Michael... you are a star! Thanks.

I have inkscape... would that be suitable for the text?

I like the idea of projecting the curves onto the surface too.

Thanks

Steve

Hi Steve,

I may be misunderstanding what you want to do but projection sound like the way to go. I used that to do a ship's nameplate, projected onto the ship's hull. It works nicely.

Actually, re-reading your post, I reckon I did misunderstand what you want to do. Is your concern that you want to have the letters projected on the sidewall radially from the centre of the hub?

Perhaps you can do something like the following images? Work out the start and end positions for your complete text, do a circular array of the line markers, then on the vertical add each letter, rotate the letter from the hub centre into position using the line markers as your guide and repeat for each letter in the text. Finally, you can project the curves onto the sidewall of the tyre.

Alternatively, you could rotate the tyre, project, repeat.

Hi Mark,

That's an excellent method! I will give that a try later. Thanks very much for all of your help.

Steve

Hi Steve,

> I have inkscape... would that be suitable for the text?

Yes, I think that would work as well, the only thing is that I don't think that Inkscape exports to the older style AI format, but you could try exporting to PDF format. PDF though is a complex file format and MoI's PDF importer is not always able to make sense of them.

That other program that I linked to before Expression does export to the more simple AI v8 format, and that format is much more reliable for getting 2D data over into MoI though.

- Michael

Very cool render and sculpt!

Thanks Michael.

In the end I used a combination of sketch (for mac) which exported as eps. Then used Marks advice using lines from centre and rotating each vector text character around the tyre. The only problem was getting the spacing correct as the text is proportional. Oh.. and it took ages! lol.

Thanks again

Steve

Thanks very much Pilou. :)

Well, I'm going to call it wraps on this model. Added wheel nuts, adjusted the rake of the spokes, added valve and cap and built the tyre. The tyre was... erm... an experience to say the least, but I got there in the end.

Thanks for your help folks...

Cheers

Steve

Beautiful! Love the renders. Can't wait to see more !

Very nice model and rendering keep it going!

Very nice. MoI is winning me over as my choice as a vehicle modelling program.

Out of curiosity, what was your rendering process? My current plan is to take my exported models into Blender and use Luxrender, but I'd love to know how you're doing it.

Hi Aaron,

Thanks very much.

I am using Simlab (Rendering Edition). I used to use Hypershot Web edition but their recent upgrade and dropping the web edition means a very expensive upgrade.. Simlab uses the same engine as Hypershot.

I export as an obj with pretty high resolution (but not max). Import into Simlab, assign materials, set up the environment and lighting and render. I prefer Simlab over Octane because the macbook pro has a 330M GPU which is not the fastest. Simlab uses CPU and as I have 4 cores it renders pretty fast.

I believe other Moi users do use your method with great success, so you should be fine with Blender and Luxrender, if that is your preferred tool chain :)

Cheers

Steve

Thank you for the advice - I'm always looking for cool ways to render things.