I haven't used POV-Ray for several years, but I've just been asked to alter a
model that I constructed back then and produce a new animated sequence.

The model has an extruded bevelled shape that needs to be replaced.

As far as I recall I created this by drawing the shape in CorelDraw and
exporting it as a single truetype font character. I then imported the truetype
font into a program I think was called "Wings 3D" which allowed me to extrude
and bevel the shape and then export it as (I think) a smooth triangle mesh. The
triangle mesh produced a nice beveled shape in POV-Ray.

As several years have passed since then, is there a more efficient method of
producing extruded and beveled arbitrary shapes?

Also, is it possible to create beveled text directly in Pov-Ray? When I last
used it, it was only possible to create flat-faced extruded text.

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> Also, is it possible to create beveled text directly in Pov-Ray?

Bevelled_Text macro in shapes.inc. You could also modify it to use it 
with any shape, not just text.
http://povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/468/#Bevelled_Text

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Thanks, I'll give that a try. The docs say that it doesn't give perfect results,
presumably because it is using lots of shapes sheared in different directions,
so I guess there are likely to be seams visible at high resolution unless a
very large number of steps is used.

I may see if I can reproduce the Wings 3D method again as that gave superb
results.

.... unless anyone has any other alternative methods?

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> Thanks, I'll give that a try. The docs say that it doesn't give perfect results,
> presumably because it is using lots of shapes sheared in different directions,
> so I guess there are likely to be seams visible at high resolution unless a
> very large number of steps is used.

Note that very large number of steps using text object = SLOW.

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A closer look through my old model files shows that although I'd tried Wings3D,
it just didn't work. What I ended up using was Elefont which takes a Truetype
font, allows you to bevel it in a variety of ways and then export it as a
POV-Ray .inc file. I've just tried this again and it works very well indeed.

So to summarise in case it helps anyone else....

1. Take your logo design in CorelDraw and make sure it is "Arrange->Combine"-ed
into a single object.
2. Move the object to the extreme bottom-left of the page - this is the origin
that is used by the export feature
3. File->Export as TrueType. Enter a file name and a font family name. Select a
letter to assign your logo to. You can adjust the point size if necessary.
4. Install the font file into Windows
5. In Elefont, click the F button and select the font family name you just
created.
6. Mess with the bevelling effects (B button), extrusion depth etc.
7. Click the S button to save the bevelled logo. Enter a file name and select
the Pov file type (.inc/.udo)

Your bevelled logo is now in the .inc file.

One of the buttons in Elefont allows you to change the smoothness of curves by
dragging left or right. I found that the highest smoothness setting was OK and
didn't take ages to render in POV.

Just add texturing, scaling etc.

Looks nice!

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On closer inspection, it seems that Elefont's povray output uses a triangle
mesh.

With Elefont's maximum curve subdivision setting, this looks OK for smaller
rendered images, but even for TV screen sized images (720x480) you can see the
joins in the facets around the extruded faces. For large format images I don't
think this is good enough.

I seem to recall many years ago using Moray. Bezier curves "drawn" and extruded
in Moray were output with extruded faces as "smooth_triangle" which gave lovely
smooth faces with no seams at all because the triangles had surface normals at
each apex.

Moray or other GUI front ends have probably come a long way over the years. Are
there any that can import shapes from truetype or windows metafile (or any
other vector based file), and export to POV as SMOOTH triangles where
necessary?

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tiresias schrieb:
> On closer inspection, it seems that Elefont's povray output uses a triangle
> mesh.
> 
> With Elefont's maximum curve subdivision setting, this looks OK for smaller
> rendered images, but even for TV screen sized images (720x480) you can see the
> joins in the facets around the extruded faces. For large format images I don't
> think this is good enough.
> 
> I seem to recall many years ago using Moray. Bezier curves "drawn" and extruded
> in Moray were output with extruded faces as "smooth_triangle" which gave lovely
> smooth faces with no seams at all because the triangles had surface normals at
> each apex.
> 
> Moray or other GUI front ends have probably come a long way over the years. Are
> there any that can import shapes from truetype or windows metafile (or any
> other vector based file), and export to POV as SMOOTH triangles where
> necessary?
> 
> 
> 


OK, this answer is probably a bit too late for your project, but I read 
your post just today when I googled for a way to make or import bevelled 
text in povray that looks good.

After I've tried some other programs I finally used Blender.
  ttf (True Type fonts)  files can be imported. (I think other vector 
based files can be imported too but I don't know how.) An instruction 
how to create text and edit with blender can be found here: 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Text

I then exported the blender file to 3ds and then converted the 3ds with 
Poseray to Pov.

The result looks very smooth even in high resolution images.

Regards,
Simone

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