Rounding the top of text?

[good2go]

I've dowloaded the trial software and am having a great time.

I've not used or seen a Carvewright/Compucarve in person, but I am building/making my projects with the software and planing to purchase a unit in the near future.

Thus far I have not been successful with finding a way to round off the top of the text. I have used many different fonts and when I use the isometric view and magnify my project, the text is still squared off at the top. Please view my sample project texttext1.mpc, please feel free to upload a update on my sample with the changes and let us all know how you did it.

I like the rounded look like on the star and all of the other patterns, I would prefer to be able to use any font and have it rounded or to click and have it round itself.

If anyone has figured it out, please post here and let me know how.

I will be reading and posting myself, hoping to shorten the learning curve for all of us....

Thanks everyone in advance for your help.
zed

[Dan-Woodman]

You might be able to highlight the text, right click, then choose outline pattern, pick a small roundover bit.

[Greybeard]

Currently, you will find it easier to redesign your texts to the shape you want by using an external drawing program to do the modification, then importing the text as a bitmap/jpg/or gif etc.
John

[Jon Jantz]

What Greybeard said.

For example... I did these up in Coreldraw, and worked on them in Photopaint just a little....

A few different ways to do it.

[BobHill]

And here's one I did to add to your examples <g>

Bob

[Dan-Woodman]

Hey Bob
Can you make that star look lik those letters in your last post here
Rather thaneach leg of the star being rounded over on the top could the stars legs be flat coming to a peak in the middle of the leg .
I don't have coreldraw.

[rgant05]

Jon,

Well, I broke a carving bit right out of the box tonight... talk about broken hearted. I don't know if I didn't have it locked in right or what, but thats what it looked like. The bit spindle really didn't act like they decribed in the book. Other than that it seemed to do everything I was expecting. Had now problem with software, firmware etc other than it didn't want to take the Serial number for 2 or 3 tries, but finally did. Now to crawl back to CW and get some parts on the way.

What I am really posting is. I have gone back and viewed the video and tried clumsily to emulate it. ( I downloaded the 15 day trial of Corel Draw X3 while I wait for my full package to arrive) Now I am trying to figure out how you did the domed or rounded top letters. I tried various things in Draw with no luck although I did find stepped contour (reducing it down to 3 steps) that had an interesting effect. But I can't invision what it needs to look like to give a rounded effect. I tried outlining the letters in Designer and then applying a double down dome surface to each letter individually... interesting effect and may be useful, but still not what I am looking for.

Roger

[menewfy]

Roger you might want to load up the cutting bit for when you are talking to cw just in case it is the part that hold the bit in place.

just a thought
tim

[Greybeard]

Roger - re coreldraw. I'm only using ver 8, but I expect the tools are still the same.

Draw a simple shape, then make a duplicate (using "View/roll-ups/transformation/scale" window) but only 10% of the size of the original.
Doing it this way they will be concentric.
Fill the large one with black and the small one with white.
Then select both(drag the selection tool over from one corner to the diagonal opposite one) then go to "Effects/blend", and hit the apply button.
The default settings will give you a starting idea of what is possible.

If you remove the outlines of each of the initial shapes, you will get a stepped blend of the greyscale. Increase the number of steps to 256 and you will improve the smoothness greatly.

You'll need to acquire some knowledge and skill in editing the "nodes"(vertexes in Designer) but you can achieve some amazing effects just with this single method.
Let me know if you need any more info.

Regards
John