I think this engraving style suits my jewellery gallery I wish I could do this with Bryce, but I have this feeling that Bryce can't keep straight lines Any suggestions?

You could do a boolean operation with a terrain that is embossed with the letters.

Attached Link: http://www.graphicsteck.com/forums/index.php

Bryceteck has a great tutorial on engraving http://www.brycetech.com//

Attached Link: http://server13.hypermart.net/madsnake3/3d/Gems.zip

Since youi're interested in jewelry, here's a link to some gems that are for non-commercial use only in the Free Stuff area. They were made by HumanoidExotik, but in the free stuff section, the url that is listed is incorrect. Apparently, the gems are located on a server that uses case-sensitive file names, and the link in free stuff goes to gems.zip but the file is actually Gems.zip. Not a bad set of gems if I may say so, the cuts are fairly accurate. And given the free aspect, they rock! no pun intended ;)

Here's a sample of engraving with a terrain. The terrain is at 1024x1024 px resolution.

ooooo, I love it very nice...Sharen

Attached Link: http://www.armanisoft.ch/webdesign/elefont/elefont.htm

There's a fast way of doing it. Get a freeware app called elefont and make your text in there using whatever font and style you want. Export dxf or whatever format it has. Bring it into bryce and boolean. Texture if you want cuz even a boolean will show the texture on the engraving if you set that in your properties box. Two caveats. 1) If you boolean the text group (each letter is an object) it won't work cuz the individual letters have to be a negative and they are neutral by default. So, move your text group to an open area in the workspace, ungroup. Set each letter to negative. Group again and set the group to negative, then boolean with your object. If you run into any problems ... just put your group where you want it and ungroup then boolean again. 2) This doesn't work well on curved survaces unless you move each letter in place by hand (ie, no text as a group).

ouch - could you do the text in Carrara and then do the boolean in Bryce? or would that just come out as a block ? I just got my copy of Carrara but haven't studied that yet. BTW if you get to eovia.com before the 8th, you might be able to get a deal. I paid $186 for the upgrade. (I know I shoulda got Bryce upgrade but all things in good time.) - TJ

JohnPenn, u gave me a good idea, but my point is to make things as much as possible on my own, without using terrains etc. I'll present my next engraving text shortly

I suppose the gems link is Bryce-related, right?

Perhaps I misunderstood, I thought you were trying to do letter engraving in Bryce. Well, you could always export the terrain as a mesh and then reimport it into Bryce, but that seems a bit silly. The link is to the free gems by HumanoidExotik that I mentioned. If you like rendering jewelry, they may be helpful. I don't know what app they were orignally modelled in, but it sure wasn't Bryce. Though they do import quite nicely. Also, you might want to check out the thread on TIR (further down on the forum page), it's a neat render setting for Bryce when you're working with jewelry and gems that really makes things sparkle.

Hey, instead of elefont and the multiple boolean issues, or the rough edges from the terrain editor, you can use Amorphium to create a text and shape it to fit just about any object, including the compound curve of the inside of a torus. It imports as a single .obj and click solid when boolean.

Depending on how close-up you want to get, I've achieved reasonable stone engravings using negative bump mapping. It helps to have some sort of gradient in the font, but that's easy with Photoshop.