Introduction to Maya - Modeling Fundamentals Vol 2
This course will look in the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. It's aimed at people that have some modeling experience in Maya but are having trouble with complex objects.
# 1 28-03-2006 , 01:40 PM
Syphon's Avatar
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Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Australia, Perth
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Embossing

Ok so i have this giant chunk of wood and all i want to do is emboss a symbol into it, so i find a TTF i liked and polyed the text, Extruded the edges and tried a boolean but when i do all of it dissappears. Please Help its so simply but so hard what am i not doing :headbang:

# 2 25-04-2006 , 11:34 AM
publicFunction's Avatar
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Have you tried using the image as a bump or displacement map.

That would be a quick and simple way to get this detail in. I did the same for a masonic symbol on a model I used. Less polys and easier to update, than remodelling.


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# 3 07-05-2006 , 03:48 AM
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Yes, a bump map would work, or a displacement map would work, although there's limitations on both. Bump maps aren't affected at all by raytracing (its in some ways more along the lines of a post-render effect) so there wouldn't be shadows inside the emboss. For displacement maps... I personally have yet to find a way to get displacement maps to go in - they seem to bump things out for me.

As for your boolean problems... If all you extruded were edges, that could be your biggest problem. if you tried to boolean a section that was just an open border of edges, the program can't tell which way is in or out. That could be problem number one, although I can't really tell without a slightly more accurate account of what you're doing. If you can close those faces, your problem might be solved.
In any case you may want to hit polygons>cleanup to make sure nothing funny is happening....

Oh, and as of (at least) maya 6.5 and later, maya has a text function (where you can type in text and it spits out a geometry version of it; see create>text). If all you need is embossing of actual text, you should be able to get words and letters (ready for booleaning, I suspect) from there.

# 4 14-05-2006 , 06:45 AM
varley's Avatar
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Join Date: Oct 2005
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when u say it all dissapears....this might be happeing if the poly count on the surface your doing the boolean on doesnt have enought polys....try upping the count in x,y,z as required

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