Need help - Diacritics in Font SOP

[Mihai Panait]

Hello guys, i need help fast please. I have a project and i need to render some 3d animated text. The problem is when i want to insert diacritics it displays question marks. What should i do?

Thanks!

[pclaes]

Not sure if there is an ascii code for those characters - but there might be.

The font sop creates curves from a letter. So you need to get those curves - probably without using the font sop.

So try any of the following:

*) use adobe illustrator (or photoshop?) and import the ai file into houdini - or read up on compatibility with vector formats, not sure if ai is supported, but I thought it was.

*) if you don't have illustrator:

You can trace any image with a trace sop, so perhaps it is a matter to get those special characters into houdini by loading a pixelated image of the character (128x128 should be enough to capture most details). There should be high contrast between the character and the background (ie: black on white should do fine).

You can probably get that from word, perhaps openoffice powerpoint, or some other image manipulation software. Might be worth finding all the ascii characters you need to do and set up a batch process for it.

[Mihai Panait]

I've already worked on the setup and it was all built around the font sop. If i would use trace or something else i would have to rebuild the whole setup. It was ready to render, all i needed was to input the texts... it's sad that Houdini doesn't support diacritics. I tried with copy paste from character map, and also with different language input on the keyboard. I wouldn't try with images or vectorial text because i have animation on each letter and i used the font sop to break the letters apart like in this tutorial:

.

[digitallysane]

I've already worked on the setup and it was all built around the font sop. If i would use trace or something else i would have to rebuild the whole setup. It was ready to render, all i needed was to input the texts... it's sad that Houdini doesn't support diacritics. I tried with copy paste from character map, and also with different language input on the keyboard. I wouldn't try with images or vectorial text because i have animation on each letter and i used the font sop to break the letters apart like in this tutorial:

.

I didn't have the time to watch the whole tut, however it seems to me the techniques described there work very well even if you import the txt as curves done in Illustrator.

The Font SOP does not support Unicode (for some reson SESI can't be bothered to fix that, even if their users are all over the world right now, using various non-western languages), so any non-ASCII character cannot be entered. You can enter any ASCII character using a backslash and its code (\238 will give you an "î" for example), so if you can edit your font and put characters in the ASCII area, that would be another solution.

Dragos