Looking for a less fragile way to emboss text and DXF/SVG logos of roughly uniform depth onto organic meshes. These are for products or custom medical cases we 3D print. The depth doesn’t need to be perfectly uniform, but ideally it would be close.
I “cheat” by converting DXF/SVG files to an STL and converting text the curves, extruding either from an oriented plane (embosser cluster in gh file), convert the mesh to be embossed to a volume, create a negative offset of the volume, then cut the logo/text with the offset body. Being normal to a plane and not normal to the mesh, it is not uniform in depth and looks bad on regions of high curvature. The region of the mesh I’m embossing here is far smoother than other meshes I work with so I’m trying to build something for most meshes I will run into.
Over the back of the model, wrapped around the ear, or over a larger section at the rear of the model is indicative of some of the mesh topologies I will need to emboss on.
The ears are a really good example of where this method fails. Any region of the mesh that is too thin, can’t rely on the negative/inward volume offset to trim the text/logo being embossed. Here for example, extending the width of the embossed logo onto the ears results in the mesh of the head being lost entirely.
If you want to recreate this failure, set the volume offset inside embosser cluster to -1.
I’ve looked at this extrude text normal to surface thread and 206358 but I’m of the impression this only works consistently with surfaces that aren’t highly multi-faceted. I know it is possible to make surfaces that aren’t highly facetted when converting from a mesh as described in 107465. I fail to see these working when needing to wrap around a mesh or where a planar projection will fail to capture adequate detail, in my case like a very wrinkly dog head where the overhangs of overfeeding (see also thiqq) would prevent the projection of points off a plane to approximate a surface adequately.
Any suggestions/other threads I should read? Worth noting the meshes come from CT scans so I don’t have the option of exporting/importing it as a different file format and in many cases I cannot smooth the meshes beyond a basic shrink wrap.
text emboss example.gh (57.8 KB)
geos.3dm (15.8 MB)
