Text Around a Curved Bowl Without Distortion Using Sheet Metal

Nov 05, 2026 Last reply: 1 day ago 4 Replies
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Lettering on a curved part usually ends up stretched or squeezed toward the edges, and most guides simply accept that. Papooch's approach instead borrows the Sheet Metal workspace, and the result keeps dimensions close to true even across a doubly curved form. That feels like a genuinely different path compared with the projection tricks people normally settle for.



The workflow itself is neat. Two sketches in perpendicular planes capture the model's profile curves, with straight tangent lines joined by fillets, and flange bodies are generated from those profiles and renamed in the browser tree. The text sits on an auxiliary flat body and is cut shallowly into its face. Split Face then projects the lettering onto the curved flange, the body is unfolded, the lettering is projected and cut onto the flat pattern, and everything is refolded. Back on the original object, Split Face uses the letters with Closest Point, and Press Pull debosses the text.



The demo is a rounded, hollow bowl-like shape with a glossy red exterior, carrying embossed black text reading 'I Love Fusion 360' around its curved side. It is a good showcase, since a bowl is exactly the kind of form where side distortion normally ruins lettering.



One trade-off stands out: the method is demanding on the processor, and Papooch would not recommend running it inside a heavy design. There is also an open question, since the maker suspects the auxiliary bodies could be eliminated by projecting onto vertical-plane sketches, but that has not been confirmed yet.



Project by Papooch. Watch it on their YouTube channel:

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Choosing to flatten and refold a sheet metal body rather than fight curved projection directly is the clever part to me. It turns a curved problem into a flat one, where cutting letters is straightforward. The cost seems to be extra bodies and steps, and the maker notes the whole thing is heavy on the processor, so the gain in letter quality comes at a real performance price.

Has Papooch said whether this only works on shapes like the bowl in the demo, or whether the curves can be tighter and still come out clean?

According to Papooch, the technique could theoretically be used on any curved surface as long as the curves are reasonably shaped, so tighter curves fall outside what has been demonstrated. Anything beyond that, the maker has not said.

A concrete next step would be testing the maker's own idea of skipping the auxiliary bodies, by projecting the lettering onto sketches in the vertical plane and using those to split the faces directly. If it works, the workflow loses a whole stage and some of the processor load along with it, which would make the technique easier to drop into existing designs.

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