3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a TextPlus primitive In the perspective view, I'll right-click so I don't lose my selection and also the press Z key. Maybe pick that up and move it above the ground plane in the perspective view. Press the Z key again. And as we tumble around or orbit in the perspective view, it looks kind of weird. We're seeing some flicking polygons known as Z-fighting because it's got an extrude depth of zero and the polygons in the front and back are crashing into each other. We'll address that in a moment, but first, let's just look at the basic text parameters. So in the Modify panel, scroll down. In the Geometry rollout, just temporarily disable Generate Geometry. And now, we just see the type outlines. And if you see brackets in a shaded view, that's a selection bracket. We can turn that off if we want with the J key and that'll just unclutter the view a little bit. Now, let's play around with the text parameters. So we can go into the fonts here and we can change the fonts on a per character basis. So maybe select all of the text in the window and change the font to Arial Black. And some of it's in italics and we change that if we want. We can select that type and disable the italic flag. And of course, we can also change the actual content here.
3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a TextPlus primitive .Let's change up the text to KinetEco and then we can adjust some of the text parameters. Down here, we have global parameters. We have the size, tracking, which is of course the spacing between letters, leading, which is the spacing between baselines. We can also get a faux condensed or extended effect by adjusting the V scale and H scale. If we want to restore this to default parameters, we can just click Reset Parameters. And in this Reset Text window, we can enable various options to reset and then just click Reset. Now, let's turn on the geometry once again. Go back into the Geometry rollout and turn on Generate Geometry. And we've got the extrude depth here. If we click and drag, we can determine the thickness of the extrusion. And if you want, you can do a negative value so that the extrusion will go behind the pivot point. Let's set the extrude value to -5 centimeters. And so that we can see this better, let's get really close in the perspective view. Right-click the perspective view and use Alt-W to maximize the view and the keyboard shortcut F4 to turn on wireframe on shaded or edged faces. Getting close on one of these corners. And now, we can play around with the beveling. Turn on Apply Bevel and then we have some presets here. Says Custom, but let's play around, see what we have. We've got convex and that'll give us a nice rounded bevel on the front. If we look in the back, we actually won't see a bevel in the back just yet. If we need to see a bevel in the back, we can do that by turning on Show Advanced Parameters. you can also adjust the bevel push and that'll give you a little bit more artistic control there. I'm going to choose the preset of just a simple linear chamfer and that looks pretty good on both sides. We can fine tune the shape by adjusting the outline offset here. But be careful, because as you can see, if you take that too far out, you're going to have some issues. So be careful with these kind of parameters so that you don't end up with illegal geometry. I'll set the outline offset back to zero and maybe give it a little bit more bevel depth. So we have nice, thick letters there, but at this point now, some of the letters are actually crashing into one another, so I need to kern these. And this is where the real fun comes in. We can go back up into the parameters here and enable Manipulate Text.
3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a TextPlus primitive .And then we can go and select the text object and you'll see there's some dots in the middle of each letter. And if I select one of those, I get a manipulator around it. And for this initial K, maybe I want to make it just simply larger than the rest of the letters and I can do that interactively. I don't need to bother with setting the size over here. It's just interactive, so just click on this corner and uniformly scale that K up. Let's look at this in the front view, Alt-W. I can do the same for the E. Select in the center there and click and drag to increase the size. And notice that the spacing between letters is preserved, so that's really a helpful feature. If I want to change the spacing or kerning, I can do that interactively as well. For example, I've got a little bit of crashing here between the K and the I. I can select the I and then click in the center again to drag left and right to set the kerning. And I can just do that throughout and set each letter individually.
3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a TextPlus primitive . When we're finished with that, we can just go ahead and turn off Manipulate Text. Go back out to the perspective view with Alt-W and admire our work. If we wanted to deform this, it would be a little bit difficult because we don't really have a lot of detail. We would have to go in and actually make a lot of manual cuts to deform this well. The best that we can do actually is, in the Geometry section here, we have Cap Type and it's set to morph by default. And we can't really see any difference if we change this to Grid, but it's changing the structure of the polygons. The only way that we can see that is if we disable Edges Only in the Object Properties. With the object selected, right-click, go to Object Properties, and disable Edges Only. Click OK. And now, we can see the internal triangles within each polygon. And that topology will determine how an object responds to any deformer if I wanted to, for example, bend this. So if you're going to apply deformers, then change the Cap Type over to Grid and now, we've got a much better structure there. But we also need to make sure that we have enough detail all the way around on all of these sides. And to do that, we'll have to play around with some of the interpolation settings. So if we go back up to the top and open up Interpolation, we can disable Optimize and now, we've got a lot more detail.
