Wrapping parameterized text (and extruding text as surfaces)

[Pettersson]

I had someone ask me today how to emboss an article number on a cylindrical surface. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this issue, and the solution always involved projecting the text onto a separate sketch with the "project" command inside sketcher. It's super ugly and it means that any time you change the text, you have to redo the sketch. This also means you can't parameterize it. All because for some unclear reason the text tool in Creo is "special" and you can't use it to extrude surfaces, or project, or ...

Anyway, I figured out a way to do this without having to project the curves, meaning I can have a model where I can change the text wrapped onto a cylinder without it crashing. Perhaps there's a common solution to this, but I couldn't find one when googling, so I thought perhaps others would find it useful. I'm too lazy to do a proper tutorial, so I'll explain it here and if someone has questions, I can elucidate.

1. Select the cylindrical surface you want to wrap your text on and copy-paste it.

2. Use the Flatten Quilt command to flatten out the surface.

3. Make a solid extrude on the flat surface, containing your text. Extrude it symmetrically so it intersects with the surface.

4. (This is my "breakthrough"!) Use the Remove command to remove the front and back surfaces of the extrude. Check the "Leave open" box. This will leave you with a quilt containing the text you specified.

5. Use the text quilt to trim the flat surface.

6. Use the Flatten-Quilt Deformation feature to bend your trimmed surface back on to the cylinder.

7. Thicken the surface.

Now you can change the text as much as you want, connect it to a parameter, and the features won't fail! This works with double-curved surfaces, too, by the way.

It's not super elegant, but I find it better than the common method of wrapping the text, projecting it back on a flat plane, then offsetting the surface using that sketch. That solution means that any change to the text will get you a failed feature.

Any thoughts? Did I reinvent the wheel? I was quite pleased with myself when I discovered this trick, but perhaps there's already a better method?

[Dale_Rosema · Accepted solution]

Not sure what you searched on, but when I searched on: text on cylinder - this is some of the results.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Industrial-Design/How-to-Extrude-Wrapped-Text/m-p/260291

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/wcms/standards/freefull_cskdb.jsp?&im_dbkey=87573&icg_dbkey=900

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Part-Modeling/How-would-you-a-cylinder-out-of-text-characters/m-p/115882

Hopefully one of these help.

Dale

[Pettersson]

One of those links involve projecting the text on to a second sketch. This would fail if the text were changed. Another seems to mostly be about wrapping curves, not a solid emboss. These are the kinds of results I found when searching.

But the link with "designated area" and spinal bend was really good! I didn't know you could make a flat surface of a multiple-loop sketch with that command. You can't do it with Flat. So that was really good, thanks for the link! It's not super elegant, but it's a bit better than my solution, I think. I can more easily explain this one to the guy who asked me about it.