CHROMETYPE Text & Art - Blender / Photoshop Tutorial

hey everyone very vague here and in this video i'm going to be taking you through how to create some typical chrome type style artwork like this in blender so i'll start off by taking you through how to do this in the simplest method before then taking it a step further and using curves to create our type which will allow us to fully customize the shape of it as well as add in effects like twisting animations and more i'll then quickly go over how you can achieve a range of different aesthetics with your design by experimenting with colour and composition before then taking our artwork into photoshop and converting it into mediums such as poster designs and album artwork so first things first we want to start off by coming up with some ideas for we're looking to create so personally my favorite place to gather inspiration for this particular genre is would you believe a page simply titled chrome type on instagram here so these guys post an amazing array of content that all falls under the wide umbrella that is the chrome type genre but as you can see there's an awesome variety of stuff that really acts as a great place to start when you're looking for direction on what to create next so then once i get past the initial overwhelming of amazing work i then try to boil it down to a few ideas on what it is i want to explore in my design and then begin making some sketches like so now i prefer to do this initial stage manually by hand but feel free to use whatever medium you feel comfortable in here whether that be digital or analog then once we've finished sketching our designs we'll scan it in or take a photo of it so we can use it as a reference in blender then we'll head over into blender and open up a new project i'm then going to go up here under our add rollout and under the curve options select bezier now before we start editing our curve we're going to want to bring in our scanned image so we can use this as a reference to trace over so to do this we'll first want to position ourselves in the top orthographic viewing mode here by pressing this blue zed icon on our gimbal from here we can again go up to our add rollout and this time under the image option select reference we'll then just select our image file and load it in we'll then want to roughly position our curve on top of our chosen design by using the move shortcut g before then hitting tab which will take us into edit mode from here we can then further adjust the control point's position rotation and scale using their respective shortcuts g r and s we can then work our way around the rest of the shape by adding in new control points to the curve as we go using the extrude point shortcut e then when we're ready to close out our curve simply select the two points we wish to join and press f i then went ahead and adjusted these handles until i was getting a nice sharp edge like so we'll then repeat this process for all of our individual letters or shapes by adding in new bezier curve objects and then adjusting them to fit and you can also use external programs here like illustrator to trace the curves if you feel more comfortable in them and then import them to blender as an svg file but for the purposes of this tutorial i just wanted to demonstrate how this could purely be done using the default tools in blender another alternative you could also look at here is creating a text object as a base from which we can then distort and manipulate further using the proportional editing mode now this method doesn't allow for quite the same level of flexibility and sort of restricts you somewhat to the font you use but if you are interested in checking it out i went over this in my last chrome type video which i'll link here so then once we've finished tracing over our design what we want to do is select all our individual curve objects and then hit ctrl j to join them all into one singular curve and the reason i'm doing this is because what we're actually going to do is convert our curve into a mesh from which we can then fill in and extrude from and because i'm just going to extrude them all at the same height in a uniform direction there's no need for us to have them a separate objects so with that done we'll now want to increase the resolution of our curve so that we're getting a nice smooth result on the edges here before we begin extruding this upwards so to do this let's come across to our curve properties tab and increase the resolution to something like a hundred we can then convert this to a mesh by hitting f3 to bring up our search dialog and then searching for the mesh from curve surf text command and selecting it and what we can see this is now done if we jump into edit mode is it's converted all our original curve information into mesh data so it's taken all our original bezier handles that we had and subdivided them down into mesh vertices like so and the reason that this is important is that now because we have mesh vertices what we can do is turn them into closed mesh faces so the simplest method to do this is by simply selecting all our vertices using the shortcut a and then use the create faces shortcut which is f and now if we swap into faces mode by pressing 3 we can then extrude our faces by again using the shortcut e and what that should give us now is a pretty simple blocked out version of our original design so from here we can really take this in a number of directions depending on the style we're looking to achieve but what i'll demonstrate next is how we can begin to go about smoothing the hardness of some of these edges as you'll find most designs in this chrome type genre use a lot of beveling or rounding on the type edges here so we can achieve this effect in a few ways the first of which being the most simple which is to just select our outer edges pressing alt click and then use the bevel tool by