The Ultimate Oldskool Chrome-Effect

A texteffect i made by following a tutorial by Shawn Kent:

http://vimeo.com/73904037

An updated and improved version of  this effect can now be found here:

Gimplearn/Displacement Chrome/Glass Effect

His video-tutorial is based on an old 90ies Photoshop effect book, called the 'WOW Book 4'.

Because Gimp doesnt have the same filters as PS, i recreated the effect by using the Displacement Filter.

Instead of using the channel technique that didnt work for me, i just made a frame by shrinking the alpha selected text by an amount i wanted for the bevelling, then cut and blurring the frame.

So i end up with a blurred frame on a transparent layer and used that as my Displacement-Map.
You chose pretty big values for the displacement because you want a zigzag effect on the original image.
And thats really it.

I added a bevel with layerfx and applied anisotropic smoothing in G'MIC to make some of the jaggy distortions a bit nicer.

As you may remember, i have talked about landscapes as gradients inside a texteffect before. In case you missed it, here are the relevant posts:

http://gimp-science-labs.blogspot.de/2013/05/unknown-territory-full-cycle.html

http://gimp-science-labs.blogspot.de/2013/05/the-power-of-megablast.html

Layer Play

This is an exercise in playing with layering gradients and textures. 

The Inner Glow has different values for horizontal and vertical.

The texture is made from a Grid with Spread and then Motion Blurred.

The Ultraviolent font is from Blambot.

Shiny Tekniqz

All texteffects in this post follow the same principle:

• The basetext is filled with a texture (an image or a gradient).
• The basetext has a stroke made of a gradient that gives the edges of the text a shiny look.
• The basetext has an outer bevel. Highlight and shadow are treated with curves to give the bevel a shiny look.

The texture of this texteffect is a metallic gradient.

I also applied the G'MIC Fish Eye Filter to the gradient layer as you see below.

The shiny edge gradient is no custom-gradient, just the normal FG-BG on repeat but treated with a colour-curve.

Here the texture is a scaled image of the sea, i found with google.

The shiny edge gradient consists of two gradients layered and blended with layermodes. A bit of curves as well, of course ;)

Same texture as above again, but this time treated with the new G'MIC 'Frosted Glass' filter that Ronounours created and then bumpmapped with itself.

The Inner Shadow between shiny edge and texture got the ring-contour treatment.

For this experiment i used the Square Gradient.

shiny diagonal Edges

Same technique as in the previous tutorial, but with a different 'Shape', 'Repeat' and a simple 2-color gradient. Then Colour-Curves.

shiny Edges

Edged the sequel

Edged