Hello My Name Is: Hand-drawn tag, turned into a 3D model
Draw a tag on a name sticker, give its strokes a nib, depth and a turn, and take it away as a sticker PNG or an OBJ.
TROUBLE, drawn by hand and extruded: the sticker PNG straight off the app's toolbar, 1800 × 1476 px. The settings behind it are the ones this post walks through.
The "HELLO my name is" sticker is an office name tag, and it is also a classic graffiti surface: write your tag on it at home, slap it up outside. I built Hello My Name Is as a digital slap tag. The sticker is the canvas, and whatever you write on it can come off as a solid object.
Below is how the sticker above got made, from the drawn line to the file. The drawing itself can't travel in a link, but the settings can: open these exact settings, draw your own tag and it gets the same treatment.
How this one got made
Draw it, then flip the sticker to 3D
Open hmni.krshi27.art and draw on the white body of the sticker, with a mouse or a finger. Each stroke is kept as you drew it, wobble included. The arrows at the bottom left undo and redo a stroke (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z work too).
TROUBLE in Tag view, as drawn: a long T crossbar through the R, the B's spine running below the line. The Tag / 3D toggle sits in the middle of the red toolbar.
Then press 3D in the toggle. The same strokes come back as solid ribbons, and at the default settings they are fat and seen dead-on.
Turn it so the depth shows
Head-on, a 3D tag looks like a flat one with dark edges. Turn it. Drag the preview and the Vertical and Horizontal sliders follow, or open the settings (the gear icon) and set them under View: 17° and 352° here.
Head-on against turned, everything else at its default. Look at the dark faces along the right and lower edges: that is the depth, which head-on you only guess at.
A thin nib, held at a tilt
The defaults are a broad, flat nib. Under Mesh, set Thickness Y to 0.03, Thickness X to 0.02 and Thickness angle to 34°. The strokes thin out and the counters of the R, O and e open up.
The cross-section works like a marker nib held at one tilt the whole way. That is why Thickness angle is an angle in the world, not one that follows the stroke: a real pen doesn't rotate in your hand on every curve.
Default nib against a thin one at 34°. The letters stop merging: compare the O and the e.
Enough depth to read as solid
Depth sets how far each stroke extends backwards.
Depth 0.05, 0.10 and 0.40, nothing else changed. At 0.40 the side faces start to fill the gaps between letters.
0.10 keeps the letters apart and still reads as an object. Past about 0.4 the tag turns into a block.
Taper, variation and a bend
Four more Mesh sliders make it look drawn rather than stamped. Depth variation 0.5 makes the strokes in the middle of the drawing order deeper than the first and last. Taper 0.50 thins each stroke towards its ends, and Taper balance −0.5 moves its fattest point a quarter of the way in from the start. Depth shift 0.3 bows every stroke towards you.
Before and after the four shape sliders. Look at the T and the tail of the R: on the right they end in points, and the O sits deeper than the T beside it.
A projection baked into the geometry
Projection under View warps the whole tag the way a drawing in perspective does: Standard, Parallel, 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-point, or Fisheye, with Distortion setting how hard. Tick Show projection grid to see the vanishing lines.
Standard, 4-point and Fisheye, all three at Distortion 0.5 so the difference shows. The sticker at the top uses 4-point at 0.1, a nudge rather than a bulge.
I apply the projection to the model's points. A camera change would only alter the view; baked into the points, the drawn-in-perspective look travels with the file into Blender or a 3D print.
From screen to object
The download icon at the right of the toolbar saves the sticker PNG: the red frame around the preview as it stands. Scroll the preview to zoom in first, since the PNG takes the view exactly as it is.
The solid comes from the settings panel: Export mesh, then Export OBJ.
Every control this post changed, at the values the sticker uses, with Export OBJ underneath.
The OBJ is built the same way as the preview. For a while the server built its own mesh, and opening the file in Blender next to the screen showed two different objects, so I made the server use the preview's construction: the file you download is the object you approved.
The OBJ of the same tag at the same settings, opened outside the app: 20,768 vertices, one solid per stroke, the turn and the 4-point bulge already in the geometry.
From there it goes into Blender to light and render, or into a slicer for a 3D printer.
Other controls, one line each
Text: type a word and press Apply text to set it in the Karoshirt centreline font instead of drawing, with Size, Spacing and Skew.
The upload icon imports an SVG and turns its lines into strokes.
Curve: Simplification decides how much hand wobble survives, Resolution how finely the line is sampled (6 and 200 here).
Fill faces off shows the ribbons as wireframe.
Your turn
Open these settings, draw the thing you've been writing in margins for years, and change one thing: Fisheye instead of 4-point, or Depth 0.40.
If it comes out well, send me what you made. I'll ask before showing it anywhere.