Title Text

We wanted to show what our model was at the end by writing its name and animating it to come onto the screen once the animation of the dredger had finished. I started off by creating some text on the page. This was found in the create toolbar, and then by selecting shapes, the second option the below options will appear. I typed in what i wanted in the text box, and then changed the properties to my liking. I selected arial bold, I wasn't too worried about the size for now as it would have to be scaled to fit the model anyway once all the parts were joined together.

Once the text is on the screen we want to make it more 3d. To do this I selected all the writing and made it into an editable poly. The colour of the text now changed. Now that its an editable poly by selecting all the writing and making sure the it s set to polygon, below in the settings we can select extrude. this enabled me to make the written as wide as I wanted. I also played around with the other settings to see what looked good, and I ended up using the Outline tool, which gave me the effect that i wanted.

Now it was time to put a map on the text. Before I went into the material editor I wanted to look for the type of maps I would like to place over my text. As we are dealing with an old steam engine, I thought that old rusty steel would be a good image for the text. I searched google for some images that would go well and came across quite a few:





I saved around 5 to my computer and thought I would try theses out individually and see what worked best.


I selected M which is a short cut to the material editor. After selecting a round ball, I selected maps on the material editor. I then went to bitmap and uploaded the image, on both Bump and diffuse colour, as shown below. Instead of searching for your bitmap twice, I just dragged my bitmap from diffuse colour straight down to Bump and it copies it for you.




I found that the colour of the material was very dark, maybe a bit too dark. To fix this I simply, changed diffuse from 100 to 85, this made it slightly lighter and I could see this on the ball at the top of the material editor.





At the moment there is no bump ticked, so by ticking the bump box you can notice that a slight texture is now visible. I changed this from 30, which is was pre set to , to 100. This made the texture much more noticeable.





I noticed that there was a problem to do with the UVW map. When i went into the settings I noticed that the tick box for mapping was set to spherical instead of box. By selecting box it enabled the sides to have the texture on also and once I selected it the error message didn't appear any more.

I still thought couldn't make it look realistic, I realised that when I played around with the settings above, the length, Width, Height and U/V/W tiles I could make it more realistic as I was playing around with the map itself.