Just thought for a presentation that I was creating to make a word that would be the image on a TShirt. Not so hard so far, I got the word created, I chose the word “AMERICA”. I thought “Well, how hard would it be to put some color in there?” Not too hard to color those letters, even though the 3D text feature makes your text as a component. I much prefer groups. So I take the word as created by the 3dText feature and select edit component. Then inside this edit function, I select all the letters, copy them, and cut them. Then I close the component and of course it disappears because it now contains nothing. Then I paste in place all the letters I just copied and cut. Then I select them all and choose to make group. Effect, a) the component is gone, b) the letters are present, but now are a group.
OK, well the word is AMERICA, so why not let the words have the colors of the US flag on them.
Whew… not easy. ON Wikipedia is the formal US definition of an official US flag, so I created one with Sketchup and then exported it as a png. Now I have an image, and it is a US Flag image.
So back to the letters, I made a new color by choosing an existing color and choosing to add, then I renamed it, then I told it to add a phototexture. So far so good, and the phototexture I chose was the US Flag png image that I had just exported. Again, so far so good.
But…good grief…getting that phototexture onto those word letters…wow, what a headache.
What I finally did was individually add the phototexture to each letter one by one, then using the position feature, I moved the phototextures around on each letter so they sort of line up and it looks
at last…!!!
Like the word AMERICA has the coloration effects of the US Flag.
Of course, who is ever satisfied…? nobody
Allright, I said, “Well…its a flag motif, it ought to be waving…”
Not too hard to do, I made a wavy line with the freehand line tool, then using Chris Fullmers shape bender extension, I added the word AMERICA to the wavy line and…as they say
Voilla (or whatever that word is)
I should add that one needs to make the wavy line so you like how it looks, then you need to go ahead and use the shape bender extension to bend the set of letters around the contours of the line. What I discovered is that you will need to do this many times to get it where it looks OK. Basically you need to do the shape bender and if the letters are all on top of each other, or distorted, or just twisted around too much, then you need to not accept the shape bending, go to the wavy line, select it, then use the scale tool to add lengthening and/or height adjustments to bring the line to a new shape, then re-do the shape bender action and eventually you’ll get the letters where they are in fact bent around, but the distortion is not sufficient that the letters look weird or ugly… just trial and error, no big deal really.
The waving US Flag word AMERICA
But I simply cannot figure out how to get the phototexture added to those letters in their wavy format.
I actually did it for the A, but I can’t remember how, and I can’t get it to work on any of the other letters…
sigh
Here’s the flag
Here’s AMERICA as a properly shaped word and its color overlay
Here’s wavy AMERICA with the Flag colors texture “sort of” applied
Here’s wavy AMERICA all the letters red
Here’s wavy AMERICA all the letters red on the back of a TShirt
Here’s the Sketchup file (I hope)
The Word America with flag colors v16.skp (840.7 KB)
enjoy… I hope someone knows what I am not seeing here. pg