Importing a special character for 3D text

Recently, I produced a set of letter stamps for a friend. He has now asked if I can produce a special stamp with a maple leaf icon. He has offered an Autocad file of the desired icon.

Is there a way for me to access a special character when making 3D labels?

If he has an AutoCAD file of the icon, I will import it for you. Send it to me in a PM.

to make this work with 3D Text youā€™d need to find a font that has the maple leaf icon you want.

I googled for Maple leaf character in font, and found this:

Might that help?

It needs further research to see how to (a) enter a Unicode character and (b) find a font that includes the maple leaf character it should represent.

Canā€™t find that quickly myself - sorry.

The maple leaf character, U+1F341, seems to be part of the font Segoe UI Emoji.

If I understand correctly, this font might be available as C:\Windows\Fonts|Seguiemj.ttf

But I donā€™t see it showing up as an option for the fonts in the 3D Text selection box.

Hope that makes sense.

I looked through that font in a font editor and havenā€™t seen a maple leaf glyph of any sort. Lots of other stuff, though.

Not in Character Map either.

I found that Symbola has the maple leaf character, and it does paste into the 3D Text window. But, when placed it shows the two non-Unicode question mark characters on Windows, and a different pair of strange characters on Mac.

I could add it to Illustrator using the Glyphs panel, but an exported DXF failed to import into SketchUp. So I exported as SVG, opened that, and then exported as DXF.

mapleleaf.skp (34.0 KB)

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I think I saw a character for embedding in web pages and not a character as part of a font. Sorry for any confusion.

No worries. Did you get the CAD file from your friend?

He sent me 4 files, all with different extensions, .dwg, .dxf, .eps, and .pdf. I really donā€™t know what I can do with them.

With SU Make you might be able to import .eps. If you send me the dwg or dxf in a PM I can import them for you.

So the .dxf and .dwg files had no edges and import into SU failed. I imported the .dxf into LO however with no problem. Then exported an image as a PNG, converted it to BMP and used BMP Tracer to get it into SU. A little convoluted but it worked.

I would still have to have this image as part of a font for picking it up as part of 3D text, right?

This image is to be used to create a stamp for use in marking his pottery. I recently did a set of letter stamps for him with lots of help from this forum.

Yes. In order to use it as 3D Text it would need to be a glyph in a font however to make a thing in SketchUp to use for his stamp, you donā€™t need it to be 3D Text. You can combine 3D of his name with the geometry of the maple leaf if you need to.

How would I get this in to my desktop? I assume that I would attach it to the basic stamp block I talked about in my September post ā€œMirrored Fontsā€. In that case I used 3D text, but in this one would I attach the maple leaf bmp to the square face of the stamp block and then extrude the image?

In the file I sent you via e-mail thereā€™s a flat maple leaf but itā€™s geometry that you can use. Scale the leaf shape as needed to get it to the correct and extrude the leaf to the desired thickness. You can then add it to the text as needed.

Remember that the text created with the 3D Text tool isnā€™t really all that special. Itā€™s just a component containing a bunch of geometry that happens to be shaped like alphabet or other text characters.

Iā€™ve been able to work with the skp file you sent me. I want to combine this with another skp file that I have, letter base.skp (103.1 KB)

I want to make 3 stamps, .5" sq, .75" sq, and 1" square, where the leaf is attached to the block.

How do I get both skp files into one new skp file?

You can import the maple leaf into the block file using File>Import.

Here I imported it, gave it some thickness and rotated it to turn if over to reverse it.

It may be intentional but you have units set to feet so this thing is kind of large.

Thanks for the help Dave.I appreciate the extra manipulations you had to do to get an image I could use in Sketchup.

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