 Hey everyone, it's EJ from iDesign.com and in this tutorial I'm going to be going over how you can recreate this cast metal type or wood block type kind of look. You'll notice that these letters aren't extruded. It's not a straight extrude, you kind of have this nice rounding here and when I had to recreate this look, I really wanted to be true to how these blocks actually look. You can kind of see a little bit better here how it's not just a straight extrude, you've got this kind of round bevel action going on and I had to create a whole bunch of these actually and recreate something similar to this. So the workflow I'm going to show you is how you can make one of these, set it up and easily duplicate it, change out the letter or the font and resize the block and just keep going, just keep on trucking and just blaze through a whole bunch of these so you can quickly and easily recreate a whole entire wall of this. So let me jump right in and show you the workflow that I came up with. We're not going to start out with a cube, we're going to actually start out with a extruded rectangle and the reason for that is, let me put this in the extrude and give that some depth is because we're going to need to subdivide the front face here and with a cube you'd have to make that editable and do a bunch of subdivision stuff like that and it's just easier for me to just go into this caps, choose the types to quadrangles and just there you go. You're already subdivided and you can still have full control over that and it's still editable. So this whole entire workflow is keeping things editable and easily manipulated or edited so you can just kind of adjust for your taste or whatever you're, what kind of look you're going for. So we have our little block now we need to add our text. So let's get a no text object and let's choose a cooler font than that and let's go for Rockwell that works and let's just go with E and let's scale that up. And give it some depth and we're done. There's your wood block. Just kidding. So like I was saying, you want this kind of, we want to go for this nice rounding here. Nice bevel. So actually how I came up with that is normally you would think of well just put, don't even deal with this mode type, just throw a bump channel on this, like a bump channel texture on here with a matte of the font that JPEG of Illustrator file or Photoshop file and just adjust the bump or the displacement channel of that texture, but then you can't easily edit that and just go and say like, all right, well I want a J instead and then just reposition you actually have to make another matte or another image with that matte where you can use that in the displacement or the bump channel. So that's that's the name of the game of this workflow here is we don't we don't want to do bump channels or anything like that. So scale that back down. So I had to come up with a different way and messing around and I mean there's so many deformers I kind of ignore a bunch of them, but I was messing around. I was like, okay, I see this collision to former and it kind of looks like just by the icon itself, it looks like something that could possibly be kind of handy. So I decided, all right, let's let's give this a shot. So basically I want this this mode type object to deform the cube and kind of give it that like it's pushing out like Han Solo in the carbonite, right? We want we want it like we want the e to be Han Solo in this to be the carbonite block. And if you haven't seen Star Wars yet, I'm sorry, you don't pick up on that reference, but you should see Star Wars. So let's so we're going to need this collision to former to deform this block with the type basically. So the collision to former can't can't interact with the extrude nerves because it's just in this hierarchy, it just won't work. So we're going to actually have to group the objects, put it into a null. And if I move this null on the same level of the hierarchy, then we can actually get this working. So we have the collision to former applied. Now we just have to say, all right, we want this collider to be the mode type, we'll just name that e. So once I throw the e in there, you'll see nothing happens right away. We don't want intersect. We're going to actually need to choose inside stretch. So right away, you can see, OK, this e, if I move this around, it's pushing out. Remember, see Han Solo, his hand, all that stuff pushing out. And that's that's that's kind of the look that we want to go for. We don't want that extreme of a bevel, though, because it's ever so subtle, but it really adds a lot if you have that effect. So what we'll go into here is adjust some of these settings. If you go into advanced, if you start playing around with some of these, you can kind of get a feel for what these things do. So if I bump up the steps, I can't really see too much, but it looks like it's kind of tightening the stretch. Just kind of stretches things out, softens that bevel or the deformation. So we actually want to keep the stretch pretty, pretty low because we want the we just want a slight bevel at the base of the letter. And if we mess with the relax, you can see that that just kind of relaxes kind of like this is a cloth. So we actually want to we don't want to keep that down too much because then you start getting these jaggies here. And you can actually alleviate that a few ways by doing the relax or by going in here and you're extrude. And remember why I said this is important and why I worked like this so you can bump up the subdivision and kind of smooths everything out. You'll see you'll have this kind of pinching here on these edges. You can get rid of that by simply let's go adjust the height and just kind of move the move the font away from the move the font away from the edges or just not have it go out that far because then that'll render out and you'll get some funky edges going on. So let's bring the height down there. OK. So that's all right. Let's go back into the collision settings here and can play around with the stiffness. See that that's kind of fixing our edges here. If we get our shrugged down not doing anything right now. But see if we adjust the flex. We think kind of reacts with this stiffness value up there. So you can kind of play around with these settings to to get what you're going for. One thing I noticed that helped is if