Modular 3D Text - Complete ingame ui sytem

Hi,
Looks like there are some issues with the fonts. They need to be fixed in some kind of font editor before getting used.
I suggest Font forge, it's free.

Here are some things I suggest:
1. The letters aren't centered properly.

Open the font in font forge, Right click the affected characters and click Center in Width


2. Flipped characters. Example: d in the mono font. The spacing of the fonts are fine but the pivot of the character is way off, so it looks like the spacing is off.
In font forge double click the letter to open the editor, press Ctrl + Shift + D or go to Elements > Correct direction.
You might want to unlink it too. Not always necessary but suggested.

3. Also, select all the characters,
Elements > Simplify > Simplify.
Overlap > Remove Overlap.

4. Font forge should suggest some options itself when you generate the font, apply them as well.



There could be other issues but that's all I found with a quick lookup.
I think the easiest option would be to use a different similar font. But if you decide to fix this one and need any help, don't hesitate to contact, always happy to help.

Hopefully I explained it properly. I am super sick. My grammar is a bit more off than usual

 

Hey, I am using v2.0.0 and I am getting some scenes that have this same problem. I believe it happened when I made the text a prefab. That is what seemed to really mess things up.

That script did help fix the issue though.

 

Hi,
There is a newer version on the asset store. Please update to that version and that should stop the issue from reappearing

 

Hey, the online documentation seems to be deleted?

Also all my text seems to be arranged vertically on default settings but I can't find anything related to bounding boxes

 

Here a screenshot

 

Hi
This is the link of the documentation : https://app.gitbook.com/@ferdowsur/s/tinygiantstudios/
Seems to be working. Maybe it was down for some reason.


The bounding box is the length and height. In the scene view, turn on Gizmos. You will be able to see it as well. They will appear vertically if they don't fit in length.

From looking at the screen shot, if I didn't miss anything, it seems like they should fit Horizontally. Is it happening with all fonts or that particular one. If it's only that font, can you select that font and check the character spacing value in that font. The spacing should be 1 in most cases. Maybe it was changed accidentally.

 

Hi - I tried setting up some Katakana fonts and was unable to get it to work in the Blender extension. I get the following error. I was running this on Blender 2.92 and Windows.

Code (CSharp):

1. Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
2.   File "C:\Users\Alex\Documents\GitHub\JapaneseText\Assets\Tiny Giant Studio\Modular 3D Text\Blender Font Extractor\Font Extractor - Unzip to use\Open with blender - Text extractor.blend\Text Extractor", line 45, in execute
3.   File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.92\2.92\scripts\modules\bpy\ops.py", line 132, in __call__
4.     ret = _op_call(self.idname_py(), None, kw)
5. RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.object.select_all.poll() failed, context is incorrect
6.  
7. location: <unknown location>:-1
8.  
9.  

I even get an error with the default character range that the Blender scene opens with. This is the error in that case:

Code (CSharp):

1. Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
2.   File "C:\Users\Alex\Documents\GitHub\JapaneseText\Assets\Tiny Giant Studio\Modular 3D Text\Blender Font Extractor\Font Extractor - Unzip to use\Open with blender - Text extractor.blend\Text Extractor", line 130, in execute
3.   File "C:\Users\Alex\Documents\GitHub\JapaneseText\Assets\Tiny Giant Studio\Modular 3D Text\Blender Font Extractor\Font Extractor - Unzip to use\Open with blender - Text extractor.blend\Text Extractor", line 57, in processLetter
4. RuntimeError: Error: Cannot read 'C:\Users\Alex\Documents\GitHub\JapaneseText\Assets\Tiny Giant Studio\Modular 3D Text\Blender Font Extractor\Font Extractor - Unzip to use\Open with blender - Text extractor.blend': unsupported font format
5.  
6.  
7. location: <unknown location>:-1
8.  
9.  

Am I doing something wrong?

 

Hi,
Sorry to hear you are having issues.

