Subtitles of the Movie

The final geometry creation tool that I want to discuss is somewhat unlikely. It's actually not even in our Geometry Creation Toolbar over here, it's all the way over here at the end and it is the 3D Text Tool. The 3D Text Tool is very different from the other Geometry Creation Tools in the sense that when you click on it you're actually going to be greeted by a dialog immediately. So now that we've got our 3D Text Tool you'll see that we end up with a dialog that comes up and you can see that we have a number of options that we can work with here. And I'm just going to do something like VTC Training. See if I can spell training right, huh? Alright. Now we can choose whatever fonts we have loaded on our system, so I probably have a lot more fonts on my system than you do seeing how I'm a graphic artist, but let's see, I'll pick something interesting. I like this one. Question of time, so we'll use that one. You can use whatever you happen to like. The regular little tab over here is basically if you have a Bold or Italic font, you can choose that here. The Alignment has to do with Left alignment. Right now it's set to the Left so that it begins here. If we do Center, if we're doing like paragraph type, Right if we're doing paragraph type. I usually like to work with Center just because I think it tends to be a little bit more easy to manipulate. The Height of the letters is actually measured here in inches because that's our default unit of measurement that we're using for our document, so I'm going to go ahead and set this for, say, 2 feet and I like that. Now we can have this extruded and this is what this little checkmark here is for and once we say that we want it extruded we can actually say, OK, well, we want however big, so I'm going to go ahead and say I want this extruded out to be 6 inches and I do want the Form Filled and you'll see what that looks like here in a second. So now I'm going to say Place and you'll see what that looks like. So there we go. There's our 3D Text. It comes in as a component, which is something that we'll discuss at a later time, but the idea here is that if you want to get into editing this text in any way with the other modification tools you're going to have to double-click in order to open that and to be able to work on it, otherwise you won't be able to actually do anything with it. But there's our 3D Text Tool and as you can see it is 2 feet tall and it is 6 inches deep as per our instructions. Now there are some places where those particular settings may not work for you and I'll show you what I mean. We're going to go ahead and change the font to something a little bit more cursive, so let's go ahead and just pick something a little bit more, there we go, Park Avenue. So, there's our Park Avenue and actually that doesn't quite get what I'm looking to show you here so, let's see if I can't find something a little bit - I know there's something at the end here that's a little bit more - there we go. Staccato. That'll do. So, one of the important things to notice about Staccato is that these letters actually overlap one another and I'm going to go ahead and hit Place so you can see that. So when we look at these letters and how they overlap one another, you'll see that they actually create some artifacts where the geometry is intersecting from the N into the T. Whenever you're dealing with some of these cursive fonts where they do that this is going to be a problem. What you want to do is you actually want to go ahead and when you select that text you want to make sure that it's not set to extrude. And that way you'll have the option to be able to actually go in there and while it's flat - double-click to Enter it - and you can actually begin to edit out those overlapping geometric sections before you extrude it up utilizing the Push-Pull Tool. So, this is a better way of working than trying to clean up all this geometry that you see here that's already messed up in the extrude and doesn't look very good. So, this is a much better way of working where you just output it as a flat text and then extrude it to whatever height you need instead of trying to clean it after it's already been output. The other thing that we want to be aware of is, let's say we want to actually put a hole in something like this rectangle here utilizing the text. Well, one good way of doing that is you can actually turn off this Filled and I'm going to change the font again to be something a little bit easier to see, like say, Tahoma and I'm going to turn off the Filled and I'm going to say Place and when I do that I'm going to have the ability to now place, as you can see, empty paths. They don't have any Faces associated with them, so this is where it's really good to put it over the top of something that already has a face, like this and now when I go and Context Click on that I can say Explode and when I do that this path that the text is made of is actually going to cut away into the face of this particular plane that I've created with the polygon, so when I delete that out you'll see that the only one that happens to fill right now is the E and the reason why is because the individual faces here are not actually locked in, as you can see. And the way we can do that is by taking the Line Tool and simply tracing one of the sides and as soon as you do that you can see that it immediately separates out. The place where that's going to become a little bit more problematic is when you're doing something like an E or an A or an O and the reason why is because you see that center section doesn't want to separate. And the way you get that to separate out is by tracing that one so that you have what's known as a compound path and now you can see that we can get both. If you do that on each one of these letters you can effectively cut a hole in this particular geometry and I won't bother finishing the whole thing. I'm just going to go ahead and delete the individual letters out so that you can see that we're effectively cutting a hole in that geometry now and if you try to do that over here on this E for instance you'll see that even if I were to trace out this particular section here and then I delete that out you'll see what I mean about that compound path. You need to do two separate Line Tools in order to create that separation for the compound paths where they have a hole in the center of the letter.