Hi Peter, I think you may be looking for something that is called a "Tapered Extrusion". MoI doesn't have a tool to do that automatically right now.
It's still possible to construct it, but you will have to use a variety of lower level tools.
To start with, create your text as curves instead of as a solid. You're going to need to use surfacing commands to build up your shape instead of having it start as a solid block from the beginning. This is actually a moderately complex type of shape to create, it isn't really a super easy beginning project, but I will try to guide you through it with some steps here.
Take the outside curve and use Construct / Offset to build an offset version of it inside. Repeat this with the inner "hole" curve. That should look something like this:
Now select the new offset curves, and move them in z. One easy way to do this is just by dragging them in the 3D view, look for the "z" straight snap line that will appear when you are nearby that direction. That looks like this:
Now select both of those curves and use Edit/Separate to break them into their component segments. You'll need to create the surfaces between these in smaller chunks. MoI probably won't be able to figure out the right connections between these pieces if you try to build it all in one step.
Now to build some surfaces, you select one pair of curves at a time (sometimes you may use Edit/Join to glue together 2 small segments into one larger one to match what is on the other side), and use Construct / Loft to build a surface between them. Here is what the first one looks like:
Repeat that all the way around in pieces until you have this:
That's basically the sloped sides of a raised shape. You could try putting in a cross section shape and using Construct / Sweep instead of just loft to have more detailed control over the shaping of these side sections. That's pretty involved and detailed work, I'm not going to go into that right now but let me know if you want a small sample of that.
Next, select the top curves and run Construct / Planar - this builds a planar surface which caps the top. Do the same thing for the bottom, and then select all these surfaces and use Edit / Join to join them together into a solid. That should look like this:
You may want to apply a fillet to this, possibly selecting just the top face, to round off some of those sharp edges.
Is that the more sort of graduated "rise from the background" type of shape that you were thinking of?
One other possible construction technique is to draw a central skeletal line down the middle, and raise that up in Z and draw connectors to different points. This will form 3 or 4 sided regions each of which can be surfaced by selecting the curves that make a ring and using Construct / Network. That looks like this:
I hope some of these ideas help!
Like I mentioned, this isn't really a very simple starting project. For something like this you generally will have to try to build it in smaller pieces and assemble the results into your final object.
If you need to do a lot of kind of raised relief work like this, you may be better off using a program that is more specialized just in creating relief-type models, such as ArtCAM.
- Michael