you bring this up bring the text up and then you then you can kind of get that nice bevel right there. But you can see that the the actual text is getting in the way the text objects get in the way. And if I turn off the visibility there you can you can start to see the results and it's still not looking like that. So we really need to tighten this up a little bit too. One thing I found that helped is if on the text object you add a fillet cap and if you adjust the steps just the radius it helps out a little bit. Another thing is just keep playing with these settings to get it to the way that you would like it to look. So let's if we adjust the steps down so that kind of tightens it up a little bit. Tightens it up a lot actually. And then we can use this relax to kind of smooth smooth that out. And again we can go to actually bring that down and we can go into the extrude nerves and bring down the subdivision of that the subdivision of that cube face as well. Let's go into our collision again. Stiffness just to smooth all those edges out. Let's choose that. So it's just a lot of messing around with all these values trying to smooth all these values out. So you get the look that you want. And right now right now you're getting we're getting a pretty good looking effect going on. It's kind of looking looking pretty pretty close. See if that helps any let's leave that alone. Let's go into make it a smaller radius for the fillets. Crease. That's not looking good. Let's bring that back down. So like I said, it's a lot of time. This is exactly how I got the look the last time is just messing around. And if you bring this out a little bit more to that helps. The one thing is is that you can see that this texture here is a lot lighter than this texture. And that's just because of keeping this smooth. In a letter press you would need to smooth this out so that the ink kind of didn't leave spots or anything like that. So you always got this dark and tarnished edge. So keep it in mind that you probably want to use two textures and it's pretty hard to kind of do polygon selections to assign different tags. So how I came up with doing this is if you turn that back on you can see that the polygons are overlapping so I can't just simply throw a lighter metallic texture on that and a darker metallic texture on the block. So if I render that out you can see that the polygons are overlapping it just doesn't look very good at all. So one thing I actually stumbled upon after playing around with some settings is that if I just do a negative value, let me zoom out and actually take these textures off so you can see a little bit better. You can see that totally changes how the collision deformer works. So you instead of having the nice rounder you have this kind of globby look. So one other thing is that if you do a smaller depth that'll actually smooth a lot of stuff out as well. So I think I actually did like if you do a negative 0.5 so you can still see that polygon overlaps and maybe let's do a negative seven. Let's just do a negative one. All right, so now if I render this no textures applied but I just want to see if there's any polygon overlap here. So looking like we're good on that front. Let's actually zoom in here. You see that this doesn't line up exactly so let's do some more tweaking. You can see that by using a negative depth value totally changes how the collision deformer acts. To get the, I mean sometimes if you just wanna, you just want this whole thing to be the same color that'll work perfectly fine for you. You don't need to worry about the negative depth but since I wanna use two separate textures doing it this way with the negative depth really works nicely. So let's actually see how this looks with no caps. So right now that matches up a little bit better but not perfect and then we get this stuff messed up so let's actually do the fillet caps again. Let's go back into our deformer, collision deformer. Let's try to get these edges to match up a little bit better. The stretch, up to size. Down, do a step to one. This is kind of lining up pretty good now. We don't gotta get too exact because once we zoom out it kind of blends in anyways and one other thing we can do is always keep in mind you can up the subdivisions and that'll help get a little bit more exact look here. So let's go in here, drop down, stretch down. Just a lot of trial and error here. Let's up that and all right, I'm pretty happy with that. It's not perfect but it's looking better. Let's bring that down, this is your, there we go. Okay, maybe stretch will smooth that out. That's looking pretty good. Okay, so we've got the depth subdivision and all that's good. So now let's actually just apply our textures and see how this looks. Let's throw some lighting in here. It's getting a little slow in my viewport so let's go to lower quality. Let's put some area lights in, set an angle, put that up there. Let's get an area shadow. Point out all the stops, we want some really nice lighting here. And let's duplicate this, bring this light over here. Down, maybe put some tiny bit of blueish tint to that one. And let's do an HDRI sky object. So let's go into our sky object. Let's throw a HDRI on that bad boy. And just so we can kind of hide it, put a composing tag on that. Don't want it to cast shadows or receive shadows. Don't want to see it in the camera view. And we want to see it by raising GI, so that's all good. And all right, let's turn on the level of detail to high, zoom in a little bit and make sure our, put some ambient occlusion on. So we can see, so really accentuate the shading on the edges here and let's give this a go. So one thing I'm seeing right away is this texture. If you look in here, this texture has a nice bump map or a normalizer map and that's actually new to R14 is instead of using bump, you can actually use normal deformations and put the new normalizer effect on there. And it'll actually, instead of just a normal black and white map, it'll actually use a UV, turn your bump maps, your black and white bump maps or whatever or just colored images and turn them into a faux kind of normal map. So it will really act a little bit better with the lighting in the scene. So anyways, that's, there's some nice textures applied on here, normal maps. And so let's actually do cubic mapping here. You can see this texture is a