Director 3D > 3D Text

Imagine you have a 2D company logo and need to generate a 3D version of it. Rather than modelling it in 3D Studio Maxor another external 3D application you can use the extrude3D() command to generate the logo from a font!

The command is even more powerful than this, however. Imagine what you can do with a font such as WingDings.

This is essentially a font created from small images (clip art style). These shapes all extrude well as 3D models and used in the right way might (efficiently) enhance a 3D world. In addition, they’re small, you don’t need to model them, extrusions are created on the fly and there is no download time. And remember - you're not limited to existing fonts - anybody can create one!

Consider the following example, created by the use of WingDings:

You can download the source file here. Here we use the text creation API covered in 3D text creation:

-- creates a text castmember on the fly -- extrudes the text into a modelresource -- deletes the text castmember -- creates a model from the extruder modelresource -- creates a shader for the model global scene on create3Dtext modelname, whattext, whatfont, whatsize, howdeep, whatcolor if scene.model(modelname) = void then newtext = new(#text) -- create new text castmember newtext.font = whatfont -- set the font for the new text castmember newtext.fontsize = whatsize -- set the fontsize of the new text castmember newtext.text = whattext -- assign text property of new text castmember res = member(newtext).extrude3D(scene) -- extrude a modelresource from the new text castmember newtext.erase() -- delete the new text castmember (we do not need it anymore) res.tunneldepth = howdeep --set the extruder modelresource tunneldepth property obj = scene.newmodel(modelname, res) -- create a new model from the extruder modelresource shd = scene.newshader(modelname & "shd", #standard) -- create a new shader for the model shd.diffuse = whatcolor -- set the diffuse color for the new shader shd.texture = void -- remove the default texture from the new shader obj.shaderlist = shd -- set the model's shader to the new shader. return obj else return false end if end