projection solids in circle on a sphere

 From:  Michael Gibson
7879.10 In reply to 7879.9 
Hi gui, it is possible to construct something like that in MoI, but since you already have what you want in polygon form it still may be more practical for you to use a polygon editing program to work on it rather than using MoI.

If you do want to use MoI, you would use the "Draw solid > Text" to create a line of text, then to bend it you would need to draw a horizontal line running along that text, and then draw a circle, then select the text and run the Transform > Deform > Flow tool to warp the text onto the circle shape. You would do that by selecting the text, then running the Flow command, then picking the line running along the text as the base line for Flow, then select the circle for the target curve.

See here for an example:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5097.2

There's also a plug-in that can help with this kind of deformation called UnwrapCurve, you can get it from here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5136.1

The way UnwrapCurve can help is that you can draw your circle first, and then select it and run UnwrapCurve to get a line that's the same length as the circle's circumference, then you can arrange your text along the line and know where each letter will go on the circle when it gets warped onto it.

MoI is not particularly specialized for text handling though, it doesn't have stuff to adjust letter spacing or things like that, so if that's what you were using in Photoshop again it may be easier for you to do it in a polygon editing program and not in MoI.

- Michael