Advanced 3D Typography Effects PART 1 Photoshop CC (How to Create Amazing Text with Mixer Brush)

hey everybody welcome into this Photoshop tutorial brought to you as always bite vidcom my name is Nathaniel Dodson and today we're going to take a look at something that you're absolutely going to love this is it's a really cool effect creating this pseudo 3d text in Photoshop on a path using the brush tool it looks really impressive and it's really kind of easy to do as long as you do a couple little things it's pretty easy to do included in this tutorial there's gonna be a link down in the description i'm giving away a gradient pack that is going to be like sampling material galore it doesn't make a lot of sense now because you don't understand how we're going to use these gradients well maybe some of you do but some of you don't know how we're going to use these gradient packs i'm going to show you in a moment how we're going to use them and you're going to absolutely love to have this resource there's me simple free download you can go over on our website download it boom just like that you're gonna have some amazing gradients that you can use you can follow along with this tutorial so without further ado let's check out the effect and how we can create it so you can see we've got these kind of 3d tubes that are just twisting and serpentining all over this document over a vibrant color background and yeah it's just a really really cool effect and it's something that i think you're really going to like so here do we do um if you're following along we're going to go file new and create a new document I'm going to create a document 2560 by 1440 is perfect for us let's go ahead and choose create now right off the bat I want to go ahead and hit this little half black half white circle in the bottom of my layers panel and choose solid color to add a solid color fill layer and I like I don't know I like to work over a really dark really saturated blue go a little darker than you think because when it actually fills the background it looks a little bit brighter hit OK we can just double click our background layer hit OK and drag it down to the garbage wonderful now that we've done that we're going to go ahead and create what I'm going to call a sampler this is where these gradients the gradients that are just talking about this is where these come into play create a new layer and we're going to name this layer sampler just like that grab your elliptical marquee tool located right there hold down the shift key and drag out a simple circle it can be big it can be small I would recommend big enough that you can see kind of what's going on grab the gradient tool and our yeah the gradient tool and I'm going to give you a bunch of gradients that kind of look like this this one's pink this one's yellow blue orange so on and so forth maybe I'll give you a couple others as well but these are just simple to color gradients let's go with the pink to begin we've got a very hot pink to a very light pink hit okay and I'm going to use a simple linear gradient and let's just go start here at the top and drag straight down to the bottom just like that light pink to dark rich pink great command or control D to deselect we've got a pink circle up on its own layer doesn't make a lot of sense but it will in a second create another new layer and let's just name this 3d or something I don't know it can be whatever and check this out we're going to grab the brush tool in fact we're going to grab the mixer brush tool and here from the mixer brush tool let's just choose to clean the brush and I am going to from this drop-down we want to go with a dry heavy load so that's going to make wetness a 0% light can you see that wet 0% load 100% that's pretty important equally important is from the draw brush drop down here and actually I'm just going to my drop down here go back to our basic brushes we're not distracted by these these little hair brushes from an older tutorial what we want to do is make sure we have a nice size to the brush 150 pixels will work here for this size document but most importantly I like to keep my hardness at 100% it really helps sell this effect if you go soft it's just going to kind of make it look like the pipes that we're about to draw are you know like you drew the pipes and then you hit them with a Gaussian blur it doesn't look all that great but maybe in some sense or in some cases you may want to use that I don't know whatever we want to hover over this pinkish shade hold on the alter option key and select and sample that now check this our up on our own layer I'm going to forewarn you this is this is not going to work the way it is but I want to show you something so we're going to just go ahead and begin painting look at that I'm just dragging this purple ball or the pink ball around and when I let go it sticks well what's happening if we look at the layer thumbnail we can see we get this big blue line let me just shut off both of these layers beneath we've got this big blue line and a pink ball at the end of it not what we wanted I'm going to undo that I'm going to undo it again to get rid of that what's happening is if we look up here at our little sample thumbnail we are sampling the pink ball but we're sampling all this blue junk around it as well why is that happening well right here because sample all layers is ticked on so not only are we sampling the pink ball on our sampler layer for Sam the colored background as well there's a couple things we can do here we can shut off sample all layers but what that means is when we're up here in our 3d layer getting ready to paint we have to select the sampler layer and then we can sample the pink ball you can see that look at that it's only sampling the pink ball and we've got transparency around it and if we paint we get this really really cool effect now here's the problem I always forget to go back up to my 3d layer and I end up painting right on my sampler layer I don't want that so the way I prefer to work is leave sample all layers checked on and when it comes time to