I have a logo that needs to have depth. I don’t have the font, so I can’t recreate it. I can apply it to a plan, using transparency, but is there a way to get a depth to it? I hope this makes sense. Displacement?
Really high segment plane, logo as black and white used in a volume select driven by texture in face mode, feed this into a delete mesh to cut out the logo, shell the result. Tbh you might get shitty results, I’d use illustrator or even bezier splines in max to trace it and then model from there.
I get the second half of your post. I thought about using illustrator to make the vector, but I haven’t used it in a decade.
Here’s a better breakdown:
- Make a white version of the logo on a black background in photoshop by whatever means you can
- make a plane in 3dsmax with the same width and height as the width / height of your logo image
- Give the plane lots of width and height segments
- add on a volume select modifier to the plane, this gives you loads of ways to select the vertices / edges / polygons of a mesh, one of which is with a map
- Set the volume select to select faces in the top section
- in the “select by” section, choose “texture map” in the “surface” section
- click the texture map button, choose bitmap from the regular map list and then choose your logo bitmap
- all going correctly, you should notice some of the faces of your object being selected and others not (this should correspond to white areas of the logo selecting and black staying clear)
- in the “selection method” section, tick on the “invert” option so you get everything but your logo
- add a delete mesh modifier and it should could away the bits you don’t want, leaving your logo.
- add a shell modifier for thickness
So the accuracy / resolution of your logo cut out is based on the resolution of your plane - the more segments you have, the smaller and finer your selection is. If it’s too blocky then add more width and height segments to your plane. The logo may have really fine detail that would be hard to capture so you may be better off with the vray displace modifier but using water level to trim it off?
You can try converting the image to vector with something like Vector magic, export it to .ai and extrude that.
$295 or a monthly subscription, I don’t think so :).
I subscribed and then canceled. I can’t do much with the EPS or SVG, but I have them.
You can resave them as Illustrator 8 ai and import it in max as a spline.
adding to Joconnells suggestion with vol.select, you could potentially select all borders after deleting, and apply a relax to them to smooth out any jaggies. if you have sharp corners you might need to do some fine tuning after…
I’ll have to try it. I’ll let you’ll know how it goes.
I can only download them as eps or svg. I don’t have illustrator, so I can’t do much with them. If I remember correctly, you can export as DWG from Illustrator, no? I’ll see if I can download a trial if Illustrator.
Worked perfectly!