Adding Text and/or Arrow / labels as an overlay

[chrisjc77]

Hi All,

New here. Not sure where to ask this question but hoping someone here might be able to help. I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to add a text and/or arrow overlay that floats in 3D space and casts a ground shadow. I know that I can add labels to products, but is there a way to do this where the text/label/arrow floats off the ground?

Thank you for your help!

Chris

[Chad Holton]

Hi Chris,

Welcome! I haven't tested it with a shadow but it should work. Just add in a plane (Edit>Add geometry) and slap the text on either as a color texture or label. Use the same text texture for the opacity map and adjust the opacity mode accordingly.

Chad

[chrisjc77]

Hi Chad,

Thanks for the reply. I wanted to give an update on my experience in the hopes it may help someone else.

One thing I noticed was that if I did it the way you suggested, it did work. However, since it was defined as a ground plane, whenever I would raise that ground up about halfway to allow the overlay text to float, it would also show shadowing on the other products in the scene.

What I did to get around this, is instead of adding a ground plane, I rendered a top view of the entire project > imported the top view render into illustrator > locked the top view render layer > created another layer > created the overlay text / images > deleted the top view render layer (when I was done) > saved the overlay text/images layer as a .dxf file > imported the .dxf file in keyshot (which made it its own layer there). Once I did this, I was able to apply a material to that layer and/or text/image .dxf file I made which was nice and when all was said and done, the overlay arrows sat exactly where I wanted it to sit hovering about halfway above the ground which allowed it to cast a shadow.

Thank you Chad for the help! Great lessons learned here.

Chris