Creating Simple High Poly Text in 3ds Max - 3dmotive

Felix: Hey everyone, and thanks for watching 3d motive dot com. My name is Cordell Felix, and on this video I will show you how to get text tessellated and ready to be Turbo Smooth using a couple of tricks using the Probillion Modifier Advanced options. I will be using 3ds max 2013 for this quick tip and this video assumes that you have a basic knowledge of 3ds max and its interface. This technique is nice for getting text evenly divided and gives you a nice surface to sculpt on as you brush. You can also use this technique to get some extra high poly detail for a model. I use it a lot for getting spline shapes ready for Z brush. This technique could be used on any spline shape. I used this for car logos that I created with splines and then applied this couple steps and then got it ready for Z brush. Let's start by creating some text. You can create text by going to the Create tab and then going to Shapes, and then click Text once. Then you can click on the screen, and there is the text. You can edit the text by going to this text box right here and typing whatever you want. For this tutorial's sake, I'm going to have 3d motive. Once you have the text there, I'm going to right click and turn it into an editable poly, so now it is no more a spline. Once you have that, you're going to want to shell it. And I have the amount for the outer to be 5, and then the segments to be 2. I have a segments at 2 because I want all the quads to be even. That way it doesn't get stretched out. If it's at 1, and you Turbo Smooth, it's going to get stretched out, and it's not going to look very nice and you won't be able to sculpt it very well, if you put this in Z brush. So I'm going to leave the segments at 2. Oh and also the shell modifier you can go under here and just type in S-H, which will bring you straight to shell. And just click Shell, and it will add onto that. I have two of them on here so it's going to look like that, but the end result should go to that. Now, this next part is a little tricky. We're going to be adding in a shape, and then proboling it out, without the new mesh actually intersecting with the text. Now we do this because we want to use one of the advanced options in the Probillion settings, which makes everything, all of the endgones to be quadrilateral. It will be evenly spaced so that when Turbo Smoothed the corners will be nice and round, and everything should be a nice surface to use inside of Z brush. So to start I'm going to just add in whatever shape I want and you can do that by going to the Standard Primitives and I'm just going to create a box for this, nice and simple, and make sure it's not intersecting with the text. So now with the text you need to add the Probillion and you can do that by going to this drop down, and then go to Compound Objects, and click Probillion. Now with the Probillion on there let's start picking, and make sure it's on Move and Subtraction. If you click the box, it should go away, and then even your shells subdivision should go away, or the segment, sorry. But that's ok, because it's still going to be using the information to calculate how the mesh is going to be evenly subdivided It just doesn't show. Now we're going to go to the advanced options. Under the advanced options, there's going to a Make Quadrilaterals, and I'm going to set this to, the quad size to be point 4 percent first, and then make quadrilaterals. And this will basically tessellate the mesh very evenly and will get it ready to be tessellated. You can mess with the size of the quad size percent if you want to, like if I go to 3, it will be kind of big, go to 1, pretty reasonable. I'm just going to use point 4, because that's the setting I usually have. And I'm going to right click, convert double poly for good measure, so that everything is collapsed and it's good to go. Let's check out the model now by going in and looking at the quads. It's got some dirty looking quads, there's I see some triangles in there, and some uneven quads that aren't completely orthtogonal. But that doesn't really matter because most of the outside they are quads, and the triangles are in the inside. And if you do add a Turbo Smooth modifier on there, it should subdivide pretty nicely. So, I'm going to go ahead and click Turbo Smooth. You can go go the modifier tab, type in T-U, and click Turbo Smooth. Let's do 2 iterations. And I'll throw in Isoline display for fun. I'm going to hit F4 now, and get rid of the wire frame, to check out the corners and everything, and make sure it's all good. And it seems to be in Turbo Smooth just as I wanted. The corners are nice and round, and it looks very smooth, and it Turbo Smoothed perfectly. And that's pretty much all you need to do to get tessellated text that you can throw a Turbo Smooth modifier on, and get all the text to be equally subdivided. I wanted to note that you can change your font in the text underneath the parameters. So, when you create the text you can go to this parameter and change the font to whatever you want. And also if you don't like the thickness or how tight the edges are here, whenever you go to the quad percent size, under the Probillion settings, you can set the percent to be a little bigger minus that point 4, if you set it to 1, this edge will be a lot larger. It all depends on what setting you have. That's it for this quick tip. My name is Cordell Felix, and thanks again for watching 3d motive dot come.