Hello all,
I'm about to start a project and wanted to ask on this list your ideas on how to approach it. I would like to get a dynamic string/symbol(with spaces) to be rendered with text3d as if it is following a spline. Where the baseline of each letter is a tangent to the spline curve. I'd like to be able to move the control points of this spline curve and change the text (including the number of letters) dynamically.
My first thought is to build a pmpd chain that will act as the "spline" then use tLia objects to control the position and rotation of individual letters (as separate text3d objects) Some issues are how to make a pmpd chain more like a spline, I guess having no flextion in the links? Spacing the letters could also be a challange.
Any other ideas of how to approach this? How intensive is the math for calculating the position of the letters based on some real spline-curve equation? Any examples how I may go about this method?
Any opions would be welcomed.
As for text3d in general It would be very very nice to be able to have support for:
* Text boxes that wrap the contents, by character, or by word, or with "-". A special line-break character{,sequence} would be nice too. You just define the bounding box for the text in gem units (or rows+columns) and it goes from there. Basically giving text3d the ability to manage multiple lines of text.
* Jusification within this box (left right centre flush)
* text following a spline? ;)
Thanks all!
Ben