Hi Martin,
> to find an easy way to create and then extract the centre
> line from the 45 deg surface of the text characters, along
> with the Z depth information.
The line where the 45 degree angle surfaces intersects will be of varying height though.
If that's what you want though, you can use a similar technique that I posted earlier - draw a 45 degree angle line and sweep it around the curves. This will produce all kinds of crazy surfaces but then you can run the Construct > Curve > Isect command to generate the intersection curve between those surfaces.
You may want to do something like use Edit > Separate on the text path first so that you have all separate curve pieces for the path, that will prevent MoI from doing its own intersections to produce mitered corners. You may instead need to do some extensions yourself in that case though.
Here's an example - here I drew a 45 degree angle line in the Front view and moved it off to the side (this will active "auto place" mode for sweeping), and used Edit>Separate on the text to break it into individual segments:
Select the angled line, then run Construct > Sweep, and pick all the path segments as the sweep rails. That will generate a result like this:
Now select all those surfaces (easy way to do that is to use the Scene browser Types section, click on the text for "surfaces" in that section to select all surfaces), and run Construct > Curve > Isect to generate intersection curves. That will produce this:
Delete all those surfaces now (again use the Types section of the scene browser to select them more easily), and you are left with this:
Now you can go to each of those corner areas and clean them up using Edit > Trim, select 3 pieces like this:
Then run Edit > Trim, and right-click to indicate you are doing a "mutual trim" where all the objects are cutting each other, and pick these fragments to discard:
That will leave you with a corner like this:
If you repeat that on the other corners, you will get a result like this:
Or as seen from the top:
- Michael
