I'm fairly new to inkscape, but I found a tutorial I would like to try that uses illustrator. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if inkscape has the ability to do it? http://10steps.sg/photoshop/create-a-3d-flowery-text-effect/#comment-3872

I have been able to read some tutorials made for illustrator and use them with inkscape, but so far I haven't been able to make the 3D text...

I'd really like to be able to do this, and I hope someone can be of some help.

See this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2760

I don't see anything there you can't do in inkscape right off the top of my head. (Might want to use a short cut to get the flowers by doing them in Gimp). You want perspective and extrusion functions on the effects menu. It might be fastest to put the beveling around the numbers and letters in by hand. [Note there is an error in the http://inkscapetips.wordpress.com/2007/ ... ve-effect/ tutorial. Or it's out of data. As noted in the other thread, the order in which you select the curves in is reversed in the wordpress tutorial. For Vista and Macs, anyways, it select item you want to apply the perspective first.]

[In theory you could use the new extrusion function in the developers version to make the bevel around the numbers and letters. The new extrusion will add something like beveling. It's still a bit crude though. And I don't think there is a tutorial for it yet.]

Depending on how new you are to inkscape you will probably have to look at a few tutorials on inkscape. But the order you'd do it in is pretty much the same as the illustrator tutorial. The flowers on the faces of the numbers and letter could either be done as a bit map in something like Gimp: You can get flower brushes for gimp. And gimp has a crude perspective function and gradients of it's own. Then imported the bit map. And convert to a patter and apply that patten as fill. Or draw the flowers and vines in by hand. To get the points on the vines use live path effects to add a triangle as a pattern to that path. Inkscape has blur now too. Depending on how new you are inkscape you need to look at tutorial on path operations, perspective, gradients, and either importing patterns or patterns to path. The "sparkling highlight can be made with the

Here is 5 minutes of play with perspective extrude and path operations. Start with the , then convert object (the 1) to path.

It isn't impossible to do this sort of thing in Inkscape but since Inkscape doesn't have a dynamic extrude tool like Adobe and Xara it's much more difficult and takes much more time. Still, if you have the patience then all you need is the time.

I hate to point people way from Inkscape since this is an Inkscape forum but Blender could be used just to help you with the 3D text part. If you have never used Blender before then prepare yourself for a shock when you see the interface. However, once you fiddle with it for a while things will start to make sense.

Anyway, as an experiment, I made some text in Blender, extruded, rotated, and rendered out a png file which I placed on a background in Inkscape. In other words, you could use Blender to extrude your text and Inkscape for everything else. Of course you would be working with a combination of raster and vector but that shouldn't slow you down much.

Here's my 20 minute sample:



SVG file

I found out that Open Office Draw is very easy to create some 3D Text, but not a high quality like Blender.
Examples (the first one imported in Inkscape and add these shadows and the background) :

heathenx wrote:I hate to point people way from Inkscape since this is an Inkscape forum but Blender could be used just to help you with the 3D text part.

Can you to put the flower patten on the text face in blender? Or is there a way to export some paths into inkscape? Otherwise it seems like you have to trace over the faces of the numbers/letters in inkscape. I've seen posts with people talking about importing SVGs into blender. I wondered if you could get SVGs out. Are you going to start blender tutorials Seems like you've pretty much cover inkscape at this point.

I think the way to do this in inkscape is very tedious but possible. Each text piece has to be converted to path. Get the perspective you would like using the perspective effect. Then duplicate text twice and offset the duplicates at the perspective you want. Then select both duplicates and do path>difference. Now you have what would be the bottom and side of the 3D piece. You need to separate the bottom from the sides using path>break apart, and playing with the nodes and breaking the path. Now take the side piece and duplicate it offset these duplicates and do effects>generate from path>interpolate. Take the bottom piece and change the fill to a lighter or darker shade as you wish and do the same. The trick is to get the same offset for both. Now take your side and bottom and align them properly and send to back. Then take original text piece and align over them. Add the gradient to the original piece. If you want you can make the highlights fairly easily as well for the edges. Then group everything together. Repeat for each single piece. Tedious, but doable. If I get a few minutes when I'm not dead from not sleeping for 30 hrs I'll do a sample of what I mean.

@ early blake: I don`t think it is a problem to use different programs to get the final result what you like.
http://www.blendernation.com/2008/03/02/vectex-svg-vector-texture-plugin-for-blender/
http://www.blendernation.com/2008/03/03/pantograph-the-vector-renderer/
We can do a lot with Inkscape only, but it is more fun for me (!) to mix the technique.
I know many adobe tutorials to do this. Why we not?
Some of my last works for example (Inkscape / Blender / Gimp):
http://chrisdesign.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/chrisdesign1.jpg?w=700&h=507
http://chrisdesign.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/skate1000.jpg

Coco wrote:@ early blake: I don`t think it is a problem to use different programs to get the final result what you like.
http://www.blendernation.com/2008/03/02/vectex-svg-vector-texture-plugin-for-blender/
http://www.blendernation.com/2008/03/03/pantograph-the-vector-renderer/
We can do a lot with Inkscape only, but it is more fun for me (!) to mix the technique.
I know many adobe tutorials to do this. Why we not?
Some of my last works for example (Inkscape / Blender / Gimp):
http://chrisdesign.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/chrisdesign1.jpg?w=700&h=507
http://chrisdesign.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/skate1000.jpg

OK book marking those.

