For the video below, I needed a way to extrude any font into 3D objects for use with ofxBullet.

There are many ways to do this and other examples using OpenFrameworks in this thread. My approach was a little more complicated than it should have been, but it worked. I used the following to get the paths of the letters for any font:

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<code>
ofPath path = font.getCharacterAsPoints(letter);
vector <ofpolyline> polys = path.getOutline();
// resample the font points so that we have a point every (x) pixels;
for (int i = 0; i < polys.size(); i++) {
 
	// now resample and draw new dots
	ofPolyline sampled = polys[i].getResampledBySpacing(samplePixels);
	sampledPolys.push_back( sampled );
	// outline
	for (int j = 0; j < sampled.size(); j++) {
		points.push_back( ofVec3f(sampled[j].x, sampled[j].y, 0.));
	}
}
</code>
</ofpolyline></code>

I also draw the letter into an FBO for later use. I triangulate the points using ofxDelaunay and remove points if they are not inside the letter polygon. After that, I simply duplicate the remaining points and move them in z-space to make the extrusion. Check out the example below for the full source.

Check out some of the images.


Download the XCode Project for OF 007. Text 2 3D.