Expert: Alan Zube - 3/27/2008

Question
Hello,

I am sorry if this is totally outside of your expertise, but I thought I'd ask anyway.  I am looking for a way to 3 dimensionally warp text to an image.  I have been researching this for the past few days, but I haven't cone up with anything solid.  I am quite experienced with the Adobe Creative Suite (photoshop, illustrator,e tc) but I have not found a way to do it there, so I thought it was time to look into bigger badder software.  Basically, I want to be able to delete the original image and have the 3-dimensional representation left behind in the text. If you know of a software that can do this, or have any suggestions that might lead me to the  right place, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you

Sara

Answer
Hi Sara,

AutoDesk Inventor will do this for sure. It has an emboss and a decal feature with the ability to "wrap text to surface". Then you can either suppress the original surface or delete it all together.

You should be able to download a free 30 copy of Inventor. If you want a longer term copy go to www.schroff.com. Some of their Inventor texts come with a one-year student copy and run around $70, which is a great deal.

Hope this helps!

Alan