Essimer Title Sequence

We have been talking recently about the Title Sequence for Bones of Essimer, and one of the things we came up with is using 3D text in the title.

Since I'm not 100% today I wanted to stay home and work on things that didn't require heaps of brainpower.

So I decided to experiment with 3D text.  I knew that there was a text option within Maya, but I had never used it.

 The text tool creates curves in the shape of each letter.  The text and font can be chosen by clicking onto the options box.

To make the text 3D I selected each curve and used surfaces => Bevel Plus. This is a very quick and easy way to achieve 3D text.  However you can only choose existing fonts, so if you are wanting something that has been specifically designed for a project you need to either use the vertices to manipulate the text or use a different technique.

I found this tutorial which uses photoshop to create 3D text in Maya.  This seems very versatile as you can convert any drawing into a shape and import into Maya.

I gave this process a try just using the text tool in photoshop.

It looks like it could now be textured.  I had thought that one option for us was to create this text then bring it to Mudbox for more sculpting.  However the front of each letter in both examples is only one face, so this idea won't work as Mudbox needs more geometry and only works with quads.  If the text is unwrapped in Maya though it could be textured through photoshop files.