Chisel Effect

This is a rewrite of the tutorial for fencepost's so called Lord Of The Rings texteffect.

I recreated it from the script as good as i could, because the original tutorial is lost with the forum it was posted on.
Every time a script is written for an effect, knowledge is forgotten. With this tutorial i want to preserve that knowledge.

The effect creates a chiselled look on text with the help of a shaped gradient.

01. Type your text. I used a canvas 800x400px and the Ringbearer font at 260px.

For the textcolour i use a medium grey (#808080), because from my experience thats the best colour for bumpmapping.

02. Duplicate the textlayer and lock the alpha-channel.

03. Go to your gradient tool options and set the 'Shape' to 'dimpled'.

You can also use 'angular' or 'spherical', but we will go with 'dimpled' here.

04. Make sure your colours are set to white-black, then stroke the gradient tool on the grey text duplicate with the locked alpha-channel.

Direction and stroke length doesnt matter. This specific gradient shape fills the boundaries with a special kind of gradient.

05. Go to Filters → Enhance → Sharpen and run it twice with a value of 50 on the gradient filled textlayer.

06. The layer we just created will be our bumpmap.

Turn off the eye of the layer to make it invisible.

07. With the original textlayer active, go to the Bumpmap filter (Filters → Map → Bumpmap).

The script uses a value of 5 for the Depth, and the default for all other values.

I will use a Depth of 10, an Azimuth of 130 and an Elevation of 30 instead.

Make sure the bumpmap we prepared in step 04. is selected in the dropdown menu, then hit OK.

08. For some tweaking i increase the Contrast and play with the Levels.

This is very much a taste thing.

09. You could use the effect now as it is, with this iron-like look or Colourise the text.

Here are three examples:

10. I will go with the iron-look and add a dropshadow:

alpha select the text and fill the selection on a new transparent layer with black.

Deselect, then Gaussian Blur (i used a value of 12px).

Offset the layer (i used 5 pixels for the x and y axis) according to the direction of light you used in the bumpmapping process and reduce the Opacity to 78% with the Mode set to 'Grain Merge'.

And thats it. Thanks fencepost !

For a slightly different effect based on this tutorial, look here.

I also used the technique with a twist on this post.


08.12.2013

Another way of colourising the text is by adding a coloured layer with the Mode set to 'Colour' or depending on what you want to achieve, another suitable mode ('Hard Light' in the second example makes it look icy).