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I’d like to know how to emboss or deboss a more complex logo/mesh into another flat surface/mesh as shown in the example:

enter image description here

What I have got so far is: transforming a logo into an *.svg from Illustrator and importing it into Blender. Now that I try to convert it to a mesh it becomes quite messy and complex and I don’t know how to emboss or deboss it into another mesh.

I tried it with the Displacement modifier, however you need to really subdivide the mesh a lot of times to get an suitable result. Is there a more elegant solution?

faybn
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    I would first try using Ps or GIMP (maybe Ai would work too) to add an inner glow and outer glow to smooth the transition in height. Then use microdisplacement in Blender. Sorry I'm not able to write up a full answer at the moment, but that will give you at least an idea, hopefully. – Mentalist Sep 05 '17 at 10:47
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    if you need much detail, a detailed mesh is needed. You could simply fill svg faces, extrude the flat mesh and then use booleans to create emboss effects: see also https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/64567/partial-shape-subtracting-only/64696#64696 and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/84216/how-to-make-a-complex-selection-of-an-image-over-a-cylinder-top-bottom-face-and/84217#84217 for examples – m.ardito Sep 05 '17 at 11:16
  • Do you have a high quality image file of the logo? Or are you trying to recover it from this photograph? – ajwood Sep 05 '17 at 11:49
  • I made a logo myself with Illustrator. The picture attached is just an example of how it could look like. – faybn Sep 05 '17 at 11:58

3 Answers3

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Here's a quick guide for doing it with microdisplacement. Note this won't work for you if you actually need a good mesh, but it'll give a result similar to your reference image.

1) Enable Blender's experimental feature set:

enter image description here

2) Add a new Cycles materal, and set its displacement method to True:

enter image description here

3) Add a subsurf modifier; select Simple, and enable adaptive rendering:

enter image description here

4) From edit mode, select all vertices and unwrap the plane (U):

enter image description here

5) In an image editor, threshold your logo and blur it a bit:

enter image description here

6) Add the image texture to the displacement at your material output node:

enter image description here

The result should look something like this:

enter image description here

ajwood
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  • Hey, thanks for the answer! I know that quite some time passed since your answer, however my result looks totally jagged and not as smooth as yours. There must be something I’m doing wrong, I guess. – faybn Aug 10 '18 at 16:12
  • Try lowering the dicing scale in the adaptive subdivision modifier. Lowing it too much will spike your memory usage, but since you have quite a bit of high-res detail in your logo, it might be necessary. – ajwood Aug 12 '18 at 17:07
  • Great, thanks for your answer, will try that. – faybn Aug 13 '18 at 06:43
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I recommend to use a normal map instead of physically embossing or debossing the logo into a flat surface. By using a normal map you should get a similar effect without all the problems of a messed up mesh. You can use this freeware tool to create normal maps: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ssbumpgenerator/

In order to use a normal map you have to: - create a normal map with a 3rd party tool - unwrap your object - create a new material - create a new texture - load the normal map image into that texture - Switch the normal map checkboxes on (see image)

After that you should be good to go. I hope this helps.

Pandatology
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You could do this with two separate objects:

  1. import your logo as svg, which will be a 2D curve in blender; add a bit of "bevel depth" and/or "extrude" in the geometry panel of the data tab.
  2. add a plane mesh positioned just under you logo

Since they're two separate objects, you'll need to explicitly align their texture coordinates by using the "object" socket from a Texture Coordinates node.

enter image description here

ajwood
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  • Or you could try a variation on this, where you convert the curve to a mesh (Alt+C) after you bevel/extrude it. – ajwood Aug 15 '18 at 12:06