Adding Text and/or Arrow / labels as an overlay

Started by chrisjc77, February 22, 2018, 03:45:58 PM

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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