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I am trying to engrave a plaque (metal, stone) with some text. The person who redirected me here had this example (with author's permission)

My current workflow is slow. I prepare a picture of the text (in Gimp), use it as a bump map node in the "final" material (to influence the metal or stone texture).

I'm looking for a shortcut: can I use a Blender text (possibly on a separate layer, not rendered as such) to achieve the same?

I can create the engraving - the key is being able to change the text over, without altering the geometry using a boolean operation, or without re-creating the maps (bump or displacement).

Arnaud
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  • Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/2612/599, http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/9005/599 – gandalf3 Jul 12 '14 at 00:12
  • What's wrong with using a boolean operator? Than you can just change the text and it will update the geometry. You could put the text in a separate layer and exclude it from the render. – Entity Dec 16 '14 at 15:52
  • @cegaton your answer seems good, the only thing to to is not applying the boolean and make the text not renderable with it's properties or changing layer. – Bithur Mar 14 '15 at 11:02
  • @Bithur I edited the answer with your notes, thanks. –  Mar 14 '15 at 13:28

1 Answers1

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Create your lingot first. Add a text object and give it some thickness extruding it in the properties geometry tab.

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Place the text where you need it and convert it to a mesh: Alt C and select Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text

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Select the Lingot, add a Boolean Modifier and select the Text as object and use difference as operation. enter image description here

You can now move the text to another layer that is not part of your rendered layers.

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If you have different text objects you can change them by selecting them in boolean modifier.