hitting control b from here we can control the resolution or smoothness of our bevel by scrolling up and down on our mouse wheel like so now the only problem with this method is it tends not to work so great on meshes that have sharp edges and intersections like in my case so what'll end up happening is once our bevel thickness starts to become wider than some of our mesh faces we'll get these really wild results so in order to work around this we'll use the second method which is smoothing it using blender's sculpting mode but in order for sculpting mode to work properly what we'll first want to do is rebuild our mesh using the remesh modifier so we can get a nice clean high resolution bass object so i'm just going to set the remesh mode here to voxel and then we want to lower our voxel size until we're getting a relatively smooth result which in my case is about 0.01 and then apply and now you can see if we go into edit mode that we've got thousands of subdivided faces making up our mesh which is exactly what we want and then we can just delete any of these off-cut islands that may have resulted in the conversion process so now with that done we can come across into the sculpting tab here and select the smooth tool we can then adjust the radius and strength to our liking before proceeding to work our way around the edges of our mesh until we end up with this more rounded look and then once we've done that we can also start to play around with some of the other tools here so another one i like to use is the draw sharp tool and what this tool is going to allow us to do is to create something similar to this effect here you commonly see in chrome type which is basically just adding in these kind of chiseled razor edges here in the center of our type so with that selected we'll make sure the direction is set to add and then we can simply switch into our top view and begin drawing these center lines roughly following the curvature of our type then with that done i selected the smooth tool again and just melted down these protrusions a bit just to make them a bit less harsh but it's totally up to you here depending on the aesthetic you're going for so i just flattened mine out even more by scaling it in the z direction and then i was pretty happy with it then we can just add the signature chrome effect to our design by creating a new material for it here in the shader editor which we can then adjust by sliding the metallic slider all the way up to 1 before then dragging our roughness right down to about 0.1 so it's nice and shiny so at this point we could then move on to the lighting and rendering stage if we're ready but i'm actually going to finesse my design a bit further with a new technique as i really want to exaggerate this sort of overlapping twisting razor effect i was trying to achieve in some of my sketches so in order to get this more complex look what we're first going to do is again start off by drawing a series of bass bezier curves but this time instead of tracing them around the outline what we're going to do is roughly build them along the middle of our type similarly to what we did with the sharp edges in sculpt mode and the reason we're doing this is basically what these bezier curves are going to act as are the guide rails for us to extrude or sweep any shape we want along them so this is going to allow us much greater control over the width and bevel of all parts of our design so to demonstrate now that i have my first base rail curve here what i can do is come across into my object properties and then under the geometry tab you'll see we get this handy little option here called bevel and you'll see that once i start increasing the depth value we'll begin to get a circular extrusion forming around our curve and the great thing about this is that it will adapt and change to whatever we do to our curve so if i jump back into edit mode here and start moving some of these points around we'll see it updating nicely alongside it and further to that we can also begin adjusting the scale of the extrusion at each point by adjusting this radius slider here so this is really going to allow us to start controlling exactly where we want our type to be more curvy and wide versus where we want it to be tight and sharp like so so then where this technique gets really cool if you didn't think it was great already is that rather than this just being a circular pipe the whole way around what we can actually do is set this extrusion shape to a custom curve so if i just add in a new bezier curve here and then rename it to something like profile curve what i can then do is go back into the bevel properties of our original curve and then under this object option set it to our profile curve and now you'll see we're getting that show up as our extrusion object instead and then we can just scale this down a bit if we need to so that it fits a bit better and so now that we're starting to get a better idea for the overall form of our design another useful technique we can begin to use is moving some of these points in the z-axis by using the shortcut g and then z so this will get rid of any intersections we might be getting in our extrusion and will start to give us that overlapping underlapping effect and the great thing about this is that it won't really change how our original design looks from top view so it will only be noticeable once we start to look around in 3d which gives us a lot of versatility when it comes to rendering time as we can choose whether we want to represent it in a more of a 3d fashion or stick to that original 2d top view we had in our sketches and then another great tool we can use is the tilt option here which you can think of as being like the rotation for our extrusion shape along our rail curve so this is really what's going to give it that sort of twisting look the more we increase this value from zero degrees