From the course: 3D Printing a Scale Model with AutoCAD

Working with 3D text - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: 3D Printing a Scale Model with AutoCAD

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Working with 3D text

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- [Voiceover] In this video, we'll use the text explode tool and the extrude tool to create 3D Texts to incorporate into our model. Now to get started I want to change the active layer. I'll switch to 3D Text. And I'm going to go into a top view and focus on this area right in front of our model. Now I'll use a text tool to start. And I'm going to type House 17. And let's see, I'll change this to Century Gothic. Our text is really small, so let's scale it up. I'm gonna use the grip commands. I'm gonna toggle through with my space bar. Til I get to scale factor. And I'm gonna scale it up to about the size I'm looking for. That looks good. And now we need to use the text explode tool. Click on our text, type TXTEXP enter. And you can see that our text has now been converted to 2D polylines. Now, let's switch into the realistic visual style just for a bit. Because I want to show you something. Right now we're looking at 2D polylines and they don't have any fill. I'm going to use the region command, REG enter. Select our objects, hit enter. And you can see that now these shapes have fill. Regions are 2D shapes, but because they have fill, they can actually be used with the Boolean Tools just like 3D solids. You can see that right now this O is actually in two different parts. So we can use the UNION command, enter. Select our objects and not only are our letters now complete, but they are also bullioned together all as one. Let's see, I'm gonna go into a little bit of a three quarter view here using the orbit command. And I'll extrude our text to about a foot. Now if remember back to the beginning of our project when we were thinking about planning and thinking about scale. And we talked about sort of minimum feature size for something to readable and printable on a 3D printer. And we sort of talked about how two inches in our full scale model was gonna correlate pretty well to what you know, felt like a good minimum. So let's just double check these letters to make sure that they meet that threshold. Type DI enter. Use the Distance Tool. Click on those points. And these are actually 2 1/4" so they are gonna be right at that threshold. I can be pretty confident that these letters are going to print well and be readable in our model. All right, so the last thing we need to do is position this. So let's move to a left view. We'll grab our solid here. Use the move tool to position this in our model. Let's switch back to the top view. And make one more adjustment. And as a last step, you can see when we did the extrude they broke out into individual solid's. Let's do with one more UNION, so we can treat this object as one. Adding text to a project is just one way to add some customization and some personality. And now that we're done adding the text, we're going to move on to the next step.

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