Pieces of Eight sign

The small roller coaster I described a few posts back needs a sign of course. The 'owner' of the ride is Tupper, the pirate accountant. He will be featured on the sign. I did up a quick concept to 'sell' the idea to the client knowing I would still play with the design and lettering style as I created the sign.

Some of the most popular bitmaps in the TEXTURE MAGIC collection are the woodgrains. I've been working on a whole new collection of just woodgrains and I decided to give one of them a test drive on this project. It still needs a little work but one section in particular looked promising for this project.

I enlarged it significantly and positioned the lettering vectors over the section of the bitmap I wanted to use.

I then drew up the panel vectors and created a flat relief.

 The bitmap was then applied to the relief.

 Once I had closed the bitmap I created a new flat relief of just the lettering outlines and then Merged Highest with the wood grained background.

Then I modified the relief by adding the lettering, once again as a flat relief.

The last step was to drop the center of the letters using the subtract command. this would make the border of the letters much easier to paint.

The Tupper character was done as a separate sculpt using Abracadabra Sculpting epoxy. The barrel and post structure will be sculpted concrete ver a welded steel frame.

I'll be posting more as the sign is routed and assembled. Stay tuned...

-dan