Two Different Types of 3D Text…
3D Box Shot Pro supports two different and distinct types of 3D Text. We are going to start by looking at the system fonts. This feature allows you to load any installed system font and render this as simple extruded 3D text. Start by clicking the Load Text button on the Model Tab:
The Create Text Box will now appear. Click on the System Font Select button at the top of the box. This will allow you to choose any font installed on your system.
Once you have selected a system font, click OK, you will be able to select the level of Extrusion. This essentially controls how thick the 3D Text is. Leave it as default for the time being.
Type the text in the Text box that you would like to render. For the purpose of this example, type “Shadows”
You can now click on the text and change it’s material values. In this example I change the general colour to black. On the background tab, turn off Reflections. Now Click on the shadow tab and increase the length and opacity of the shadows. Next select the lighting tab and drag the horizontal light until the text appears as below:
You can edit the pre-set in Notepad in order the change the text and the font. This can save a lot of time if you build complex text scenes in 3D Box Shot Pro. Open the unzipped preset file in you favourite text editor and scroll over the the left. The section you need to edit are modelFont and modelText. Edit the text between the ” ” and you’ll see the changes when you load the pre-set back into 3D Box Shot Pro.
Let’s have a look at how we can use this image as the basis for a book cover. Imagine for a moment that you need to render a cover for a highly pretentious biography called “Shadows and Reflections”. Given the current trend in minimalist design you could easily come up with something like this:
All I’ve done here is change the font from Arial to Raleway (available free of charge from the amazing League of Movable Type). I then rendered the word “Reflections” in white on a black background with heavy reflections enabled to the same length as the shadows. I used a background gradient for the background of the cover.
Minimalist Typography Covers
Minimalism is currently very trendy on-line at the moment. Simple designs, simple fonts. For the rest of this article we’ll look at how you can create more traditional typographic effects in 3D Box Shot Pro, as well as some more weird and wonderful ones. One simple way of doing this in our software is to break your title into separate word or even separate characters. As 3D Box Shot Pro coverts the text you type into 3d models, this means that you can scale, pan and adjust individual words and characters in order to build typographic blocks such as these:
This provides a good example of a minimalist design that works on a solid black background, simply because it looks stark and unique by being so simple. This design raises a dismissive finger to the frippery of photographic covers and wears its Spartan design with pride.
Double spacing between characters in the title and the authors name can be used to add some gravitas to a simply typographical cover.
We’ve drawn inspiration from classic covers for some of these. However, once you increase in confidence using the software, you should soon be able to come up with some innovative layouts of your own. Don’t be afraid to experiment and be creative!
Isometric Perspective Typography
The perspective controls in 3D Box Shot Pro make it relatively simple to create isometric perspective scenes. You may have noticed that this is a technique that Apple use in their marketing spam emails. I used this technique to render the following image. This is intended to be the flip side of Android’s “Be together not the same” marketing program.
We’re now going to use the same process to render text isometrically. The first thing you need to do is drag the perspective slider all the way to the right. The left click and move the view port until the grid appears in a diamond pattern:
You can now generate a the perspective elements you need to create simple perspective book covers:
Funky 3D Text
Ok, it’s time to look at the other type of 3D Text that 3D Box Shot Pro supports. Unlike the simple system extruded fonts, 3D Box Shot Pro also ships with a small range of royalty free complex 3D Fonts. These have bevelled edges, which can be very useful for creating very impact-full cover text. Click the Load Text button on the Model Tab in 3D Bx Shot Pro and select from the following fonts from the Font Drop down list. Please note Baskerville is selected by defualt:
Type in the text you want and 3D Box Shot Pro will automatically generate the 3D Text. As the software automatically stack 3D models, you can use this to generate text line by line from the bottom up:
So that’s it for the typography tutorial, if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider downloading the Demo of 3D Box Shot Pro and buying the software if you like it. Ultimately we need to sell the software to stay in business. Hopefully, using the techniques discussed on this page, you’ll find its possible to create complete typographical designs in 3D Box Shot Pro without the use of any additional software. 3D Box Shot Pro is a commercial Windows Software Product. It does not run on Apple devices.
