A while ago I found a way to be able to get text wrapped on a sphere. Yesterday I started a new project where I need to do this again, but I completely forgot one important step and I hope someone can help me to refresh my memory.
The steps are as follows:
Cut out the part of the sphere where you want the text.
Split this part into smaller pieces.
Line them up next to each other to form as flat surface as possible.
Create a new plane in front and place the text on this plane.
Project the text onto the “flat” surface created by the small pieces.
Union the pieces together again and extrude the text.
Union the sphere together again. Done!
My problem is that I cannot remember what I did to rotate the smaller pieces around the axis of the curved face. I remember I just aligned the smaller pieces and then rotated them around this axis a few degrees to create the nearly flat “wall”. Everything I have tried so far fails, I cannot get them to rotate at the curved face.
Does anyone have a solution?
The text on the piece I made before was for my wife, I was hoping she would be ok with me getting another 3D printer if I got her this sphere.
I managed to find a solution for my issue.
I cut out the part of the sphere I wanted to put my text. After that I cut out a slice, 10 degrees in my case. Lined up straight and made 35 copies. Then I took the minimum distance between each piece and moved them sideways to line them up and create the “flat” wall to project the text on. This worked very good and here is the result after putting it all back together using union.
Although this does seem to work, I think that it is much easier to keep the body you want to project the text on in one piece. Just create in front of the body the text you want project. Then project the first character, turn the body a number of degrees, move the text one character and project the next character. Continu as needed.
I am not sure if this is still relevant, but I am currently modeling some remotes, and had no problem getting curved text into my curved surfaces
First I made my base sketch with a rectangle on the X axis, and set up any construction lines I want.
Then I copied that sketch up 50mm.
I proceeded to layout my buttons all in this sketch, anything that was going to be removed like .1mm offset faces, or extrusion areas. Added text where I wanted text.
I then go back to the original sketch and extrude the thickness of the remote
Now on the remote there is a bowl shaped button for OK in the middle of the navigation buttons.
The OK curves with the bowl.
All I did was go to my upper sketch. Select OK, than project and the curved face of the okay button.
When I select the new letters on my main body and extrude them, they remain true to the curve.
I know it’s a lengthy explanation but the actual process took me 30 seconds tops