heck of a lot better. So it's kind of just adjust, adjust these, let's bring this to 200 by 200. And all right, let's do another render here. So you can see the normal, the normal map really bumping into that. So maybe we want to turn down the normal strength a little bit there. So in here, bring that down. The nice thing is that you can actually see it update the textures and a little bit of the lighting in the viewport too. That's new in R14 as well. So kind of nice. I'm not crazy with the size of the texture there. So let's bring that texture down. Let's make that seamless so we don't have any seams. Actually bring this down to that lower quality. Let's try 70 and turn seamless off. And there we go. It's looking a bit better. Let's see. Maybe we need to shine a little bit more light on this guy. So you can really see the bevel edge in there. So let's bring this light out one front. Let's actually bring the accuracy down on this. We don't want another five year render. Render. So you can start to see this nice rounded edge here. It's a little bit dark. But you can see it, that nice rounded bevel that I was talking about in here. Let me, just so you can see a little bit better. Let me actually brighten this texture. Darken that so much. Let's go to this texture here. And reflection down the normal bump. Down a little bit too, like one last render. So now you're starting to see a little bit better that rounding. You're still seeing a little bit of kind of gookiness right in here. But again, you can just jack down that subdivision setting and that'll take care of that. Or even play around with the collision settings and maybe do the relax a little bit more as well. And that'll smooth all this out up the steps too. I think the steps kind of act as a subdivision kind of smooth stuff out as well. So again, it's just a lot of adjusting these options, playing with the depth here, depending on if you want a separate texture for the front cap here. So you can get the nice lighter metal or wood color on this. See how this is a little bit more shiny texture than the actual block. So then, so you got your one block, right? And let's actually go down in level of detail again and let's actually go way low. So we're gonna actually, let's just do this, the E block and duplicate all of it. Actually, let's group that together. Let's just team group. And we're gonna duplicate all of this by holding down control, click and let's do J. Cause that's my name, block and let's keep it tidy, rename. And okay, so we're gonna go in here, J. We're gonna move this whole entire block over. My name's not J, it's EJ. So let's move that over there. We can go in here and adjust the block size. Let's make this a little bit more square. And let's do, let's do an uppercase J. And let's bring the height down. So that's kind of the whole point is that you make one of these, you get the look, the rounding the way you want to. You just duplicate the one block and resize it here. So there was a method to the workflow that I kind of came up with here is that you can easily just iterate and make a whole bunch of these blocks. Cause like I said, I had to make a whole entire wall of these and just spending the time and getting the one block to look perfect was really nice because then I have those, all those settings, I just duplicate it, just change the letter, change the font and to whatever you want. And you can easily bang out a whole entire wall of these guys. So can do one less render here. Like I said, it does, it does, it does bog down your computer quite a bit. If once you actually get all these guys set and you know you're not going to change it, you can just make everything editable. See, and I think at that point, you can actually believe you can just cache the deformation so it doesn't bog down. Cause I mean the collision deformation is what hogs up a lot of the memory. So if I go to, we don't want to auto time cause it would actually time out the deformation over your, each second over your timeline. So we just want to sample one frame. So we're going to go from start one frame at zero frame, stop at one frame and let's calculate. This is going to calculate the J. That's not what we want. Actually let's update. So we actually need to, I made it editable but I need to actually connect all these and delete. So all this is one object. And let's make that editable as well. Objects and delete, so all right cool. So now I just put that back on there and delete the extra nulls. Get rid of these guys. Now I think we have to reconnect the collision into the collider, yep. So move that object, the J object back in there. And so we've reconnected that to deformation. There's our cube. All right now let's do the caching. So this is when you're all ready to go and you don't need to edit anything anymore and you just want to navigate around the scene. So set this zero to one and let's do calculate now. And that's enabled. So let's just hide the E group. You can see my computer kinda struggling before with moving around. So now it's just super, super fast. And that's because that whole collision deformation calculation is now in the cache. So keep that in mind when you actually get to a point where you want to make everything editable and just navigate the scene and animate some of these guys because unless you work in low res mode or just have it where, let me actually bring this guy back. Or if you just work in a mode where you make sure you have your subdivisions up until you actually want to render. So you can actually animate and stuff like that. So keep that in mind when you actually want to render these if you just want to do like a print piece or something like that, I really don't have to worry about that. But when you do want to render make sure to bring the settings back down so you have that nice rounded bevel there. So that's how you go about creating a bunch of these cast metal type. Here's a, let me actually find one that I already did. And there you go. And I just, you kind of recreated this and made it into type. And I think I have my render here on the desktop. Let's see here. Yep, let me bring this over here. So there it is, fully rendered with that nice bevel curved edge down at the base there with the separate textures, all that good stuff. So hope you followed along there all right. And go make some wood blocks or cast.