Creating a Logo at BlenderNation 125/05/Friday 02h57

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Creating a Logo
(This tutorial is also available in German and Italian)

About Blender
Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive
creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU Public License.

You can download Blender free of charge on www.blender.org. On the Blender site you will also find a
gallery with cool Blender art.

Introduction
Well, this time things aren’t going to be as exciting as the ride in the mines, but I’m sure I can show you all
some very useful Blender techniques.

This kind of stuff is actually the kind of work that pays computeranimators. While not being very
sophisticated, this may be important to remember ;-)

The techniques that you will learn in this tutorial include:

Rotoscoping (tracing a background image)

Working with curves

Tracing your logo

Note before you begin: unfortunately as of Blender 2.37 the Background Image that is used below is broken.
To do this tutorial you’ll need to grab a copy of Blender 2.37 from the Blender Release Archive.

The most tedious part of creating a logo animation is tracing the logo. In most cases all you’ll get as a
freelancer is a paper print, or a bitmap of a companies’ logo.

In this case, I just ripped a cool looking logo from the internet.

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Fire up Blender and remove the plane from the middle of the screen. Select ‘Background Image..’ from the
View menu:

Press the ‘Use Background Image’ and select the Open Folder icon next to ‘Image’.

Select a file, and load your logo into Blender. When you’re done (hit enter to load the image) you’ll see the
background picture in your viewport.

Next, add a curve (a Bezier curve is fine). While still in edit mode, go to the editbuttons screen and select the

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‘Convert to Poly’ button. I always find it easier to create a general outline of a logo in straight lines first.
Later, I’ll convert everything back to smooth curves - don’t worry!

Now, move the vertices to strategic locations on the logo. Keep drawing by holding down the control key and
left-clicking your mouse. This will add new vertices and connect them to the existing curve.Make closed
shaped by hitting the ‘c’ button. When you need new vertices for a new shape, duplicate an existing vertex
(shift-D), and move it to another position.Don’t worry too much about being very precise yet.

The picture above is the result after tracing only the numbers. For a bit of detail, look at the following picture,
and pay attention to the way I drew the corners. This is important, because later on, I’ll convert the polygons
back into Bezier curves and the corners will be perfect this way.

Keep drawing, and don’t worry about overlapping lines. Here’s the result of tracing the entire image:

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Yes - chaos. But I’ll change that now! Select all vertices and convert them back into bezier curves. Now
comes the real trick: for vertices along smooth parts of the logo (like the circles on the left), select the vertex,
and hit h-key. This will align the bezier handles and create a smooth curve at that point.This is also the time to
pay attention to positioning the vertices more precisely. In this case, the logo was scanned at a pretty low
resolution, you you’ll probably need to do a lot of quessing about the correct positions.Here’s an example of a
part of the ‘3′:

I’m afraid that for the rest, it’s just a lot of work, but in the end you should have a pretty good looking trace of
your original bitmap. Also, keep the final purpose of your model in mind. For some low-resolution web
designs, you probably don’t have to worry too much about being very accurate!

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The fun part

This is, or course, the better part of this tutorial ;-)

I’ll just assume that we have what I like to call a ‘default’ customer. That is: a customer who wants a shiny,
metallic looking logo. Oh well. Let do that!

First, give the object some depth. Leave editmode, go to the editbuttons screen, and set the following values:

Ext1: 0.2
Ext2: 0.02
BevResol: 4

Next, because I want to create a nice, smooth looking , I crank up the DefResulU value to 25. (Ton will
propably disagree on me here, but hey!)

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Now I’d like to give the numbers in the logo a different material than the rest of the logo. I need to convert
the numbers into separate objects for this. Enter edit mode, and select a vertex on one of the numbers. Hit P.
The number is now separated. Repeat these steps for the other numbers.I’ll leave the rest up to your own
imagination. This is what I did with it:

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15 Responses to “Creating a Logo”

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1. 1 zlatko nikolic Jan 13th, 2006 at 6:33 pm

thank you for this tutorijals.

Best regards from Zlatko Nikolic - SERBIA

2. 2 Carbon Jan 17th, 2006 at 6:59 pm

Nice tutorial, ill use it sometime. Thanks!

3. 3 Andrew Feb 9th, 2006 at 3:16 am

at the shit-f7 i cant find ‘Background Pic’ button. A ‘load’

can someone help me find it??

4. 4 bart Feb 9th, 2006 at 7:19 am

Andrew,

I checked and there are two problems: first the interface has been changed. I fixed that in the tutorial.
Next, the Background Image is broken in the latest Blender releases. Get a copy of 2.37 to do this
tutorial from http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.37/

Bart

5. 5 blenderer Feb 18th, 2006 at 2:30 am

how do you fill in the faces i don tunderstand

?

6. 6 Gabriel Feb 24th, 2006 at 4:13 pm

Hi,

Congratulations for your website, it’s very well done!

I like your tutorial and am actually trying to make a 3D logo with Blender. I have a problem:

- how can I fill in the bezier curves? For example, the big curves around the logo: I have the same big
rounded curve than you have in your logo. I have created two bezier curves, one that follows the inside
part of the curve and one that follows the outsidepart of the curve. Then I use the same values than
yours, the logo begins to look 3D, but the inside is empty… I can’t fill in the part between the two
curves. How do you fill it in?

Thank you if you can help me!

Gabriel

7. 7 bart Feb 26th, 2006 at 9:31 am

Curves are filled automatically; just close them with C. If you have curves within curves then Blender
will automatically determine which part should be filled and which part should be left open.

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8. 8 Furio Feb 28th, 2006 at 5:15 pm

Even if it’s outside the scope of this tutorial, the same result can be obtained with an external tool:
Inkscape (an open source vectorial graphic program available for linux and win) have a quite powerful
tracing option that usually does a very nice job converting bitmaps to curves on the first take (and you
can anyway adjust the result, it’s the program job!). You can then save the curves in pure SVG format
and load them in Blender via the Paths python script. I used this feature a couple of times and it was
quite satisfied with the results (this reduces a lot the manually adjusted bezier knots ;) )

9. 9 Tamlyn Rhodes Mar 15th, 2006 at 11:58 am

Hey thanks for the Inkscape tip furio - that bitmap tracing function saved me a load of time! In fact
Inkscape uses a component called potrace so you could even bypass it and use poscape directly:
http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

10. 10 somebody Mar 24th, 2006 at 11:15 pm

great tuorial egt wel goed hoor ook al kan je dit niet lezen!!! really greeat by the wy

11. 11 chris Mar 31st, 2006 at 3:25 am

what exactly am i doing when you say to “add a curve”? am i tracing the background or just adding a
curve anywhere?

12. 12 nathan Mar 31st, 2006 at 10:20 am

great logo but the .blend file is replaced some where could you put it back (update the link)? or mail it
to me? tnx, you did a great job :) nathankroon at hotmail.com

13. 13 bart Apr 2nd, 2006 at 9:44 pm

@nathan: I’ve decided to remove the link alltogether. You don’t really need that file when you have just
learned how to do this in the tutorial, right? :)

14. 14 Ahriman Apr 14th, 2006 at 11:19 pm

Nice tutorial, I’m only new to Blender, and have learned heaps from your tutorials. Awesome :)

15. 15 deep Apr 20th, 2006 at 5:55 am

The logo really cool but I get real problem to manipaulate the bezier curve I studying A naiamation and
got the work to trace out a logo for test and I can tell you it turn into a real nightmare . plz help your
advise will be the most welcom

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Creating a Logo
IT: Creare un Logo
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