In this post, I’ll show you how you can work with text in Blender!
Did you know that Blender can work with text? This is great because you can do things like make awesome logo introductions or your own stylized ending credits for a film. Or if someone’s birthday is coming up, you could create one of your own video birthday cards. In fact, the logo for my website and YouTube channel was made using the text system in Blender. I’ve also used Blender to design the logo for each of my films.
How to create text in Blender
First, let’s see how we can create text in Blender. It’s actually pretty easy to be honest.
- Open up Blender and delete everything (A to select everything and X to delete).
- We can now add text! Do this by Shift+A -> Add -> Text.
- It’s pretty boring to see just the word “Text”. It might instead be more interesting to see the word “<Insert your name here>”. To change the text, simply press Tab. You will see a cursor in the 3D view. Delete everything like you would in Microsoft Word and change the text to whatever you like.
- And that’s how you create text in Blender!
Make that text look more fancy..
So you now have text, but it looks pretty boring with that default font. Word of advice: Don’t really show off any renders with the default font to the Blender community, they’re pretty quick to find out. It’s almost always better to change the font. So let’s do that!
- Now that you have your text, we should change the font. To do that, go to the Font Object tab (the one with the F on it) in the Properties window on the right.
- Go to where it says Font. You will see that next to Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold & Italic, they all use the same font ‘BFont’ which probably stands for Blender Font (just a guess). We need to change this. You can download a font from a website like 1001 Free Fonts (they literally have 1000s of free fonts you can use) or DaFont and store it somewhere. Or if you’re happy with the fonts that you use for Microsoft Word, you can use that too. If you use Windows, your fonts is usually stored in the directory C:\Windows\Fonts. Any fonts I download from the web I usually store in this directory so that I can use them in Microsoft Word as well if I need to. Note that fonts are usually stored as a .ttf file.
- Once you have your font, go back to Blender and let’s change ‘BFont’. Press the yellow folder looking button next to ‘BFont’ and locate the font you want. Then press ‘Open Font’.
- Now you should have some pretty neat looking stylized text!
- Wait! There’s more styling you can do. Underneath the font area, there’s some other stuff you can do. Like ‘Size’ changes the size of your text (or alternatively scaling in the 3D view). ‘Shear’ makes your text look italic but you can pull it even more. Try changing the values or moving the slider from side to side to see the change. We could use italics but I think ‘Shear’ is generally used so that we can animate it.
Another note: From what I’ve tried, I have never really been able to get the Bold or the Italic effect to actually work. It seems only the Regular works. Maybe it’s something within Blender but I’m not too sure. I used Blender 2.71 so later versions might not have this issue.
Let’s make 3D text!
It’s nice to have some neat looking text that we can customize, but we are working in a 3D software. So we should be able to make our text 3D! This is almost necessary for epic logo or movie introductions. Here are the steps to do just that:
- Tab again to get out of Edit mode, if not already.
- Go to the Modifiers tab in the Properties window.
- Then press Add Modifier and select ‘Solidify’. This makes any 2D object look 3D.
- Now our text is 3D! We can customize this modifier even more. If you want to make it thicker or thinner, slide or change the value of the ‘Thickness’ in the Solidify settings.
That’s it! You now have 3D text! You can apply materials and shaders on it as if it was a 3D model. Go and make something cool like a logo or something! I hope this tutorial has helped you and please feel free to ask me a question below! Thanks!