The first error appears if you try to extract the font in Edit mode. Please swap to object mode first to do it.
(I will change it to work in both mode next update)

The second error says unsupported font format. Will it be possible to share the font file? I got the Katakana font from here to test: https://www.dafont.com/katakana.font
If it's the same font, can you check the font file downloaded from here?

 

Thanks for getting back to me - it seems I missed a step. So I need to download a font first (ttf, for example) and then, when I click extract, I select that font. Is that right? I'm a bit confused about how to set the range, however. When I left it as a default (! to ~) it worked fine. When I actually tried to select the Katakana range, they all came out as squares.

 

Hi,
Yes, you are on the correct process.
Blender writes squares when a font doesn't have the appropriate character. Sounds like Blender can't find the characters in the Katakana range.

Can you check if the font has the characters? There several ways to check it.

Example:
1. Install the font on your computer,
2. Open up a Doc,
3. Type the missing characters with the font.
4. Check if they are written and in the correct font you are checking. Some software like MS Word automatically changes the font for characters that don't exist in the original font. So, they dont appear as block but that specific character is in a different font.

Or,

Open the font in something like Font Forge and you can check all info/characters of the font.

 

Version 2.0.2

• Editor performance improvement
• Fixed a bug that was causing issue creating new lines in text in Editor

 

Version 2.1.0

• Updated asset to 2019 Unity version to comply with up-coming Asset store requirement.
• Bugfix: List/Button visual updates now sets text dirty to mark/save changes.
• Bugfix: In-editor, List/Button no longer updates text unnecessarily.
• Bugfix: Fixed a bug where controlling list with keyboard when list had 0 elements caused a error.
• In editor darkmode, modules have better coloring.
• Updated almost all inspectors.

 

Version 2.1.3

• Bugfix: Parent scale not properly being applied to text

 

Version 2.2.0

• Bugfix: Fixed text updater empty mesh check.
• Bugfix: Scripting define fix that was causing build error.

Version 2.1.3

• Bugfix: Parent scale not being applied to combined mesh properly

 

Had a question about the MText_Settings object. I checked the documentation but didn't see anything referencing it. Once i create one of those settings objects, how do I get it to apply to new text?

 

The settings file is just for the editor stuff by the asset.
There is no need to create new ones.

It just holds some default values for the asset and makes it easier to modify them if needed. And some custom editor values shared by multiple scripts.

 

What i'm trying to do is set the default material and size setting for text in my project. That way, when i create a new one, it uses my defaults. Is that not where I should be doing that? After I created a settings asset, none of the values I set in it were applied to new text that was created.

 

Couple of options:

1. I would recommend this. For simplicity, you can use a prefab. I think that would make it much easier to handle this scenario.

2. Select the Modular3DText.cs file in scripts folder and you can change the default text and material. Easy but that's it, those two variables only.

3. There is no way to handle multiple setting files as I don't see any use cases to do that. There is already a settings file in resources folder. You can change your default text values there. Having multiple might cause issues.

Open the MText_MenuItem.cs folder, modify the LoadDefaultTextSettings method to this. (Around line 311)

Code (CSharp):

1.         static void LoadDefaultTextSettings(Modular3DText text)
2.         {
3.             MText_Settings settings = EditorHelper.MText_FindResource.VerifySettings(null);
4.  
5.             if (settings)
6.             {
7.                 text.Font = settings.defaultFont;
8.                 text.FontSize = settings.defaultTextSize;
9.                 text.Material = settings.defaultTextMaterial;
10.                 //text.autoCreateInEditor = settings.autoCreateInEditorMode;
11.                 //text.autoCreateInPlayMode = settings.autoCreateInPlayMode;
12.             }
13.         }

Note that not all the values from the settings file are applied in the asset. That's why the file and the documentation for the file isn't out in the open. Slowly adding support for it one, two scripts at a time, since it can potentially break the asset by mistake.
The plan for this is to have a Tab in the tools window for setting like making mass changes in scene. Most of the codes that are there but commented out are to support upcoming changes.

