Cutout

[tom c]

Gman
yeah it was no piece of cake trying to work out all the angles etc. the shadows are really a crude interpretation, I tried to have them dark enough so thatpart of the standing letters could be seen. the standing lettrs seem to be ok ,just relocated at an angle.....and since they are the same color as the material, they should disappear .....unless the opposite side were of another color
Anyway that was my approach...
thanks for the critique
tom

[Grafixman]

Your 3D text effect reminded me of an old Photoshop trick that could also be easily adapted for PI. Basically, it consists of duplicating the text, then nudging the duplicates 1 pixel vertically, horizontally or diagonally with the keyboard arrow keys. Building it up layer by layer until you have a nice extrusion. It's easy with PI. Select your text, skew it, shift D to duplicate it, then nudge with the arrow keys. Shift D, nudge, shift D, nudge... again and again. Here's what I came up with after a few minutes of key pressing... You can combine objects into a single object then duplicate and nudge that for a longer distance to speed up the process.

[Grafixman]

Some more extrusions. Turn your path objects to 3d bevels before duplicating and nudging. This will produce the light and dark sides.