Creating a 3D model of the Tomb Raider Logo in Blender 2.8 - Tomb-Raider-Level-Editor/Tutorials GitHub Wiki

Written by Not Again!

This is a step-by-step guide showing how to make a 3D model version of the Tomb Raider 2013 logo in Blender 2.8 It requires no prior knowledge of Blender, but if you are interested in getting to know Blender better, then the developer team's own Introduction to Blender 2.8 tutorial series on YouTube is a fantastic place to start.

Things you need for this tutorial:

• Blender
• the font for the logo

BLENDER

Each version of Blender conveniently has a portable version alternatively to the common installer version, which is incredibly useful if you want to use different versions of Blender simultaneously on the same machine (or generally prefer to not install things whenever possible). You can find every version of Blender, portable and installer, here: Blender's index of release (the portable versions have the file extension .zip and the installer versions have the file extension .msi)

For this tutorial we are going to use the latest version of Blender, which is currently 2.81a

Blender 2.81a - Installer Version Blender 2.81a - Portable Version

FONT

The font used for the original Tomb Raider reboot logo is Gotham Ultra by Hoefler&Co. type foundry, but we are going to substitute Montserrat Black, a popular Google font by Julieta Ulanovsky, because it is very similar to Gotham and free. You can download the font from FontSquirrel.

Comparison of Gotham Ultra and Montserrat Black:

Pretty similar, no? (just ignore the M :P )

Open Blender and once you got the splash screen out of the way (by hitting ESC or simply right-clicking your mouse outside the splash screen) this is what you see:

We don't need any of those things, so we select everything by pressing A and then delete by pressing X.

Now switch into top-down view by either pressing the Z-Axis in the upper right corner of the window (or by pressing Numpad 7) and add a Text object:

Next go into Edit Mode by hitting TAB - you'll see that the Text object now has a cursor and you can edit the text.

When you are done, switch back to Object Mode by pressing TAB again and then select the Text Properties menu on the right. We need to adjust some values in the highlighted sub-menus.

Shape:

The Resolution Preview U determines the polycount and vertex density. The default value is 12, but since we are making a model for a fairly old engine where every vertex counts I suggest decreasing that value to 5.

Font:

Here we can select our font (click the folder icon and select Montserrat Black) and set the size (10.000)

Paragraph:

Here we can position the text (Center and Bottom Base-Line), increase letter spacing slightly (1.100), and adjust line height (0.700)

Geometry:

And last but not least we are giving the text depth by adding an extrude modifier and a bevel:

I've set the value for Extrude to 0.5, but suggest you adjust that value to your liking. You can rotate the view freely by pressing and holding the middle mouse-button (scroll-wheel) or selecting one of the axes in the upper right corner of the window to take a look at the model from the side.

For the Bevel I've picked the value of 0.2. You'll notice that adding a bevel increases the width of the letters. To counter that and get the letters back to their approximate original size we change the Offset value to -0.2.

Resolution controls the subdivisions the bevel has - that is, whether it is a hard chiseled edge or smoothly rounded curve. We are going with a chiseled look and set the resolution to 0

Now We're almost done with the modelling part. What remains is converting the text to an actual mesh and clean it up a bit.

This is a good place to save your workand keep the file as starting point for any other logos you would like to make in the future, because at this stage nothing is finalized yet and you can freely change the font and add all kinds of modifiers - to warp the text for instance.

If you look at your newly created mesh in Edit Mode (TAB to toggle between Edit Mode and Object Mode) you'll see it's a bit messy. To fix that select the Face menu and then Beautify Faces:

Next step in our clean-up is to remove double vertices:

Now we need to rotate the mesh by -90° or it will be lying down when you import it into Tomb Editor. First make sure that your cursor is in the exact center of the grid like in the screenshot below, because this will be the pivot point around which the model rotates. If the cursor is off center hit Shift + C to remedy that.

You need to be in Edit Mode (TAB) and also have switched to side-view (with Numpad 3). Now either use the rotation gizmo and hold CTRL while rotating to rotate in 5° steps, or simply type R-90 on your keyboard and confirm with ENTER.

7. (optional) deleting the backside of the model

A potential final step would be to remove the backside of the model to lower the polycount, but that depends entirely on whether you want to use the logo in a flyby that shows its backside.

But if you opt to delete the backside then enable X-Ray (with ALT + Z) so you can also select those vertices that are obstructed by the ones in the front:

And that's it for the modelling part!

- Part two will cover the process how to warp and curve text

- Part three will describe how to best uv unwrap the logo and how to apply a texture