I am currently working on a big update for the text that would make using the text much easier and will improve the process of extending the asset both by me(asset creator) and the user.

 

Ah thanks for that information! I guess the main thing I wanted was to be able to use the settings object (I don't need to create my own, I didn't realize one was auto created in resources) to globally define what font/material is used. My intent was never to have multiple, I just didn't know that there was a main one. So i'll use the one in the resources folder. Sorry for the confusion. The update sounds great though, looking forward to it!

Speaking of materials though, I'm migrating to your asset from vtext since it doesn't work well with the new prefab system (your ability to save the meshes to asset files is extremely useful, and the performance of just having it generate the text at runtime is fast enough that pre-generating the meshes isn't completely necessary). One feature that I do miss is the ability to set a different material for the sides and/or back of the text. I'm sort of faking that functionality using a shader at the moment, but is that something that you could look into adding?

 

Sorry, currently there are no immediate plans to add support for that kind of material setup atm. I will look into it in future.

 

Hello,
I'm having one issue with 2 Cyrillic letters, can you help please?
I use this font https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Yanone+Kaffeesatz?subset=cyrillic
and these settings:
Unicode Sequence
0021-007E,00C0,0410-042F
Everything works well except 2 letters:
0420 and 042B
I see "space" GameObject instead of these letters.
Thanks.

 

Hi,
The space/empty gameobject appears if a letter is missing in the exported font.

 

Hi,
Thank you for the information!
But when I use this font in UI text boxes the letters above works well. It's strange.

 

Hello, I just bought this asset on friday. I'm wondering how do you get the letters to have two diferent colors, for example white in the front/back and red in the borders? I'm trying to create something like your previews, but I'm not good with shaders. Do you have a shader that already does this by any chance?
(I added an image as reference, it's 2D text, and what I want to do is replicate that with your tool)



Thanks for your tool, it might be of great help in my project and also thanks in advance for your response.

 

Sorry for the late reply, I am having some issues with my personal life.

Example scene 16 is the one you are looking for. It isn't the best approach to get something like this but pretty easy one I think.

 

Hey @Ferdowsur Thanks for making awesome asset!

Btw, I'm having problem creating Korean font asset. after I included all these Unicode Sequences for Hangul (1100-11FF,AC00-D7AF,3130-318F,A960-A97F,D7B0-D7FF) I only sees individual words(ㄱㄴㄷㄹ...etc) working but not complete words(가나다라...etc).
These are the Hangul Syllables (AC00-D7AF) and it contains 11184 different characters (as it is actually combinations of individual characters). maybe because it is to many? I attached the link below for the Hangul Syllables.
Hangul Syllables - Unicode Character Table (unicode-table.com)

Could you tell me what is the problem here? please let me know! Thanks!

 

How performant is this asset compared to TextMeshPro?

 

They serve different purposes.

TextMesh Pro is definitely more performant if you are using for the UI canvas.

Modular 3D Text is more for in-game interactions that exist in the game space(?). It creates 3D meshes, not 2D images with depth. So, you can do a lot of fun things with them. Like add physics, create Shop signs etc. There are a couple of video samples in the store as example.

 

I definitely understand the different uses for them. I may as well elaborate my use case. I'm developing a card game. I know a card game _can_ exist in the UI but I want mine to exist in world-space. I need text on the cards. Having a UI canvas for every card is pretty out of the question. I also ideally want the cards affected by lighting and shadows.

World-space TMP meshes can supposedly dynamic-batch with each other pretty well, but dynamic-batching seems to no longer be a recommended performance optimization today due to the increased CPU overhead compared to the GPU benefit. I'm looking into GPU Instancing as a solution, but it seems very difficult if not impossible to write a shader to get TMP to do that. So I'm stuck with basically an extra draw call per card, or at best I can maybe batch cards that have the same text.

