WINGS3D Mini Tutorial How to create Text with Nails by David Brinnen April 2006 HTML Version by Hans-Rudolf Wernli   «Chaos» prompted the writing of this mini tutorial >

— Introduction —
Moving the Camera To move the camera in the X- and Y-direction, click on the centre mouse button and move the mouse around carefully. Just click the left mouse button to freeze the scene. To move the camera in the Z-axes, press the centre mouse button and move the mouse. If the button is released, the camera is in the X/Y move mode and you have to left click to freeze the scene.		Selecting and Deselecting When the mouse is near a selectable part of the object, that part becomes green. When clicking the left mouse button, that part becomes red, which means it is now selected. When clicking on a selected part, it becomes unselected. To deselect everything, hit the space bar on the keyboard.

		Let's go Start Wings and right click in the empty world. The menu shown at left opens. Go to «Text» and select the rectangle at right. This opens another menu.

		Type in a word (here: «Text» and the font desired (here: «Verdana»).The more bisections, the finer the resolution of the characters.

		Randomly select some faces in all directions. The more faces selected, the more chaotic the result.

		Select «Inset» and make the faces smaller. The smaller the faces, the thinner the nails.

		Select «Extrude» «Normal» and push the faces out. At left, the faces were extruded to D = 1.5 The more the faces are extruded, the more "airy" the resulting figure.

		Select «Extrude» «Normal» and extrude the faces again — but only a bit. In the example, they were extruded to D = 0.15. This will become the pointy part of the nail.

		Scale down the size of the extruded faces, using «Scale Uniform». The example has them downsized to 80%. This makes a dull point for the nail.

		Hit the + key — or select «More» from the «Select» drop down menu. This selects the points.

		Now, «Mirror». This example takes quite a while to perform the mirroring. Obviously, the quantity of selected faces was a bit over-generous and the chaos is really complete.

		In this experiment, only the faces shown at left were selected. They were Inset to 50%, Extruded to 1.0, and again Extruded to 0.1. Then the points were Uniform Scaled down to 50% and finally the full point selected with +.

		Left, the result after the Mirroring, which was compeleted considerably faster then the first example and got a bit clearer and simpler — it still looks pretty chaotic, though.

		When you are happy with the result, select the complete object and export it as 3ds.

German and HTML Version by Horo - 23. April 2006.		The object imported and rendered in Bryce, lit by two Coloured Light Rings. The object was copied twice, the copied ones downsized a bit and placed left and right behind the main object.