Easiest wayto create 3d letters?

Whats the easiest/quickest way to create 3d letters?

I have tried Wings3d then pull into Giles to lightmap but seems like there MUST be a quicker way to create an entire alphabet of 3d letters that look great.

Any thoughts?

don't know, in max it creates 2D splines from whatever windows compatible fonts you have on your system. THese can be edited like regular splines. And then you can just beveu/extrude them as you please.

So basicaly type away and edit if you wish. I can't say for sure but I'd imagine Blender would be able to do this too.

Otherwise you can see if your 3D app can load any vector art file formats. or try converting to them. Max supports adobe illustrator, autocad etc.

I think the first place I'd look for a 3D app would be Blender.

Anim8or!

Isn't there a demo of 3d letters inside the samples/3d folder I think they were generated on the fly (I might be wrong though)

IPete2.

Milkshape has a text function which brings up a textbox you type in and it creates the letters in 3d, which you can do what you wish with them.

Kind of on topic, whats the best way to create 3D letters in code? By this I really need to extrude a flat bitmap image into something 3D (Blitz3D). Any suggestions?

Jason.

. see below

This is the code which I meant - although you do need the .3ds files to make it work.

;	3D Text Demo
;	(c)2001 Rob Pearmain
;	www.peargames.com

;	Why on earth did I write this?

;	I wanted to demonstrate dong Arcade type fonts but using 3D
;	to produce the fonts

;	That's it

;	'*' is a line terminator
;	'.' is total terminator

;	Supports A-Z,0-9,copyright, etc.

Graphics3D 640,480,16
SetBuffer BackBuffer()

camera=CreateCamera()
CameraViewport camera,0,0,640,480
PositionEntity camera,0,0,-500

light=CreateLight()

nPivot = CreatePivot()

nLine=200	

;	Load and create the characters
Restore namedata
lEnd = 0
While lEnd = 0
	nCounter=-200
	Read a$
	While a$ <> "*" And a$ <> "."
		nObject =	LoadMesh(a$+".3ds",nPivot)
		PositionEntity nObject,nCounter,nLine,0
		EntityColor nObject,Rnd(0,255),Rnd(0,255),Rnd(0,255)
		nCounter = nCounter+100
		Read a$
	Wend
	If a$="." Then lEnd=1 Else nLine = nLine - 100
Wend

;	Loop and turn
  While Not KeyHit(1)

	  TurnEntity nPivot,.1,.2,.3
		
      UpdateWorld
      RenderWorld

      Text 320,500,"First Blitz3D Program"

      Flip

  Wend
  End

.namedata
Data "B","L","I","T","Z","3","D","*"
Data "R","O","C","K","S","*"
Data "*"
Data "B","Y","*"
Data "R","O","B","."

IPete2.

That`s quite nice, I remember this now from the samples that come with Blitz. But I really need a way to do this without the need to have premodeled 3D letters so that I can create my 3D objects from fonts and so forth.

Any other ideas?

Jason.

You could draw an outline round the letters. Fredborg created code to fill in a boundry, with triangles. IE, you draw the outline, it fills it in with triangles :o)