Wow nice work. That's amazing. I keep meaning to try blender, but I probably wont get a chance for a couple of months. You use gimp, without a gun to you head?

llogg wrote:I think the way to do this in inkscape is very tedious but possible. Each text piece has to be converted to path. Get the perspective you would like using the perspective effect. Then duplicate text twice and offset the duplicates at the perspective you want. Then select both duplicates and do path>difference. Now you have what would be the bottom and side of the 3D piece. You need to separate the bottom from the sides using path>break apart, and playing with the nodes and breaking the path. Now take the side piece and duplicate it offset these duplicates and do effects>generate from path>interpolate. Take the bottom piece and change the fill to a lighter or darker shade as you wish and do the same. The trick is to get the same offset for both. Now take your side and bottom and align them properly and send to back. Then take original text piece and align over them. Add the gradient to the original piece. If you want you can make the highlights fairly easily as well for the edges. Then group everything together. Repeat for each single piece. Tedious, but doable. If I get a few minutes when I'm not dead from not sleeping for 30 hrs I'll do a sample of what I mean.

I don't see how you are going to get a consistent offset for each letter, except a lot of trial and error. Because of the way perspective works in inkscape you have to do the perspective function before you do the offset. Once you've done the perspective you have odd angles, so you can use snap to get a consistent offset. You are also going to run into the granularity of the alt -> at different magnifications if you use the arrow keys to try and make a consistent offset. Extrude lets you set the angle and the distance for the off set, so they would be consistent.

Coco wrote:We can do a lot with Inkscape only, but it is more fun for me (!) to mix the technique.
I know many adobe tutorials to do this. Why we not?

I think Coco hit the nail right on the head.

It is fun and interesting trying to use Inkscape as a total solution but not if it prevents one from achieving their design intent. I would love for Inkscape to get to the point of having those same power tools as Adobe but Inkscape is just a pup in comparison. In time its tools will become more powerful. Until it gets there, free and open-source programs like Gimp, Scribus and Blender and can lend a hand where Inkscape has a shortfall. After all, you wouldn't want to play golf with just one club...even though you could.

I just want to reiterate that the 3D text effect in Inkscape is NOT impossible. And certainly - the other effects surrounding the text are completely doable in Inkscape as well. Coco and I (and others) just think a little out of the box sometimes.

the '3d polyhedran' extension in SVN might be of interest to you guys looking at this, it lets you import obj format 3d models. So you could create the text in blender or whatever and import it via that extension to get svg shapes of the faces...

Simarilius wrote:the '3d polyhedran' extension in SVN might be of interest to you guys looking at this, it lets you import obj format 3d models. So you could create the text in blender or whatever and import it via that extension to get svg shapes of the faces...

That would be extremely handy. I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the tip.

I forgot this example i have made long time ago before i use blender:
Inkscape only, but much work.

Here's how I got a fair imitation in inkscape for a single number. Using a font with curved corners makes it tougher and I had to add an extra element with a slight blur to try and get it right. Not entirely successful, but not bad for 20 minutes of tinkering.

Simarilius wrote:the '3d polyhedran' extension in SVN might be of interest to you guys looking at this, it lets you import obj format 3d models. So you could create the text in blender or whatever and import it via that extension to get svg shapes of the faces...

I'd love to try out the 3D polyhedron but I'll be darned if I can figure it out. I have a 3D.obj sitting on my desktop and I'm having trouble getting it to import. All I get are red dots on my canvas.

heathenx wrote:

Simarilius wrote:the '3d polyhedran' extension in SVN might be of interest to you guys looking at this, it lets you import obj format 3d models. So you could create the text in blender or whatever and import it via that extension to get svg shapes of the faces...

I'd love to try out the 3D polyhedron but I'll be darned if I can figure it out. I have a 3D.obj sitting on my desktop and I'm having trouble getting it to import. All I get are red dots on my canvas.

it defaults to rendering vertices. go to the style tab, and switch the 'show' dropdown to faces.

Ok, here is a link to the documentation:
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/0407DG-3DObjects.pdf
Have fun!

heathenx wrote:
I hate to point people way from Inkscape since this is an Inkscape forum but Blender could be used just to help you with the 3D text part. If you have never used Blender before then prepare yourself for a shock when you see the interface. However, once you fiddle with it for a while things will start to make sense.

Anyway, as an experiment, I made some text in Blender, extruded, rotated, and rendered out a png file which I placed on a background in Inkscape. In other words, you could use Blender to extrude your text and Inkscape for everything else. Of course you would be working with a combination of raster and vector but that shouldn't slow you down much.



SVG file

Well, I was planning on using GIMP for everything else, actually...I just need inkscape for the 3D part. But I liked this example the best so I figured I'd try it first...
You're right, I think I actually slipped out a 'whoa' when I opened blender.
I think I messed with it for about 45 mins. before I finally figured out how to get the text how I wanted it, but I have a couple questions. First, did you color it in inkscape, or blender? And the second is about how you got to save it as a .png? (I think figuring that out has taken longer for me than the text itself)

Coco wrote:Well, I was planning on using GIMP for everything else, actually...I just need inkscape for the 3D part. But I liked this example the best so I figured I'd try it first...
You're right, I think I actually slipped out a 'whoa' when I opened blender.
I think I messed with it for about 45 mins. before I finally figured out how to get the text how I wanted it, but I have a couple questions. First, did you color it in inkscape, or blender? And the second is about how you got to save it as a .png? (I think figuring that out has taken longer for me than the text itself)

Well, I could explain it but I'd rather just screencast it. That's easier for me. I colored the text in Inkscape and rendered out an image that was twice as big as my Inkscape border so I could scale the png down. Otherwise the png will look a little grainy.

Flash Video

Simarilius wrote:it defaults to rendering vertices. go to the style tab, and switch the 'show' dropdown to faces.

Ah! I get it now. I didn't have much time to make anything nice but I exported one letter out of Blender as an .obj file and brought it into Inkscape. It took some fiddling to get the right orientation. There is some definite potential with this effect.