sample the new color or a new gradient I simply shut off my background layer then I can hold down alt or option I can sample the pink you can see I've got the pink I'm still on the 3d layer and then I can just come over here I can even turn my my blue back on and I can just go ahead and paint paint paint away and I can paint whatever I want I can just go in and start drawing and get really really cool shapes that look super 3-dimensional and very much like these squiggling twisting tubes going all over my screen so that's really really cool now before we go any further I want to let you guys know boom I'm selling a course over on set vidcom all about how to retouch images in Photoshop maybe you're not a photographer but there's a ton you will learn about Photoshop even if you're not a photographer and if you pick up that course will link appeared up there in the corner only for people watching on YouTube I should mention if you pick up that course you're going to support what we do here at VidCon you're going to allow me to keep creating these tutorials which is great I love you thank you so much if you pick it up thousands of people have bought it already and as far as I know everybody's happy I haven't I am return to single one of them I'll put it to you that way so everybody I think is really really happy with it so go ahead if you're interested pick up a copy of that course it really helps us out if not the tutorials still free here so let's jump back into it in fact I'm going to make my brush tool quite a bit bigger my brush tip quite a bigger so it gets like 300 right and we paint we're going to get a huge soft tube now I have some pressure options turned on up here that shape dynamics ticked on I'm going to shut that off and I was using my tablet so I was getting some crazy effects there but you can see if I paint I get this big huge you know Lunken 3d looking tube moving across my my screen now just check this out real quick if I shut these layers off look that I'm still getting the dark-blue around it why is that happening well it's happening because remember we're sampling this area when we actually took the sample there was no blue background but then we turn the blue background back on and it's actively sampling that area so if the black is Lubeck if the if the blue background is on if I can speak English if the blue background is on its going to automatically sample some of that blue so I'm going to shut that blue background off and then I paint and I get a nice clean graphic with no blue over spill or anything like that and it looks really really cool all right I'm going to shut that layer off let's explore some other ways we can use this now let's go ahead and create another new layer here and I'm going to name this 3d as well I guess I really don't need to keep naming these layers we know what's going on here and I'm going to create a path using the pen tool so I'm going to go ahead and just say I don't know I'm going to create something like this right just some big old path hit the enter return key there we go go to the paths panel there it is let's double click on it and just choose this name at path one that's going to lock it in and save it so we don't accidentally delete it later on now remember we're up on a new blank layer go back to path so I have that path selected I can right-click on this and choose stroke path and choose from the drop-down menu to stroke it with the mixer brush tool I don't want to simulate pressure I'm going to stroke it with the mixer brush tool hit OK and check this out look at that isn't that so cool deselect the pathway selecting anywhere out here we've got this really cool shape or the mixer brush tool conforms to our path and gave us this really beautiful pink swath just just swooshing across the screen with the greatest of ease now something else we can do something that I think you will really like is let's create some additional samplers here on our sampler layer let's go marquee tool once more let's hold down shift to drag out a circle grab the gradient tool and let's just go with the yellow gradient since that's what we have next with the yellow grading I'm going to put the highlight over here so I'm going to click up here and drag across my circle that way right that really bright yellow is over to the left commander control D to deselect let's create another circle down here let's make this one big then I'm just making it big to show you that the circle can really be any size you want let's go with the blue hit OK and with the blue I wouldn't do with a highlight way over here with the blue so we get bright blue over there pull it back to dark blue on this side again with the elliptical marquee tool - I got another circle right around here great gradient tool and let's go I just have this fourth orange gradient here I'll include some additional gradients I'll make I don't know eight or ten or something for the gradient pack I give you to download and let's hit OK and in this case I'm going to choose the radial gradient just because we can and I'm going to start right here with the highlight and I'm going to pull it straight back across and you can see if I commander control D it's just a very different way that the gradient is being applied and also a very different way our 3d tube would look if we sample this particular gradient let's go ahead here and create a new layer I'm going to just name this layer on W because we're going to create the letter W how are we going to do that well we're going to do it with a pen jewelry form Bensel have you ever used this tool before the freeform the pen tool up here in the control bar there is this little gear icon select that and I want to set curve fit to ten pixels it's the maximum setting here in Photoshop and what it's going to do is it's basically going to help smooth out our path as we draw it now it really helps to have a Wacom tablet or some kind of graphics tablets because you can just write and draw with much greater ease and I'm going to just draw a big fancy W kind of something like that it's not at all perfect I'm