Used to be able to do this on a program called Imagine3D on my Amiga last millennium.

I'd like to import a PNG or GIF image with transparent regions, like a logo or a picture of text, and have it turned automatically into a polygon/nurb object, which I can then extrude to make it 3D.

So far I have selected one of the orthographic views and imported the PNG (with transparent layer) as an Image Plane (as shown below), but am lost as to what to do thereafter, or even if that's the correct way to go about it.



Thanks.

To be honest I don't think you can use an Image to construct an object automatically. Your best bet would be to trace the outline (Silhouette) of the Logo. Including the Inner regions. With Nurbs Curves (CV Curves) Then Simple: Surface> Extrude

Play with the options a bit until you get what your looking for.

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image planes are just there for reference or for rotoscoping
you can't actually do anything with them other than transform them

i was going to suggest saving it out as a vector graphic and importing it into Maya using the File > Import
it worked well with swift3D, but nothing appears when i import a .ai file into Maya...

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I never used displacement maps but I think there's an option to turn them into polygons... Perhaps you can use it when the image is the displacement map and just erase what you don't need? Just a thought...

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I dont think that a displacement would be a good option for this, it would make an unruley mesh that would be hard to edit to get what this guy's after, though your right it would generate a mesh but as I said it probably would be a bit of a mess.

Personally Steve's suggestion to use curves would be the simplest and give the best results. Or in a similar way to what Chrone said, use some curves generated from illustrator, imported into maya.

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Forgot to mention I'm using an old version of PaintShop Pro for the graphics, and don't have Illustrator.

I made a mistake, in that Imagine3D could only import 2-colour images, where it would treat black as solid and white as transparent. So something like this:



... which you can import and treat as an object (for extruding into 3D, etc.). Can you at least do it that way?

Otherwise, is there any way to convert a bitmap image to a vector one?

Thanks