Overview

This app demonstrates my new triangulated 3D font library. It lets you dynamically adjust various font parameters including different shapes, spacings and extrusions. Use the sliders and controls in the top-left of the app to interactively change settings. If you are keen, you can also enter your own text and export the resulting geometry as an OBJ, STL or PLY file.

I wrote this because I really needed to see and experiment with various font shapes, and to thoroughly stress test and optimise the code. Also, code-based unit tests can't really give the same qualitative feedback as actually seeing what example text looks like as various metrics are dynamically adjusted.

Why 3D Vector Fonts

Whilst the typical approach to 3D text is to texture map font glyphs onto transparent flat surfaces, this is tricky to get looking good and not totally suited to the kinds of model annotation I need/want to be doing.

I was using using my own line-based vector font library for annotating things, however Chrome version 57 onwards stopped supporting line widths greater than 1 pixel in WebGL on all platforms, regardless of the capabilities of the underlying graphics hardware. As Chrome is one of the most popular browsers at the moment, and single pixel lines on retina and other high resolution displays can barely be seen, I needed to sort something out quickly.

Interesting Features

Designing a dynamic 3D font is way harder than it looks. There are still a few configurations of stroke thickness and aspect ratio that cause same self-intersection in one or two glyphs, however on the whole I'm pretty happy with the results. Moreover, it has proved surprisingly fast and quite memory efficient.

© Dr. Andrew J. Marsh, 2017.