I`m stuck specially in the beveling\broken shapes part.
any idea help hints other ways of doing it are welcome !

J.

As far as i could get, not very good at modeling. hehe
Maybe the key is have more divisions on the front side of the texts, believe you can do that with a “Divide SOP” - not very sure how to use it myself, does anybody out there?

Green nodes are the ones i added to your file.

Good luck!

eitht.

Seems like most Houdini Td`s and artists using other software to generate text extrusion for logos
:-)

there are times .. when you “ need to rotate the problem ” , imho .

( look at the red-colored-node )

Innovative~ i still wished the polybevel would do it's job though. ._.

Btw, i've been working on a personal project which involved embossed texts and was following khermah's attribute and heightmap tutorials helped me a lot - He's got threads linking peeps to his free tutorials but anyways~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITlLPPv658s [youtube.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0pEHzSuYo [youtube.com]

hopefully they'll be equally helpful to you,
Cheers~

eitht.

eitht
Innovative~ i still wished the polybevel would do it's job though. ._.

Btw, i've been working on a personal project which involved embossed texts and was following khermah's attribute and heightmap tutorials helped me a lot - He's got threads linking peeps to his free tutorials but anyways~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITlLPPv658s [youtube.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0pEHzSuYo [youtube.com]

hopefully they'll be equally helpful to you,
Cheers~

eitht.

hi eitht ,

during many years i have modeled many logos , beside other things , in another pure-poly-modeling package .. with only the “ undo ” feature available . so , when you face for the 100th time the same problems , there comes ‘ that 101th time ’ when you try “ the opposite way ” .

saying so , that trick above ( in similar cases ; only the 2d shape available ) works in any modelling app .
but keep in mind also that even a nurbs modeling app has problems dealing with similar cases , like the opening post of this thread . i use MoI in special modelling situations and in my personal experience even there ; beveling results arent often successful ( ! ) . other more specialized apps may be .. i dont know .

the good thing about Hou , imo , is that you can build your own ‘ bevel tools ’ which can be case-dependent also .
im glad i arrived here =)

@ embossed text
saw the videos . nice ones with good infos there too . thanks !
now , the quality of the embossed text depends on its contribution in the final rendered image . using heightfields works in some cases , but is ‘ too expensive ’ if it is not applied locally ( in the small zone surrounding the text ) . to be fair , there are two ways i have applied on my works ( not in Hou yet ) :

> model the text in advance and deform it respecting of laying surface
> isolate / cut the zone separately . give it the ‘ special love and attention it deserves ’ . than put it back into the main model .

in my guess , Hou should be pretty good in applying both methods fluently and non-destructively . maybe ill try something and record a video .. if other occupations permit :evil:


now Back On Topic : .. Yes ! Polybevel needs some additional love .



.cheers

thanks mates but your solution still show cuts in the shape.

I encounter inconsistent weird behavior with importing Ai or and eps files
and getting different results with the same nodes and parameters …

My (modest) opinion is that Sidefx should check again their font,extrude,polyextrude,polybevel,file(Ai file related) nodes.
or at-least give better guidance if its our (brain bug) fault :-)

Hey James, I think I have encountered this problem before. The issue here is that importing the AI file using the file SOP will run the geps.exe command with the -h flag by default, thus autogenerating your holes. The way the holes are generated in this conversion is not ideal.

Instead, create a ROP network withing your logo SOP, and run the geps command without the -h flag to avoid the holes. This will create a bgeo file, which can then be loaded via the file SOP. After that, simply turn on the “hole geometry” option in your extrude SOP to get the holes without the nasty bridge breaks. Also, because you are using a unique bgeo file, you should get more predictable results out of your operator

I recommend setting up a digital asset that takes the AI file as the input (and runs the ROP network when the file name changes or expose the render button), and via expressions, you get the name of the bgeo file to load

here is your file with the fix. Press the render button in the ROP network if you want to see an update to your AI file (so that you can keep doing changes in your AI file and see it update in your model… is quite nice..)

Hope this helps!

Thanks.
good to know this “trick” i will use it for other problems i guess.
Still,Its not a solution,other errors comes up…

I`m start to practice Blender-3D to make up on Houdini unsolved issues.

thank you mates for all your help !
J.

Hey no problem!

Just out of curiosity though, what are exactly the issues you are concerned with in addition to the polygon bridges? Since I had to adress these exact same issues recently, I can definitely help

The main advantage over using Houdini over oter packages is it's non destructive procedural nature. So if you had to do 50 logos, a digital asset would come quite handy in having the data live if you need to do mass changes.

In other programs, you are generally stuck with your result and doing massive changes (I.e changing your bevel amount on all your logos) can be tricky

Use the Extrude SOP when extruding fonts.

The Extrude SOP has support for clamping and fusing in tight folds of incoming fonts. This is the main issue with extruding fonts. This typeface has this in droves. The first letter has tight folds in the lower part that are handled not too bad with the Extrude SOP.

The Extrude SOP supports a backbone curve where you can design your own profile. Simple bevels are trivial to support. Combined with the various fusion options in the Extrude SOP, you should get something to work out.

With this font, for some reason the nested two ‘O’s created an issue with the Extrude SOP so I took the inner two profiles and moved them out, extruded them with the rest then moved them back in. No biggie.

You can process the incoming profiles to clean up some of the tricky areas as well. Making the primitive normals face the same way (how these fonts get approved is a mystery to me…), resample the points to get rid of points virtually on top of each other creating nasty results no matter what, then remove in-line points with the Facet SOP to clean up the flatter areas for better results.
All procedural except for the nested O and even then, I was able to make it procedural with little effort.

See the attached file. This should give you a decent starting point to work up something you like.

o… thanks.
I will take a look …

I made little draft,actually the breaks in the shape look fine, i think :-)

Congrats man! Love to see it animated.

eitht.

Looking cool man!

Jeff, did not know about the profile curves in the extrude SOP! That is awesome! I must go back to all my DAs now

Jeff its so great to learn from your solutions,
but i wont take my words back,
Sidefx should fix\change the way artist can extrude text\Ai\EPS and control it.
I wonder (from artist\creator point of view) why I need to know so much in order to extrude and bevel text…

I partially disagree, it only benefits artists or in fact anybody to know more stuff! :wink:

eitht.

From the point of view of someone who has learned several programs in my career, I think it is not a matter of “the program needs fixing” but a matter of learning how a program handles things in a different fashion. There are a LOT of things that may be perceived as workaround in Maya and XSI, but they feel natural if you have been doing it for a while.

I believe this polygon bridge issue you see with fonts here is not unique to Houdini (at least according to some of the Maya modelers at my studio who deal with this, not sure about blender ). It has to do with strange primitives with holes inside of them and I recall seeing it in other packages. We did write at one point an automated version to do this in Maya, but required a ton of manual cleanup anyway

The nice thing about houdini different from other programs is that once you know how to fix it, you can package the whole thing as a digital asset and make the process transparent to anyone else

you both right, still.
in my opinion it should not be that way I`m consider my self very technical and i think some nodes need to be “perfect” so the artists will not spend time on this kind of issues.

btw in blender it works great.