lettering down a tapered column

[jseiler]

I am trying to put letting down a tapered column I made with a two rail sweep. That works well enough, but the letters that are down the column where the column is thinner are much smaller than the letters where the column is fatter. That is to be expected. I can correct that with distort.

Is there a better way? I tried scaling my 2 rail sweep profile to distort more precisely, but it keeps telling me that one of my rails is invalid, even though its a flip of a valid rail.

Is there a way to scale the letter size exactly to a rounded tapered object?

John

[esteeme1]

Are you sure that you are selecting the proper distortion option? You need to select between two curves. If not, is it possible that you have an extra vector below one of your bounding vectors?

[jseiler]

I had the vectors selected wrong. It works now.

If I use the profile for the 2 railed sweep (mirrored on both sides) of the text, it kind of works to do what I want to do. It breaks down when the math fails. It stretches the letters, but when the diameters get really small, the approximation of "arc length of wrapped letter = width of letter" falls apart. Usually one doesn't try to get too radical with changing diameters, so its good enough for most things anyone will try to do.

I proved this to myself by creating a cone (0 radius at the bottom, 1 in radius at the top) with the two rail sweep. I put some letters down the length of it. I used the 2 rail sweep profile on either side to distort the letters such that letters toward the pointy end of the cone were wider than the ones at the top. The letter at the .5 in radius point ended up being twice the width of the letter at the radius=1" point.

There may be a way to fix this by distorting the profile rail with a clever curve before using them to distort the text. This first distortion would take care of the projection error inherent in flat unwrapping.

Thanks for the hint! (It helps to read the directions on the screen...some things aren't consistent. For two rail sweeps, you pick the rails first. For distortions, you pick the rails last.)

BTW, This distortion tool rocks.

It would be nice to have a way to do a full on vertical projection onto a round object to take care of diameter effects in rotary toolpaths...kind of like projecting toolpaths onto flat models.

John