then i'm just going to give our object the same chrome material we created earlier and then if you're wondering what this start and end option is here down in our bevel properties what this will actually do is control the start and the end point for our extrusion so in my case i just want to leave these at 0 and 1 because i want to cover the entirety of my curve but this can actually be a really awesome tool for creating path animations once we're finished so to give you a quick example of this if we just go to the beginning of our timeline and then set this start value to 1 and give it a keyframe by pressing i we can then skip forward in our timeline and do the same thing but this time setting our value to 0 you can now see when we hit play that we get a nice little animation so continuing on i just proceeded to work my way through the rest of the letters and shapes using the same process of adding in bezier curves and giving them the same bevel object and then once we've finished all our shapes and are happy with the overall design we're ready to move on to the lighting and rendering stage so the first thing i'm going to do is set up our render view so i'll just add in a camera object and then what i like to do is open up a new viewport here and set this to our camera view by pressing zero and then i'm just going to set its position here on top of our design looking down and now if we swap into rendered mode we'll see we're not getting any lighting showing up so to fix this we'll go into our shader editor and change into world mode before then adding in an environment texture and setting this to an hdri of our liking so then the next thing we'll want for our render is a backdrop for it to sit on so the way i prefer to set this up is to just add in a plane like so and then for the color of my backdrop i want it to be a simple gradient so we can do this by creating a new material and then assigning a colour ramp node to the base colour input of our principled bsdf we can then position the scale and location of the gradient by adding mapping and texture coordinate nodes now the next thing i want to show you guys is another great tool we can utilize to really take our designs to the next level and that is the curve modifier so the curve modifier works in a similar fashion to our bevel modifier which we used for our type except this time we can actually get our curve to deform an entire custom object of our choosing so to demonstrate this what i'm going to do is first import the object i want to deform which in my case is this barbed wire obj and then what i'm going to do is draw in a new bezier curve which is going to act as the target for our barbed wire to deform to then once we've done that we can simply select on our barbed wire object and then come across into our modifiers tab and select this one here labeled curve then all we have to do is set this curve object here to our bezier curve and select the correct deform axis and if your object still isn't deforming correctly here what you want to do is hit ctrl a on your bezier curve and apply all transforms like so and now we can see just like for our type curves we can now move this bezier curve around like so and our barbed wire will update automatically and then we can use all the same adjustment features here to control the twist radius and position at different points and so what i'm actually going to do here is add in some keyframes at 0 and 360 degrees of our tilt parameter so we'll get a nice twisting effect on our barbed wire so just work your way around each control point of the deform curve adding these in at the start and end of our timeline like so and now you can see if we hit play we're getting this really awesome twisting effect with our barbed wire so yeah feel free to let your creative juices fly as you can really use any object you want here to fit the particular aesthetic you're going for and add some simple deformations and animations to it and if you do want to use this barbed wire asset i'm using here it'll be included in my chrome type starter package which i'll link in the description below to my gumroad and this pack will also contain all the finished project files as well as the poster templates and fonts we'll be using later on in the video so feel free to give it a download if you're someone who's looking to get more into creating this type of work but anyway continuing on i then wanted to match this twisting effect on my type as well so i just went into each of the curves and repeated this process of adding in keyframes for the tilt parameter at 0 and 360 degrees and then at this stage i was really starting to get close to the final render as i was happy with the overall animation and composition of my design but there was just one last touch i wanted to add which was to give my chrome material a bit of iridescence so if you're wondering what iridescence is it's this effect commonly seen in chrome type artwork which is basically these colored rainbow like refractions we get depending on our angle of view so the best way i've found to achieve this effect is to start off by adding in a color ramp with a full rainbow spectrum of colors before then adding in a layer weight noise texture and mix rgb nodes and plugging them in like so and now we plug this setup into the base color of our principled bsdf we'll begin to see how our colors are displaying and then if we come here into our noise node and start playing around with the scale and distortion parameters we'll be able to adjust it more to our liking then i'm going to add in another mix rgb node in between our color ramp and bsdf just so these start to blend into each other a bit more and then next what we'll want to do is start to add in a bit of randomness into where these colors show up as i don't want them to display uniformly across my whole design like it's currently doing so to do this we'll