actually going to undo that let's let's redo that there we go maybe something like that and when I look at this I can see I'm going to zoom in on it a couple times there's a couple flat points a flat flat in order to fix any flat points you want to grab your direct selection tool the white arrow right there and you simply just click anywhere to deselect the path and then select that path segment that's flat grab a tangent handle and I like to drag the tangent handle so it's straight across with the tangent handle right across from the Anchor Point so both these tangent handles go through this anchor point I want to make them you know relatively straight and that's going to let me know that that curve where those kind of run into each other or that point where they run into each other it's going to be a nice smooth flowing point same thing with this little tangent handle here boom and look at that we've made it nice and smooth around the top of our W let's do this here with this little flat point here you can see that the tangent Andals are much tinier but if we kind of follow that rule it just it helps them just I don't know helps them look better I don't know how to describe it and you can go through and any of these points that aren't quite perfect you can go in and tweak and adjust them and make them much much nicer I'm not going to take the time to do it here because I don't want to spend the entire tutorial tweaking a path but just know the smoother you make this path now the better your effect will be when it is applied later on so I can like come here and just stretch this path this way a little bit you know I can move this down and move this up you can do all kinds of things to really just adjust the way that your letter W or whatever letter you you draw out is going to look and the more time you spend on it like I said the more time you spend on it the better it's going to look in the end all right so with this path first and foremost we want to make sure we save it so double-click path - that's fine we can actually name it W if we want great and I'm going to use the path selection tool which is going to make sure we selected the entire path and just drag the path down to like right over here so it's kind of out in the middle of our working area we're gonna go layers we're up on our new layer great we've got our mixer brush tool I'm going to shut off my background once again and let's let's just go with the blue here so I'm going to just make sure I've got a brush that's big enough to be covering the entire blue area hold down alter options select blue you can see up here we do have our blue gradient selected beautiful a brush that's 250 pixels around probably going to be a little bit too big for the W so let's right-click and downsize it to maybe around 150 160 something like that that's that's a little more reasonable go back to paths right click on the path stroke path stroke width you've got it mixer brush tool hit OK and look at this beauty look at that go ahead and do its thing we have this 3-dimensional W now and that's so cool it's so cool it's so easy to do you just create the path you've got your little color sampler and boom you create the letter if we wanted to create another W create a new layer shut off the blue W shut off our background so we're sampling clean colors here let's just do like an orange W here see what this looks like go back to path select the path W right click stroke path mixer brush tool hit OK and voila we have an orange W as well so very quickly very easily you can go in and create these rather complex very three-dimensional looking letters you can go to whole words or just regular old paths as you see fit or as your project calls or one of the other things you can do once you've created letters or words in this sort of big hulking 3d way I'm going to go back to the letter of the blue letter W is you can create or add a drop shadow to it so if I just go layer layer style drop shadow just add a huge drop shadow kind of what I have here is great 30 percent opacity angle of 90 degrees is great distance in size of 200 apiece and hit OK and there's just a very big subtle drop shadow beneath this W in fact if I double click on my color fill layer and I make it a much lighter blue you bring it over here like this you can see that there's a big just sort of super soft shadow underneath the letter almost making it look like the three dimensional letters popping up off the background floating in mid-air I don't know it's in effect it's a thing that you can try I'm going to undo that because it's not necessarily what we're shooting for here now one of the things that I want to show you is how to sort of hijack a typeface and create these 3d tube letters using a typeface so I'm going to grab my type tool and I'm going to work with you know let's go huge let's go with 600 point text right off the bat and I've got my color set to white for the text so we can see it over this background let's go with the letter U alright so we've got the letter U it's a nice simple letter I'm going to move it right over here using my move tool I want to right click on this type layer and choose create work path what that's going to do is it's going to give us the work path outline of that letter I'm going to go over to paths I'm going to double click on my work path and name this U and what I can do now is go back to my layers and just get rid of this text layer I don't need it I just want that path let's create a new layer here and I'm going to name this layer you what happens if I stroke this path with one of these colors well let's show off our background layer let's grab the mixer brush tool let's alter option click up go with yellow I don't think we've done yellow yet have way all right so we've got 159 pixel brush let's go 170 file to make it a little bit bigger and let's just stroke this path so there it is the letter U right click stroke path what are we doing mixer brush tool you got it hit OK and it's going to be a convoluted mess you can see it's it's kind of interesting looking but it's also kind of a mess