After experimenting around, I'm leaning toward possibly just trying mip-mapped bitmap text images loaded into material property blocks. But anyways, with all that explanation, I'd be interested in hearing if you think there's a way your asset might help me eke out some more performance. "No" is fine! I can definitely see there are lots of fun and interesting things that your asset enables with text and I've favorited it for the future

 

May I ask why? Even Unity recommends using several Canvasses (also within other Canvasses even) to group them together.

 

Multiple canvasses is necessary for rendering full UI (with text and images) in world-space, and in screen-space as part of a "single" UI, multiple canvases prevents needing to do a complete redraw for the entire UI every time a single UI element changes. This is why Unity recommends using several canvases.

Having multiple 3D canvases in a scene means they won't batch together on the GPU. They aren't even capable of dynamic batching like world-space TMP text are. That means (at least) 1 draw call per canvas. Canvases also require far more CPU resources to render than 3D text.

To demonstrate this with a test, I generated 100 canvases with UI text mesh components and spaced them out on the screen. It ran at about 960 fps. The I did the same thing but with 100 3D TMP texts. That ran at 1270 fps. When I check the two tests with the profile analyzer, I can see that the version using canvases is using a lot of resources on

PlayerLoop

,

UGUI.Rendering.EmitWorldScreenSpaceCameraGeometry

,

PostLateUpdate.PlayerUpdateCanvases

,

UGUI.Rendering.UpdateBatches

and

UIEvents.WillRenderCanvases

. These are all resources that the 3D text doesn't need to spend. This test was done with no dynamic batching, so 3D TMP text wasn't even benefitting from that and both tests had 101 batches.

With that all said, I'd like to avoid trying to rely on dynamic batching, so I'm trying to find a good alternative.

Edit: Oh and that's forgetting to mention that I can't get lighting and shadows while using world-space canvases.

 

Does Modular 3D text use anchors, or does it have some kind of a feature for responsive design? How should we account for UI on different screen resolutions?

 

The 3D text is on the the world space, not on the canvas. So, it doesn't support any built-in solution for responsive design.

It CAN be used on the canvas just like any other 3d meshes but that comes with the same advantage/disadvantage of using a cube mesh on UI. Because the asset creates 3D meshes.

I have personally used it with camera render texture for responsive design but I wouldn't call it supporting canvas, since that introduces unnecessary render time and extra hassle to set-up.

 

Is there a wat to do an outline or bevel? I don't see any options for it or module.

 

Sorry, there is no way built in way to do that.
For my personal project I use a outline Shader. You can find a lot of them for free. The texts support most shaders.

 

Version 2.2.2

• Bugfix: Some sample scenes weren't working as intended.

 

It doesn't seem like this asset supports the New Input System?
Am I missing something or is there a fix for this?

 

The current version of the asset store doesn't support the new input system.

I am currently working on a new version that supports it and quite a new feature like supporting more languages. The minimum input system package requirement is 1.1.0-pre.6
The current main to-do for the new version is updating documentation.

If you would like, I can provide it. Drop me a mail at: asifno13@gmail.com with your invoice number.

 

We are having an odd issue with the asset (supposedly when it's on sale):

This red text appears and won't go away even if all scene GameObjects are disabled.

It does go away if we remove the asset.

Any ideas on where to look?

 

That's odd. Can you check the version of the asset?

 

Just updated to latest and the problem is still present.
It's very odd, I deleted all objects in the scene, saved and reopened it and there's still this SALE text present, but it doesn't happen on a brand new scene.
It turns out SALE is from one of our own prefabs, but it's a prefab that is not added to the scene, and the same issue has happened to our artist with some of the other text prefabs as well. I dug into the scene file and found out it has some GameObjects that are somehow not shown in the editor.
I believe the issue presents itself when a project is reimported.
For now I'll try to just manually remove the unnecessary gameobjects from my scene file.

 

Hi,
My sincere apology for the error. That sounds like a very old bug. I am not sure why that is reappearing. There was a unity package manager bug that would download old versions of assets.
Can you check Tools>Tiny Giant Studio>Modular 3D Text for the version number? If that's 2.2.2.
I am looking into what could cause the issue to reappear in the current version.

