How to Create Cubic Typography in GIMP | GIMP Text Effect Tutorial

hello and welcome back to another video my name is mike davies and in today's tutorial i'll be showing you how to create what i'm calling cubic typographic text inside of i'll be using version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of inkscape and dark table tutorials on here you can also get more by becoming a dmd premium member and i have tons of free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and as i mentioned you can get more by becoming a dmd premium member and i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video i'll be using this free font montserrat from google i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to download and install fonts specifically from google fonts i'll link that to this video so here is the final composition we'll be creating for today's tutorial as you can see the text curves around the edges here of this cube and also goes off in various directions and it has some shading here i actually have a template available here for dmd premium subscribers that just goes over how the layers are related to the position on the cube and you'll see what these labels mean a little bit later on in this tutorial and you can see that each one of these counts from one to five and i have directional arrows so you guys can see what direction these layers are placed on the final cube so here is one example of a rendering i did and you can see how layer one three and five are shown here in which direction they're facing but don't worry i will cover each of the steps for this tutorial so i'm not gonna skip anything it should be super easy let's dive right in so i'm gonna start by closing out this tab just because it will get a little bit cluttered as we use the tool to create our cube so it's better to have less compositions open here i'll go to file new and i'm going to create a new document so i'm going to go 1000 by 1000 so that's going to give us a square and because my background color was set to black our background color here is now black you can always click and drag the black onto that and that will change the background color next what i want to do is i want to type my text in here so i'll come over and grab the text tool from my toolbox and i have my font here set to months are at bold you can manually type whatever font you want to use here and it will come up just hit the tab key or you can click on here and cycle through the fonts you can also click this icon and scroll through the fonts here in the fonts dialog and also going to come over and change the size to 75 and make sure the color here is set to white and right now you'll see that the spacing between lines the line spacing is minus 30. so i'm going to come over to my composition click on here and with the caps lock key on i'm going to type my text all right so here is my text this is way too small right now so i'll hit ctrl a to select all the text and now i can come up here and just increase this until it basically fills up the entire space and if i hold the alt key i can move my text so i'm going to move this over and see if that fits so right now it's a bit too big so let's go down to 115. so once this is positioned where we want it i can come over here and grab my move tool from the toolbox and next what i'm going to do is i'm going to slice this text in the place where it's going to basically bend around the corner of the cube so what i've been doing is i've been slicing it right at the eye here to do that i'm going to come over and grab my rectangle select tool and i'm just going to draw this first randomly and that was actually pretty close so you can see i went all the way outside the text box and i'm going to just adjust this so maybe it's a little bit better aligned with that eye you guys can slice this wherever you want just make sure that your text does not go outside of the boundary you can see my text box goes outside of my composition boundary but not the text itself that is important because your text will get cut off there but making sure you are on that text layer you're gonna hit control x to copy that or to cut that i should say and you'll see that now that whole right side of the text will disappear and i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that selection area then i'll go to edit paste in place so that i'll paste that exactly where we cut it from originally but it will place it as a floating selection or a pasted layer so now i'll come over and just add that to its own new layer and now you can see that these two areas of the text are now on separate layers and i already know from playing around with this tool how the various layers in my composition are going to line up to the sides in the cube so that gives me an idea of how i need to place the text here in this case because i'm having this side of the text line up with obviously this side the left side of this portion of the text around the corner i'm going to need these at opposite ends of our square here and you'll see why once we get into generating the actual cube but i'll come over here to my toolbox and i'm going to grab the alignment tool and on this pasted layer now which is going to be the right side of our text i'm going to click on this once so now that's selected by the alignment tool i'm going to set this relative to image and i'm going to left align this so now that's aligned to the left side of the image and let's just hide that temporarily here so let's come down here to the second part of the text the left side of the text first thing i want to do here is go to layer crop to content so that'll crop the layer size down so now the right side of the layer is aligned here with the right side of where the text is cut off then i'm going to click on this layer and you can always tell a layer is selected by the alignment tool because it has these little boxes in the corner now come over here and i'm going to align relative to the image to the right side and now if i come back over here and unhide this you'll see now the left portion of our text is on the right side and the right portion is on the left side however one thing i want to point out here is if you want these to be a line like this where they come pretty close to each other in terms of the edges of the cube you're going to want to come over here and take out the gap here at the bottom so this is still set up with the alignment tool so i can come over here and just align this to the bottom and if i come back over here to this layer click on it i can also align that one to the bottom and i am going to have to crop this to the content first so layer crop to content and now let's try that again we'll click on this and now we'll align that to the bottom so we are missing one line of text i'm going to add that text now so i'm going to come over grab my text tool again we'll have all the settings set to the same and actually i remember i did change this so i'll go with 115 here these don't all three have to be the same settings so let me click on here now and now i'm going to type by davies hit the enter key media design so now i'll come over here grab my move tool and i'm going to hit shift r on my keyboard that's going to grab the rotate tool and now i'm just going to click and if i hold the shift key it'll rotate this in 15 degree increments so that's going to rotate this to negative 90 degrees and now i'll come over here and click rotate and again just based on playing with this i know that this needs to be over here in the bottom left corner in order for it to show up like this so let's come back over here hit the q key on