if we're in edit mode of the text it's going to give us these options here so I will just click on Bold so now this bit of text is going to be using the Bold font that we've added in and if I click and drag to select the software I could also do that so I could click on Bold and now it will use that same font and you could do this as well with the italic one and then just click on italic now if you want to get rid of this font I can click and drag to select software and then I can click on Bold to turn it off and if you turn it off now it's just going to use the regular font now there's also a few transform settings so you can change the scale of the text and you can also change this Shear here if you want to Shear the text now you can also make the text follow a curve if you want to it's all press shift a I'll go here to curve and I can just add a bza curve and then I can scale this up maybe go into edit mode and just kind of rotate this so now if I go back to object mode I can select this text here and I can click on the text on curve and I'll choose the eyedropper and then I can select this curve so I can now just move these kind of down here into the center but if I now go into edit mode of the curve I can rotate the curve and you can see it's going to rotate the text so this is a very cool way to move the text around if you want to have the text moving up and down so we can close the transform and I now want to open up the paragraph because there are quite a few more settings in the paragraph so I can choose right here where I want the text to be so right now it is set to left so you can see there is the object origin it's that little orange dot there however I can change it to the center and now the text is going to be nice and centered or I can also choose this to write if I want to be over here and there's a few other settings you can use I'm going to use Center because I like that best for this text and you can also choose where you want the text to be so you can change it here to the top or you can also change it to the middle or the Bottom now under the paragraph alignment you can also choose the spacing so there is character spacing so this is going to be the spacing of every single letter there's also the word spacing so I can make each word farther apart if I want to and then there is line spacing so if I want the lines to be really close I can or I can make the lines very far apart now let's say you're done writing the text and you want to actually edit the geometry of the text well if you hit the tab key that'll go into edit mode of the text but I can't actually control the geometry I can just write the letters so to actually edit the geometry you'll need to convert the text object to a mesh object so to do this you can select the object and you can click here an object and you can go down here to convert and then you can choose mesh so if I now hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode we can actually edit the text just like we would with a normal mesh object and converting the text to a mesh object is very helpful if you want to add textures because if your text hasn't been converted to mesh then you're not going to be able to UV unwrap the object because you're not actually able to go into edit mode and edit the geometry so I'm just going to go over to the shading workspace by clicking here on shading and I've added a new material to this text object and then I've added in this brick texture so I'll plug the color up to the base color of the principled Shader but now if I zoom into the text you can see that the brick texture isn't applied properly on the text so this is where it would be really useful to convert the text to a mesh so I'll click on object and I'll go down here to convert and then I can click on mesh so now if I go into edit mode I can select all the text and I can hit the U button and then I can unwrap the text so I'll just do like the smart UV project and then click on OK and now if I go back into object mode you can see the brick is being placed better on the text however to place this on the text a little bit better I'll hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode and I can go to top view and then if you hit the U button again this time I'm going to use the uvnrap project from view so now if I go back to object mode you can see the brick on the front of the text so that is the basics of how to use text in blender so I hope you found this tutorial helpful and thank you for watching and if you'd like to help support me and this channel some great ways to do that or by checking out my gumroads store and my patreon page and the YouTube memberships and all of your Port really does make these free tutorials possible but I hope you found this video helpful and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 19,282

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, text, 3d text, how to use text, blender text, blender 3d text, text tutorial, adding text in blender, blender fonts, add font to text, beginner tutorial, blender for beginners

Id: sSpem6jHXak

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023