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.