my keyboard to grab the alignment tool and now i'm going to click on this layer and i'm just going to left align it to the image and then align it to the bottom if you want there to be even less of a gap than you see here you can always crop this layer to the text inside of it so layer crop to content and then align it but in this case i actually like the little bit of spacing so i'm going to leave it there so there's just a few more simple steps before we get into mapping the layers to the sides of the cube so for starters i need to hide the background layer and then what i'm going to do is come over here and create a new layer this one i will name blank and i'll fill this with transparency and click ok we will be using this blank layer for multiple sides of the cube and then finally what i need to do is i need to make the size of these layers the full size of the composition right now they're pretty small so what i'll do is go to layer layer to image size and i'm going to do that for the other text layer so layer layer to image size and finally layer layer 2 image size the last thing i'll do is i'll label each of these layers so i know where they go inside of the cube and i only know where they go because i played around with this earlier but again you guys can check out my premium template if you are a dmd premium member and that'll save you a ton of time but i know the layer order for me is going to be back right and bottom and so let me come over here and change this to back right and bottom and you'll see why i'm labeling these the way i am in a moment so now that all that is done i'm going to hit the forward slash key on my keyboard or go to help search and run a command and then i'm going to type map and what we're looking for is the map object feature so i'll double click on that this is going to look a little bit messed up at first because the sides are not properly mapped but what you need to know is that map2 needs to be set to box i recommend having transparent background otherwise it'll fill this in with whatever background color you have currently selected and i recommend either create new image if you want this to open up as a brand new composition once it's rendered that just takes a bit more time or create a new layer to place this on a brand new layer i don't recommend having both of these unchecked because then it'll place the cube on whatever your active layer is so i like to go with create new layer anti-aliasing if this is turned all the way up it is going to make your lettering look smoother supposedly but it will take up a bit more performance on your computer so if you have a slow computer i don't recommend turning this up probably above three or so and i like to have the update preview live option checked that way we get a live look at what's going on here but the first area i'll go to is this box area so here you can see why i label these things the way i did so you have back right and bottom and you can see here we have back bottom and right so let's assign these to their corresponding layers so let's find the layer labeled right and this is why i closed out those other compositions because everything will show up in here but we have this one set to right and we don't have a left so if we don't have that one we're going to set it to the blank layer we do have a bottom layer so we'll set that to the bottom layer and you can see right now all of them are set to bottom that's why we have to go through and set these manually this one will set to blank because we don't have a top we do have a back layer so i'm going to set this to back and the front layer we do not have so we're going to set that to blank my template does have the labels for layers from bottom to top so definitely check that out but now i'll come over and click preview so there you can see everything is aligned properly but it's not really positioned so that we can see everything the way we want to see it so what i'll do to fix that is come over here to this tab orientation and here you'll see we have several sliders so what we're looking for first is the rotation slider so what i'm going to do is just click and drag this with my mouse and so the x slider is not what we need right now neither really is the y so the z is going to bring this back into focus it's going to straighten it out a bit we still want this to be sort of tilted a bit there and then once we get the z in a better position we can mess around with the other sliders here so this slider here is basically going to zoom it in or out this one is going to bring it up or down and this one will bring it left or right and if i set these to 0.5 it's basically going to set these at the exact middle points so that's what i like to do for x and y we'll leave z where it is for now all right so eventually you'll get this to a place that you like so these are my settings i decided to go with here and if you don't get a preview generated in real time just hit the preview button there but once you have everything positioned come over here and you can mess around with the light and material settings so the light setting itself allows you to change the position of the light so let me hit this little minus sign and you can see right now my light is positioned out here i can move this around and it won't actually render the new light until you actually release it so every time you move the light you do have to click and then release and you can see what that's doing there to the shading here in the lettering the unfortunate thing about this is you can only zoom in this much so you can't really get a full picture of what's going on with the lighting but you can still play around with this and of course if you move it further away the lighting gets dimmer especially at the bottom there so you can change the type of light here so it's point light by default but you have directional light and then no light and you can also come over here and manually adjust the exact position of the light and of course change the color although this really only works when you're using lighter colors but if you want to change how the light is interacting with this further so let me just zoom in a bit more you can always come over here to material and play around with the intensity levels and the reflectivity so this is just changing basically how intense the light is on the various aspects of this so here you'll see the ambient light is going to make this lighter if you turn it up more or if you want less ambient light it'll make it darker and then diffuse is going to determine basically how much spillage of the light is going to occur and then below that you have reflectivity so diffuse specular and highlights so you guys can play around with those settings until you get the look you like so once we're ready to apply our changes i can come over here and click ok here you'll see our cubic typography and this is a pretty harsh lighting setup so that's why you have such a drastic difference between the various parts of our text but let's say i wanted to put this on its own background i can go to file new and let's make this 1920 by let's go 1080 click ok we'll keep this black background and when i click and drag this over here to the black background you can see the result of that shift s on the keyboard i can always scale this up and click scale alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 8,193

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2021, GIMP graphic design, kinetic typography, cubic typography, wrap text, wrap text around 3D object, GIMP 2.10.22

Id: PvHRc6y_xOE

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021