From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

Creating a TextPlus primitive - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

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Creating a TextPlus primitive

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- [Voiceover] You can create text directly in 3ds Max either as straight up raw splines or as a primitive 3D surface. If you just want splines then you can go to the create panel and in the shapes subpanel you've got a Text object. And you can click and create that text and once you've created it, go into the modify panel and play around with some of its parameters. You've got the font and so on, its all here but I'm going to show you a new technique, which is better and more fun, which allows us to create 3D geometry directly, and we don't even need a bevel modifier to do it. I've got that Text object selected. Just delete it with the delete key on the keyboard I'm going to go back to the create panel and the Geometry section, and this time I'm going to create a TextPlus object and this will give me a lot more control. If you're doing motion graphics, this is going to save you a lot of time. I'll activate the tool, and then I need to drag out in the view port to define the region of the type. Click and drag. And as I do that, you see those brackets? That's indicating the region the type will wrap inside. If we have a smaller area, then the type will automatically wrap. Pretty cool! Right, there it is, a right click to exit that tool just position it near the origin and I wanna go into the perspective view and maximize that with alt + w And it looks a little weird right now, we can select it and go into the modify panel and scroll down to the bottom or even better, expand the command panel out. We can just drag on this edge to give us more columns to that command panel. Down here near the bottom we have a Geometry section It's got an Extrude amount of 0. Let's just set that to -4 inches and now I've got a thickness to that object. Let's play around with all the cool features of TextPlus. Going back up to the top here, let's change the font. I'll select all of that type there, and then change the font here. And you'll have different fonts on your system I'm going to choose what I've got here, which is Eras Bold ITC. We can change the font for each letter here that's something you couldn't do with the standard text object that just generates splines. Notice that some of that is in italics we can select that and turn the italics off. Let's change the actual type in here, and we'll call it KinetEco. And now I've got a nice little logo there, and let's play around with some of the controls we've go the size here, and we've got tracking, which is the global spacing between letters. And if you want to revert any changes here for example let's say you've changed up the horizontal scale to make condensed type, but then you decide that you want to revert that you can change all those parameters back to their defaults just by clicking on this button labeled Reset Parameters. And inside there you want to enable all these switches and reset All Characters, and click Reset and now we're back to a neutral state. Additionally, you can manipulate the type on a per-character basis. Just enable this switch that says Manipulate Text and then you can click on the circle in the center of each one of those characters, and then do things like change the kerning or the scale. Let me get in a little bit closer there, as I hover my mouse I get a little tool tip, and this one is the Kerning. If I click there, I can change the spacing. But it's not gonna work on that first letter, we gotta choose one of the inside letters here. Click on that and I can change the kerning between that letter and the one immediately before it. Let's go back to the letter K. You can also scale non-uniformly or uniformly. If I want to scale that K up equally in all directions I can just click on this corner here and increase that. Let's look at that in an ortho view. Alt + w to go back to the front viewport. Scale that up by some amount. Maybe on the E as well. Select the E by clicking on the little circle in the center And then click on the scale icon in the upper right, and we can scale that up. And notice how it's maintaining the tracking and kerning between adjacent letters. Very cool! Alright, so that's how you can manipulate the type and then finally if you want to get a bevel effect, let's do that. I'll turn off Manipulate, scroll down to the bottom, and we can enable apply bevel and this gives us a simpler interface to control the bevel than what we saw with that bevel modifier. We can directly change the bevel depth here, or the width if we enable that. So we can have a bevel that's not just a 45 degree angle by having different values here to the depth and the width. We've got the Push amount and so on, we can play around with all these and see what they do. Just be careful that, as with any kind of 3D spline object, if you're doing an outline effect and then generating geometry from that you might have some issues with some of the polygons crashing into one another. So as I change that outline amount, you can kind of see what that's doing. So be conservative in the values that you put in here, so you're not creating too crazy of geometry. Pretty cool! That is the TextPlus object in 3ds Max 2017.

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