OK....
I'm at a loss. I want to apply either a decal or a logo or a projection of either or a projection of text.
I added a jpg and a bmp version of a logo to the shark, photorender,textures path as well as drilling down via the palette. I only end up with bands of the blue and white in the logo, but not the logo itself which has readable text.
Prior to that, i imported the jpg and rotated it to try to project it onto a corrugated surface (shipping container). There is no way to project the image onto the container.
It would be neat if an imported object can be a pass-through or reflection source without committing CPU resources to applying a decal/material to an entire surface. I just want to burn in the image or link it by position onto the corrugated surface and have the letters ripple.
Prior to that, I manually created the name of a ship and sized it accordingly. The problem with that approach is that if there are multiple ships to name, then each one needs to be typed (not the problem) and then each has to be positioned, extruded through, and chopped off. THAT part begins the problem. If it were only a projection of the letters, it would be very simple. But, in this case, I want thickness to simulate bead welding of a name on a steel hull. The problem that continues from this is that the underlying surface is not ideal. It originates from either a mesh, or from curves that imported into VCP/Shark. Converting the mesh to surfaces, then the surfaces to curves yields curves that are faithful to the original mesh. But, I need to turn them to interpolated splines, to smooth them out.
Unfortunately, there are a number of control points that cannot be joined and eliminated through a process of making least-curves-bsplines.
It would be nice if Shark and VCP could make least-curves-bsplines so that only two control points in a spline or curve exist (it is definitely doable in PolyCAD (free), by Marcus Bole, and I may end up having to export parts of the work to there and then edit and reimport to VCP or Shark).
Without those lattices/vertices mucking up the picture, I could then create the sideshell I need, and onto it I could project the name, then use one, smooth, compound-curved surface or solid to split the back and front faces of letters and then offset the remainder and then fill in gaps as if they were welded.
However, the real problem is that even though text can be projected after filling in the non-holed parts, they cannot be edited (change the name or stenciling) and made to "re-heal" themselves. People who make model guns, or other devices and need to add serial numbers have a tough time in many cases, but few if any CAD companies seem interested in the matter.
It would be cool if one could create the name, project it, resize it or change fonts, offset it with perfect tangency/contact, and colorize it. Often, i never care about rendering. I already like what I have in the non-render modes -- especially since rendering is "slow" to me disrupts interactivity.
For now, however, I'll probably stick with projecting the name and trying to thicken that, but I hope the "throw" direction and angle are correct, since in the case of a ship bow panel, there is compound curvature, sometimes just two angles, but the writing may not be at 0 or 90 degrees to ground/sea.
Cheers!
