Tutorial: Page (1) of 2 - 05/30/07

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Extrude Beyond Get past thick letters By Ko Maruyama Of course you can extrude letters in MAXON's CINEMA 4D.  If you're considering software for 3D motion graphics, one of the things you'll definitely need is the ability to extrude all kinds of fonts.  But you don't have to stick with one tool to make those letters "thick".

In C4D you've got a few options for 3D character creation.  The first is obvious.  Without any other help, in the core package, you'll find the Text tool.  It creates splines from True Type or Postscript fonts that you have loaded on your machine.  By typing any source text into the object's property parameters, you can come up with some splines.

Alternatively, you can type set the phrase in a separate application that supports the export function for those paths to Adobe Illustrator 8 or CAD splines.  You can do ANYTHING you want with these splines, or at least anything that splines can do in the application.

If you have added Mograph to the C4D package, you also have the option of the Mograph Text Tool which will deliver many more options for modeling and animation, but will also simply extrude the type by default.





For the most part - broadcast designers and motion graphics artists are going to extrude them into Z space, but there aren't many options for cap "rounding" within the basic extrusion NURBS.


With the Text Object selected, hold down the ALT/OPTION key, then select the Extrude NURBS object from the toolbar.


With many of the NURBS objects, you can select the way the object is capped (closed on either end).  A set of fillet options will  describe the way that cap meets the rest of the object.

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