strange artefacts on extrude

[AdamT]

There's no way that I know of to get around that. The problem is that when you make the fillet too wide, it starts crashing into itself in tight bends, and that makes it impossible to create a cap. You can see what's going on if you switch to fillet only (as opposed to fillet cap).

[Rantin Al]

Just scale it up. I tried with a factor of 10 in XYZ. Bingo.

HTH, Alan.

[JeremyW]

Wow, that scale up tricked really worked...Cool.
I was gonna suggest unchecking "Constrain" for the caps. This of course makes you font look fatter, but artifact free. You could compansate by using thinner font, or better yet, start with your font, and "CreateOutline" of the text spline to pull it in.

[Rantin Al]

Another tip is to tidy up the splines and get rid of extra un-necessary points.
On the other hand, you sometimes have to add others to balance the flow.

The 'hole splines' had different start point positions and the 'd' was reversed.
The 't' had extras on the top ascender.

Scaling it up is only a partial solution but it does allow a bit more control.

Here is the modified file to see what I am jabbering about.
Cheers, Alan.

[AdamT]

Not to be a wet blanket, but scaling up is not really a solution. If you look at the relative width of the scaled up fillet vs. the width of the original file, you'll see that the former is a lot narrower. If you scale it to match the original you get the exact same problem.

[rodney71]

thanks for the tips guys. I agree with Adam that scaling up is not really a solution so far as I can tell. As soon as you proportionally scale up the rounding/bevelling you get the same problem. Your explanation is probably the right one Adam but the puzzling thing is that even if i'm careful not to cross a threshold where geometry overlaps on thinner parts of the letters, I still get faces dropping out or reconnecting to others in wierd ways. Only with very small radius does it work right.

Alan, I didn't find any difference in your file once I turned up the radius and I had also played with reversing sequence direction on inner counters for letters like the e, a, and d. I don't think the extra points make a difference unless they overlap each other like in tight corners. I've tried adding and removing points without improvement.

JeremyW, I think your suggestion, though finnecky, is probably the only one that will achieve what i'm after. Turn off constrain and start with a spline that has been choked to be a little narrower.

thanks again.

[rodney71]

On second thought, Jeremy, that's producing some problems with overlap also. In the end what I want is to have a nice rounded top surface to the letters so it picks up reflections nicely and looks chrome-like. would you recommend Displacement?

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