Make a Sign

In this mini-guide, we’ll make a little sign that you can place in your world, with any text on it!

• Create a new Scene and add the following nodes (name: Type)
  • Sign: StaticBody3D
    • CollisionShape3D: CollisionShape3D
    • Stick: MeshInstance3D
      • Plate: MeshInstance3D
        • Text: Label3D

Like this:

• Save your new scene in the objects directory.
  It should automatically get called sign.tscn if you named your root node “Sign” as shown above.

• Select Stick
• Set the Mesh property to New CylinderMesh

• Click the new cylinder mesh to edit it
• Set both Top Radius and Bottom Radius to 0.02 m
• Set Height to 1 m

Now, let’s change the color of our stick:

• Set the Material property to New StandardMaterial3D
• Click the new material to edit it
• Expand Albedo

• Set Color to a brownish color (or whatever color you please)

• Move the stick up by 0.5 so the bottom of the stick sits at the scene origin

Now, let’s create the Plate in a similar way:

• Select Plate
• Set the Mesh property to New BoxMesh
• Edit the new mesh
• Set the Size property x, y, z to 0.8, 0.4, 0.02
• Move Plate so it sits in a good position relative to the Stick

Your scene tree and scene should now look something like this:

Notice that our CollisionShape3D has a warning icon next to it. We’ll fix that now.

• Select CollisionShape3D
• Set the Shape property to New BoxShape3D
• Use the size manipulators to make the box roughly the size of the sign

Ok, and now - finally - let’s set the text:

• Select the Text node
• Expand the Text section in Inspector
• Set the Text property to “HELLO” or whatever you like (we’ll change this again when we place instances of the sign)

• Drag the blue arrow a bit to move the text out of the sign so it becomes visible

• Adjust the other text settings like colors (Modulate) and Font as you desire

Note that you can get a crisper text by making the text Font Size much larger, and then scaling down the node with Transform/Scale or by using the scale tool.

It can now look something like this:

• Save the scene again

• Now open a level scene where you would like to place your sign
• Instance the sign by dragging sign.tscn from the FileManager onto the desired position in the scene
• Adjust the position and rotation as you please

Now we just need to tweak the text.

• Right-click Sign
• Enable Editable Children`
• Select the Text sub-node, and adjust the Text property

The yellow coloring here is meant as a warning that any changes here may be lost if the source scene is changed too much. In particular changing node names can prevent Godot from finding out which editable children were change.

Now, go sign your levels! 😉

Bonus Idea

Similar to what we did with flag portals, you can add an Area3D to register the player walking up to it and load another scene, a shop map or whatever you’d like.