text bevel issue
it makes the text swell up. especially in Asian characters, it creates artifacts and sometimes makes complex character hard to recognize.
in Maya or c4d text bevels are clean and don’t inflate the text, they also have custom bevel curve. i would suggest blender to use Maya or c4d’s bevel method.
here is a demonstration about the text beveling method.
font and language support
right now making text titles like news or TV program is really unnecessarily complex. I have to import SVG (for non-English characters) and if I want to have a clean bevel I have to hand retopo the text (auto retopo doesn’t do a great job), for Asian characters it’s really complex. then I’ll add materials and other effects. if the title need to be changed, i’ll have to import another SVG and do everything all over again.
Hi, I’m one of the main Blender bevel developers. I’m confused about your diagram about the differences between beveling in Blender and Maya. If you are trying to show that blender expands original faces in orange to the blue position, that is not what it does and I suspect Maya does not do such an expansion either. the main faces adjacent to beveled edges stay in the same planes where they were before, but their outlines shrink at the beveled edges cause a kind of inset to happen in those faces. Blender bevel also now has the option for doing a custom curve for beveling, though there aren’t as many presets as Maya has.
The big difference between the beveling in your two videos is that in the Maya one, the letter faces are not triangulated before you do the bevel, whereas they are triangulated in the Blender one. Try merging the triangles in the faces before you bevel in Blender. This still will not work great on all characters – especially ones with serifs – because Blender’s bevel doesn’t behave well when the shrinking offset starts to self intersect. It has long been a goal of mine to make it work in that case, but it is very hard to do in general, and I am working on another difficult blender project right now.
Hi, Howard,
Thanks for the reply. I think i didnt demonstrate my point well enough. I understand that mesh bevel works great, and have custom curves and is not at all what i showed in the drawing, but text and imported svg behave the way in the picture. When adjusting the bevel depth option in the curve panel. Like i showed in the video. It swells up as if its been displaced.
The main point im trying to say is the text tool needs a improvement. There are two big downside about text in blender.
1, language and font support
like i said above, blender have to import font (also doesnt support all font format) and doesnt support non english characters, like traditional Chinese. I can import svg but it makes the work flow very slow, if the text needs to be changed, i have to import another svg. I cant just type it in like maya or c4d. After that, ill have to do all the adjustment and effect again which is a waste of time imo.
2 text and svg bevel not mesh
Like i showed in the video, adjusting the bevel depth in the text or curve panel makes character swells up. If i have a bold font, a little bevel will make the character even thicker and create artifacts on complex character like traditional Chinese for example. Again i can just convert the text or svg to mesh. But if i want to bevel it, ill have to hand retopo the character (auto reropo doesnt do a good job), u can imagin the amount of work to retopo one Chinese character. Not to mention if one character needs to be changed, ill have to do everything again. Im maya, since it support all language and all font on your pc i can just type in a new character and it will retain all bevel effect and custom curve.
I hope i didnt create any confusion this time. I love the mesh bevel but the curve and text bevel is not on the level of mesh bevel. It’ll be nice if it can be improved. So making TV program, title will be 10 times easier.
Oh, got it. I missed that you were doing this in the text tool, not just beveling mesh versions of characters. I agree that the text tool could use some love.
I also understand your point about not wanting a slower workflow. There may be an annoying workflow that involves converting the unbeveled text to mesh and then cleaning it up before beveling, but that would be a bit painful. Another painful workflow would be, as you say, importing the text as svg. There is actually a better svg importer for this purpose in the “Testing” addons called “Import-Export: Adobe Illustrator / PDF / SVG”. It is better because it can do a bevel on import that uses a bevel algorithm that fixes the “insets start to overlap” problem I mentioned in my earlier post. Unfortunately, it only does flat bevels though, not curved ones.
As you say, it would be much better to give the text tool some love for bevels, and maybe I will get around to that some day. (Right now: I’m back to work on improved Mesh Booleans.)
In desperate need for language and table support.
It would have been very nice to also import table from excel. Need this for product specifications and parameters during product presentations and trainings.