really the interesting looking part are these two parts of the U but down here it's just kind of janky and wonky and not at all we want how do we remedy this well what I recommend and what I usually do for any virtually any work paths that have to do with letters that I get from fonts is I go in and simplify the path and I do that with the direct selection tool grab the direct selection tool in this case we're going to select all of the inner anchor points so you can see the outer hollow anchor points none of them are selected the inner anchor points are all solid colored because they're all selected going to delete key get rid of them we have a nice simple new path if we stroke this path right click stroke path with the mixer brush tool hit OK we get a nice simple beautiful letter you in fact I think this would even look better if we made our mixture brush a little bit bigger so instead of 375 let's go like yeah 250 maybe 300 I feel like I'm pushing it a little bit yeah 300 might be a little too big let's go to 50 go back to paths right click stroke path mixer brush tool hit OK and look at that a nice fact bulbous letter U it looks so cool and we've kind of hijacked a typeface and use the paths from that typeface to create a perfect letter U much different than our sort of freeform handwritten letter W or whatever letter you would write that way so there's multiple ways to use this effect now one last way that I want to show you this effect I'm going to create a new layer here and what we're going to do is you can take any one of these of any one of these brushes let's actually go with let's go back with the pink again because it might be most noticeable let's go with the pink will to make our brush a little bit smaller brush tips a little smaller I'm just using my square bracket keys by the way to do that hold on alter options sample pink you can see sure enough yep we just have pink selected great and what I want to do here is select my brush panel it's going to open my brush panel and I'm going to turn on shape dynamics now I don't want to change anything here I want that to be 0 I want angle jitter to be 0 roundness jitter zero everything zero nothing turned on the only thing I want to change is under here on the control drop-down menu I want to turn on pen pressure and I still want to make sure everything is set to zero you can see what changed it just kind of said like we're doing this pen pressure thing great I'm going to close my brush panel now I'm going to go back to paths I'm going to make sure I'm using a nice large brush so I'm going to go a little bit bigger here maybe like 300 or so I'm going to select my letter U I'm going to right click you know 300 a little bit too big right go back down to 250 I'm going to right click on the letter U and choose stroke path now here I'm going to tick on the simulated pressure option so I'm going to tick that on I'm going to hit OK and you're going to see what happens is we get this very interesting at brush fading in and brush fading out all the while applying this three dimensional like sampled gradient to our brush so it's a really interesting effect it can do really really interesting things for you it's what I did over here for this letter 3 and you know like this letter 3 could be if I just rotate it like this this could be like horns on a round it could be a crazy letter 3 it could be something like that you know I don't know in an athlete's rear-end I don't know it could be anything it could be all kinds of different things and it just is a really precise way to apply to sort of fade in fade out to a brush that you're painting and when you mix it with the textures and gradients and colors that you can use with the mixer brush tool man it can be pretty stinkin powerful so I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial if you create anything that you think is cool using this technique tag me on instagram or in that image i would love to see it my instagram is at Tut vid 2 UT the ID tag me i'll go ahead I'll like it I'll comment on it I'll interact with you you know as long as it looks pretty good this is interesting and stuff like that but just if you create something that you think is cool don't hesitate tag me I would love to see it love seeing what you guys make and I'm getting bombarded with stuff on Instagram what kind of sort of bombarded with stuff on Instagram I really want to up my Instagram game a little bit more but tag me in anything that you create I would absolutely love to see it and if you've enjoyed this tutorial make sure you like this video comment on it if you feel so inclined to also make sure you subscribe to my channel that way you never miss another video in the future for creating this 3d tube style text in Photoshop that is absolutely amazing and is to make your friends say how did you do that that's it get it got it good Nathaniel Dodson Tuck vidcom I'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: tutvid

Views: 333,446

Keywords: 3D Text Effect, 3D Photoshop, Typography, Type, Lettering, Text Effect, Graphic Design, Graphic Designer, Photoshop, Photoshop CC, Photoshop Tutorial, Mixer Brush, Brush Tool, Pen Tool, Paths, Shapes

Id: d8yH8frsofo

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Medfly70]

The letter 3.

[u/SpliffDr]

any tip as to why I'm getting this result? Double and triple checked my setting & they all match.

[u/AnbaRL]

Reminds me when back in the days Amiga was the thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5fF1OYaobPA#

[u/Newageknobhead]

What are the practical functions of this technique?

[u/Iceash]

Coming back to this

[u/RyanFromGDSE]

If you're going to rip off my tutorials you can give me credit. Of course given that all you do is spam reddit channels I'm not surprised.

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Full length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AELf9E-OdY

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60 second series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkizaItKfhg&list=PLvC9AFF2RjsfJyWTPy6ps0RixWDNFXIfM&index=4