Friday, July 3, 2009

Design a stunning 3D text effect

As you would surely know, the typography or text in a design is a very important factor.
A good effect helps to increase the creativity and uniqueness of a design but also help
to achieve a great finish. So today i will take you through the process of designing a
very nice 3D text effect.

Step 1: Begin and Prepare

Begin by opening Photoshop and creating a new file. The size is up to you based on your requirements
but for this tutorial i will be using 500px by 500px.

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Next select either your rectangle tool or paint bucket tool and set your foreground colour to #1b1b1b.
Now fill your background with this colour.
So now your document should just be a large dark grey area.

Now change your foreground colour to #cbcbcb.
Select your Type Tool and use the following settings:

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We now want to type our text in the middle of our document like i have in the following image:

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Step 2: Improve the text

Before continuing we need to Rasterize our text layer so that changes can be made. We can do this
by right clicking on the layer in the layers palette and selecting Rasterize Type from the drop down
menu.

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Now that our text layer is rasterized we can change the perspective of it. Navigate to your top menu bar and click on
Edit > Transform > Perspective.

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Now your text will have a wire frame around it, drag the top corner inwards and your bottom corner outwards like the following image:

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Time to make our text 3D, which we will do through the use of duplicated layers.
Right click on our text layer and select Duplicate Layer from the drop down menu. Once duplicated move the new layer down
by 1 pixel (1 click on the down arrow). Now duplicate the duplicated layer and move this new layer down 1px as well. Continue
this untill you have 12 duplicated layers plus the original layer. It should look something like this:

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We want to merge all of our duplicated layers at this point, to do this we need to hold down the “Ctrl” key and left click on
each of the duplicated layers in the layers palette. Remember NOT to select the original text layer. Now that all of
our duplicated layers are selected we can let go of the “Ctrl” key and navigate to the top menu bar where we will click
on Layer > Merge Layers.

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Now we need to swap our layers around in the layers pallette by dragging the original text layer above the merged layer
like the following:

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Step 3: Text additions

To add some more flar to our 3D effect we will add a gradient overlay to our merged layer. Right click on the layer
and select blending options from the drop down menu to enter the Blending Options for that layer:

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Once inside the menu click on Gradient Overlay from the left hand side menu and enter the following settings:

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And then click on Ok to save your changes.
Your text should now look like this:

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Next we want to select our original text layer by clicking on it in the layers pallette. Right click on this layer and select Blending Options
from the drop down menu as we did in the above step. Click on Outer Glow from the left hand side menu and enter the following settings:

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Next click on Bevel and Emboss from the left hand side menu and enter the following settings:

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Lastly select Gradient Overlay from the left hand side menu and enter the following settings:

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You can now click on Ok to save the changes.

Your text should now look like the following:

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And that is your final 3D text effect.
Stay tuned for the next tutorial that will continue with a certain effect of this text.

Also just a final note, i would like to apologize for the late timing and poor quality of this tutorial, i have been sick over the past week.