first add in a mix shader and then duplicate our principled bsdf using shift d we'll then plug them in like so before then creating a new noise texture which we'll plug into a black and white color ramp so what this is going to do is act as the alpha for our mix shader so to demonstrate what i mean by that if i just plug our noise setup into the material output like so we'll see all we're getting is this black and white result and basically what these black and white values will tell our mix shader is where to show one material versus the other so if we were to then go ahead and now plug these into the factor of our mix shader we'll see that now shows up as intended then we can just play with the sliders on our color ramp and noise nodes until we get the iridescence to our liking so now we're pretty much ready to render out our final animation but just before i do this what i'm going to do is come across to our compositing tab so we can add a few subtle post effects that will add the final polish to our render so the first thing we want to do is just check this use nodes box here and then i'm just going to pull out a new viewport and set this to our render result so i can see what's going on then the first note i'm going to add in is a glare node which is going to give the highlights of our image a nice sparkle so you can tweak these parameters to your liking but i tend to just use the streak setting and then turn the threshold up to 20 with the angle offset set to about 45 degrees then next i'm going to add in a lens distortion node which is going to give us this cool kind of 3d chromatic aberration effect so i'm just going to set the dispersion value to something quite low like .03 as i only want it to be quite subtle from here we can just come across to our output settings and then set the folder location and file type which in my case is mp4 before then hitting the render animation button and then hopefully if you've been following along you'll end up with something kind of resembling this but as i said guys it's totally up to your own creative limits here don't feel restricted to the same colors and materials i've chosen as you can really take the techniques we've covered in this video and use them to achieve whatever aesthetic resonates most with you and your style and just to demonstrate this even further i went ahead and freestyled a bit myself after my original creation just to see if i could take my design in a bit of a different direction so i just started off by adding in a new cylinder object for my backdrop to see what having a more three-dimensional scene would feel like i then added in a couple of area lights before then starting to play around with some different materiality for the type next i started tweaking the positions of the letters forwards and backwards from the camera to add a bit more shadow and depth to the scene i then change the profile of our extrusion curve so the type would be less sharp and take on a more rounded organic shape like so after that i experimented by adding in this kind of pseudo pond at the base of my type and once i did that i realized i was getting a sort of surrealist aesthetic happening a bit so i decided to just roll with that and began adding in some random objects like spheres and rocks in addition to inserting a lot more color into my scene through both the materials and lighting and that's really about it i just kept messing around with it till i was happy with it and then just added in some simple rotating and path animations like we did earlier so then now that we have a couple of different rendered looks or styles to play around with we can take these over into photoshop and begin experimenting with how this might look in other graphic mediums such as album artwork or poster designs so the best method to do this is to set up a base photoshop file for your artwork which you can then import as a link to other documents by using the place linked option so this is really great because it'll allow you to integrate your artwork into documents with different layout formats or page sizes and so on and then because it's linked whenever you update or save over your original artwork file it will update live in all the associated documents like so and then from here we can start to do things like change the blending mode of our artwork which will make it integrate over the top of whatever texture we have beneath it so for example here i have this simple faded black poster texture underneath and then if we just go ahead and change the blending mode on our artwork layer from normal to screen you can now see we're getting this really realistic gritty looking printout version of our poster so we can also do the same here on things like album artwork and so on so feel free to create these from scratch guys depending on the particular format you're looking to experiment with but as i said earlier i've made a new chrome type starter pack available on my gumroad for just 10 bucks and this includes a whole bunch of template photoshop files in a variety of different mediums including the ones i've just been over as well as all the associated fonts and it'll also include all the finished blender project files we went over in this video so you'll be able to interrogate my scenes further and have all the materials etc ready to go so i'll link that in the description down below for anyone who might be interested other than that thanks for watching guys and i hope you found this video useful and if you did feel free to give me a glow up on the youtube algorithm by dropping a like leaving a comment and subscribing cheers [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: veryveig

Views: 226,284

Keywords: type, fashion, typeface, typography, streetwear, aesthetic, clothing, design, graphic design

Id: mpvczz47Bz0

Length: 25min 36sec (1536 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021