Reply To: Derek’s Polybook | CORE | Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling in Blender

[Derek Chestnut]

Yeah, the logo is geometry; it is made of a text object converted into a mesh and joined with the frame.

I kept running into problems though when it was time to wrap it around the coffee cup, and I wasted so much time making tiny mistakes on things that I either have a knowledge gap on, or operations I haven’t cemented in my skill set yet; I began to get very frustrated, because I had the right idea from the start, but I was missing something each time I tried the operation, until finally, I learned all of the little tricks.

It took hours and I started to get disgusted with how much time I was wasting just failing and failing and failing…

In the end, I succeeded by:

• converting the text into a mesh object.
• converting the surface of each letter into an n-gon (this was necessary to prevent lighting concerns)
• model the frame from a plane (paying careful attention to ensure it had enough geometry to distort)
• joined the two meshes into a single object
• creating a lattice object (taking care to ensure it had the proper resolution for distorting)
• parenting the logo to the lattice (the logo was a child of the lattice, not the other way around)
• adding the lattice modifier to the logo object and assigning the parent lattice object as the deformer
• utilizing a shrink-wrap modifier on the lattice object (shrink-wrapped the lattice, not the logo)
• set the logo’s shading to smooth

The whole thing was a big heaping pile of frustrating, but I’m glad to have stuck with it and learned how to utilize the lattice modifier in tandem with the shrink-wrap modifier, because this combination allows you to wrap any object around any surface, granted you’ve modeled them with enough supporting geometry.