Explanation of what could be happening:
Unity has a feature, Hide flag for objects that can be set to make objects invisible in hierarchy amongst other things. In one older version of the asset, this was turned on by default for the editor when combining texts, which would cause this bug. The option was under advanced settings > Hide letters in editor.
This feature has completely been removed from newer versions because I didn't find anyone that actually used it and currently is only for playtime now.

To make every hidden object visible in the hierarchy, you can use this script: Link

 

Thanks, that fixed it!

 

Happy to help!

 

Sneak peek of the new update

 

[This is the largest update yet.]
Version 3.0.0
Please completely remove the old asset from your project before updating it. I suggest updating only if you have some time or are on a new project.

• Better Single Mesh workflow: The new workflow massively improves the in-editor experience and prefab interaction.
• Layout systems overhaul: The layout system is separate from the rest now. So, it is easier to reuse it and create custom layout systems to fit your need. They can be used for any usage, even outside the UI/text system like creating a row of tiles, fences, and buildings.
• Better language support: 3D Fonts now keep the data from the original TTF file. So, missing characters can be created at runtime. This means improper character range input is less punishing. In the previous version of the asset, it couldn't handle languages like Korean/Chinese because combined letters weren't included in the 3d font because there are too many of them to hold individually. But, now it can generate them when needed as long as the original file data is kept.
• Better spacing: In previous versions, the asset would use character bounds to set the position of each character. This would often create a different look than its 2d counterpart. Now, this is moved to a setting that can be turned on/off and by default, the font will use the original "advance"/spacing specified in the TTF file for positioning.
• New input System Support Added
• Module systems overhaul: Modules are easier to modify for each instance. It also improves the inspector for custom modules.
• Individual character control: There are more options to modify how each character looks by selecting the 3D font file.
• Removed built-in pooling.
• A lot of new prebuilt fonts were added.
• UI improvements.
• Unimportant stuff is hidden from sample scenes now.
• Bugfix: Fixed an instance where texts were setting the scene dirty for no reason.

 

Hello there!

I have some questions.

1, Are the fonts in this package arectotally free to use in my commercial project?
2, Is it support Hungarian accents, like á, é, etc?
3, Can I use this 3d fontos onky on 3d world or can I use itbis an UI Layer that is 2d?
4, I want a 3d font that has colliders on it, lets say the "CINEMA" world in 3d world.
First all the letters have a collider but when something collie let's say the M letter than the letter's rigidbody become usegravity=true, static=false. Is it possible? The "M" letters collider will be a simple box collider or a Mesh collider?
5, After the change made, any way to reset back the positions of the letters?

Thanks

 

Hi,

Yes, the fonts are all open source. You can use them however you want.

Some fonts support them now. Each font is different.

Yes, the text is usable in the 3D world

You can treat all the characters as separate objects if you turn off the single mesh.
The situation you are describing requires you to make your own custom script to work. The script will work the same as trying to make it work with a cube. The characters are just "meshfilters".

You can reset their position. If they are still child objects of the text, call UpdateLayout() method on the LayoutGroup component to reset the position.

 

Hey I bought your asset. But I need to create a HUGE word in 3d world, and my player need to collide with it (it is a 2D/2.5D game) When I add the Add_Physics module nothing happen, I don't see any Collider on that. Only when I set the "Enable Gravity"

So how can I collide with the 3d text (only 1 letter) and then when colliding the use gravity set to true?
Also how can I freeze the X, Y, or Z constraint?

 

Hi,
Modules only work during runtime.
For the editor, you can just delete the Text creator+ layout component and do whatever you wish with the individual characters. They are just meshes.

Add physics module works without the Enable Gravity option. This is the default value you get when adding a rigid body component.


I suggest looking at: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Collider.OnCollisionEnter.html
I am not sure why you would freeze all three axis if you want to enable gravity.