Altough it's very good in some cases, just this example needs some fighting.

If you succeed to imprint your shapes into the curved surface as 3D and get the wireframe scene (hidden lines removed) to Illustrator as vector, it surely reduces the drawing effort at least 50% when compared to drawing it from scratch.ĪDD due the comments: The used 3D software is DesignSpark Mechanical, it's freeware. But the wireframe can be taken to Illustrator (in this case only as PDF print) and colored there.

Unfortunately the shaded image is a screen resolution bitmap only, it can have only one color and there's no materials (typical limitations of easy to use freeware). This is a 3D wireframe and a screenshot of a shaded view of letter A imprinted to an oval knob. Low curvatures probably can be handled with envelope distortion. The difficulty increases radically if you want to simulate insets to a strongly curved surface.

But to prevent the result be unsharp, make a copy of the non-blurred shape, unite in the pathfinder panel all subshapes, color to white and use it as transparency mask to remove all blur outside the apparent piece: If you need roundings in 3D it can be achieved with expanding the extruded shape and applying gaussian blur. Top layer has a gradient with blending mode Hard Light to give some apparent formīottom layer has another gradient to make an illusion of metal There's low ambient light to get contrast It's here blue, but it must be nearly or full white when extruded You extrude the edges and what's outside the hole and add something at the bottom. This is possible with coloring and Extrude & Bevel.

Designspark mechanical text