Hi Nick

> With this I was getting problems during the trim process
> (to get surfaces). I kept getting voids or areas that got
> skipped over inside of the closed curves/letters.

Sometimes text can be finicky in several ways - fonts were really designed just for 2D page output and fairly often they can have some kinds of messy structures in them that cause problems in more elaborate 3D calculations like using them for intersection calculations and things of that nature.

But if you do have a font that is kind of messy (stuff like pieces broken into more segments than necessary or a lot more control points in it than necessary, etc...) it is often possible to clean up some of those situations using the Rebuild command, see here for an example:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3976.11

Also if Trim is giving you some problems you could also try some different techniques for generating the surface fragments - Boolean Intersection will also work and come to think of it, it may actually be easier for a kind of batch operation.

The way that would work is instead of projecting curves, you would instead extrude the letters out into solids that push through the base shape, and make the base shape an open surface (delete any end caps) instead of a solid, that looks something like this:



Then select the base surface, run Construct > Boolean > Intersect , and select the solid letters and push "Done" or right-click to finish that picking part, and then the boolean intersection command will keep just the parts of the base surface that are contained within the volume of the solid letters, leaving you with these pieces:



Then to thicken these, if you use Shell it will produce an offset of the surface, kind of making it follow the surface contour:



Extruding them will punch them out in one straight direction making a different kind of shape like this:



Then you can do boolean difference or union of those pieces with your main piece.


Not sure if that gives you anything you can use, but also next time that you run into some difficulty with a specific model try posting that model here and that will help me to be able to give you some advice for that particular situation.

- Michael

Here's what I am running into, slightly dumbed down (all parts not involved deleted).
I thought about the boolean intersect, I just haven't experimented with it yet. It looks promising. What I am looking for is an embossing effect which seems to be more elusive. I can get extrusions to work pretty well now, but doing an extrude inward and then trying to boolean it out is stumping me.


This one worked... go figure


Here's what I end up with




My files both before and after projection/trim are attached.

Thanks for taking a look,
Nick

Hi Nick - are you using the "Mode: Closest Pt" option for the projection?

That mode unfortunately does not really work that well - it calls a function in the geometry library but it turns out it only works very well if the curve is already pretty close to the surface to start with.

In your case here, it's making some really bad quality curves that are sort of wiggly and have some areas that are kind of like little curly-cues - that kind of thing where a curve crosses over top of itself will tend to really confuse trimming when it tries to determine inside and outside regions of the trimmed up area. When you get things like holes that are filled strangely that's usually what is going on (self-intersections in the curves).

So that particular Closest Pt mode is just too junky to get good use of right now, you have to do a straight direction projection to get good results for this currently.

I'll be writing a new closest point projection function in the future to replace the one in the geometry library that does not work well for this purpose.

- Michael

I guess that's been my problem. Yeah I've been using closest point. I liked the wrap of the letters better than the straight projection. I'll give straight projection a try later.
Thanks,
Nick

I've tried various methods to carve letters into a cylinder (ring), and Michael's method seems to be the most direct and reliable way.

It would be great to have an "Emboss" function that performed the intermediate steps behind the scenes and worked kinda like the projection function.

Create some closed shapes (letters or other shapes), position over the main solid (cylinder, sphere, block, ring, etc), hit "Emboss", enter the depth [ + or -] , press Done :)

Ed

Hi Ed, I'm hoping in the future I might be able to make that kind of "Emboss" function included with the Booleans, something like a "Limit depth" checkbox in Boolean difference that you could enable when doing a Boolean on a solid with closed planar curves as the cutting objects...

- Michael

"...something like a "Limit depth" checkbox in Boolean difference that you could enable when doing a Boolean on a solid with closed planar curves as the cutting objects..."
-M. Gibson

That's what I'm talkin about. :-)
I was actually thinking of how to create an extrude-cut script for limited depth cut-outs, but the above might be even better.