Inkscape 3D Text Tutorial: How to Create 3D Text Effect in Perspective

I'm Rick Johansen and this is iron Echo design in today's inkscape tutorial we're going to make 3D isometric text just like this it's coming from a comment from Davey Edgar glad I found your videos can you do a tutorial on how to combine 3D text with perspective and I replied and he actually gave an example he wants to look kind of like this we did this previously a different tutorial using interpolation today we're going to do a different method called motion it gives you a little bit more control and it lets you actually fine tune the gradients now this is an example of something kind of like long division where it's good to know how you do it but there are 3D rendering software they can do this automatically illustrator I know the latest version does it with an automated feature you can still do it in inkscape it's fun it's easy so let's begin we can start by getting our page set up so we're all working at the same scale you can go to file document properties and you'll see the format A4 is what I have here x out of that I did bring in the color palette because I want to cheat and go quicker if you want these exact colors you can either screenshot it or I'll have the color codes in the description below let's grab the text tool and we'll write 3D I'm using enter which is an open source Google font if you don't have enter you could use something like Ariel I'll change my style to heavy and no matter which method you're going to choose you have to first make this text into a path so you have it selected we'll go to path object to path right now if you look down here at the bottom this is your info area it's saying group of two objects we have to ungroup it object ungroup and now we can take these two parts and create a path path combined now that it's a path we can either do path effects or we can do the interpolate or motion let's start by doing interpolate like in the previous 3D text video so you can see how it compares to the new motion method that we'll do I'm going to play with the colors we'll go to object fill and stroke I'm on the fill Tab and right now it's black I'll do eyedropper and we'll make it this pink Ctrl D will duplicate it I'll take this one and put it aside I'll change it now to this darker pink Ctrl D again will duplicate it and we'll pull this aside and make it darker this maroon these right here this is hierarchy I want to have the maroon one at the bottom click lower selection to the bottom and now you can already visualize the 3d effect that we're going to create with interpolate and in the previous tutorial we actually made it smaller as well to create even more of a stretch the color change will go from what you first select to what you second select so we want to go from the back hold shift get the front extensions generate from path interpolate for today just stay on exponent one the steps that mean means how many iterations of this path do you want between the back and the front we'll start with 60. for the method have it on discard extra nodes of the longer path and when you select interpolate style that's going to create the shading it's going to go from this darker to this lighter pink whatever it is so let's do that and if you put that lighter color on top you've created your 3D text that's basically the whole first video we did on this with interpolate it's a fine way it's easy but it's not what Davey Edgar was asking he wants to do it in perspective and he wants it to look like this let's start fresh I'll do 3D again we'll change it to heavy it's not going to work unless we turn it into a path so a path object to path ungroup it they're both selected now we can go to path combine and we can change to this pink here I want to look at his reference picture one more time he wants the perspective to be angled this way and pulling the depth out that way since it is a path we can have it selected and go to path path effects it'll look blank hit the plus and you get the path effects menu you want to find the one that says perspective right here perspective envelope the sidebar menu is going to pop up and the first one type perspective that's what we want but we want overflow perspective still nothing happens so you want to go to this icon right here it's edit paths by node now you'll see these diamonds in the corners here I'm going to draw this node upwards and the bottom one upwards maybe I'll make it a little bit more dramatic that's it for perspective instead of doing interpolate to draw out the depth we're going to go with motion go back to extensions generate from path there's interpolate next one down is motion the pop-up menu you get you'll have couple choices length and angle I did sheet the angle negative 160 is going to draw it back this direction so for Speed just start with that you can play around with the different angles and see how it looks and for length I'll just stick with 10. we'll do live preview apply and there it is it's hard to see whether it's all bunched together I'll take away the top I'm actually going to use this part twice one will be the proper face of a 3D design when we're done and the other will be a lighting overlay if you find this method easier than the interpolate you actually could select all of this part make it darker and put your face on it you'll still see these lines though the way you get rid of that is to select one of them and hold shift grab everything path union now it's all nice and clean you could put the front back on it but we want to go one step further we want to actually have control of the shading so I'm going to take this off Ctrl Z so I have everything the way it was and I'm going to eliminate anything that's not seen beneath the face to help visualize it I'm going to cut the opacity on the front so I know I want to take all of this out it's as simple as selecting while holding shift and deleting that here's a trick you may not have used before I've got the 3D this pink 3D selected I can hold alt while clicking the mouse and grab layers beneath that top selection now I have this part delete that finishes the D now let's clean up the three you technically can leave the stuff behind there it's just easier for me to visualize when I want to do the gradients to have it in set pieces so just humor me I'm going to delete a couple more parts and now we prepare for the gradients to meld all these sections together I'm going to hold shift create a bounding box select everything go to path union now it's all One path I can add a gradient to it this one holds shift get that path Union this one's independent I'll do alt Red Line This path Union let's make this full opacity put it back here these remaining lines don't bother me because when the gradients are applied the contrast and color is going to hit there anyway let me take one more look at the reference photo this was definitely or probably made with 3D software but it looks like there are light source is coming from here pushing the Shadows that way so I'm going to go and make a sun to help visualize what we're doing here I may use some artistic license so go easy on me if my physics aren't right we'll start with the top this section right here the way you apply a gradient make sure you're on the fill tab on fill and stroke and go to linear gradient the default will take you from the base color to full transparency so we don't want that I'll click over to the other side this arrow on the slider correlates with this part this bar down here changes the alpha and you can make that full opacity and we'll do eyedropper to bring it to this color see how that looks better already you can slide these around to change the gradient you can also actually hit this over here create and edit gradients if I have it selected you can change the direction of the gradient as well if the sun was shooting up here for some reason you could bring your shadows out that way you can play with it go back to selector tool choose the next grading area on the fill tab linear gradient fix the transparency and under here I would imagine maybe it would be lighter on the inside so this side will go lighter in the comments in a different video Someone said I miss having the actual gradient bar and I thought the exact same thing the first time I used inkscape 1.2 you see this new slider and you think that it's been replaced but it's still there you just have to click the tool like I showed you you can also choose like let's say this one here rather than rework it every time you can go to gradient hit this Delta and choose the one that you liked or word of caution though if you do cheat like this and take a gradient you already made if you make changes on this it's going to affect the other one as well so I am going to cheat on this one but we'll start fresh for over here I imagine I was time lapsing some of that if this part right here one more trick you can also hit this left right arrow that will reverse the gradient you can see if you like it better with the dark to the light or light to the dark goodbye Sun I want to add the overlay here I've got the original that we had I'm going to choose radial gradient I want the light part to be in the center so I'll do reverse but that's actually just transparent we don't want that I want it to be full opacity but white something like that and one more trick before I lay it on top I don't want it to be blend mode normal I'm going to go down to Overlay it's a subtle difference I like the way it behaves as an overlay not just a second layer and if you really want to fine tune it if you choose your edit the gradient you can move which way the shine hits I'll leave it right there group everything together and let's throw this on a backdrop there's your 3D isometric text the long division way if you have a suggestion for a video you want to see let me know in the comments I appreciate it if you're brand new to inkscape this was all too fast I do have a quick start beginner guide I'll have it up here somewhere 45 minutes free course walks between to all the menus toolbars everything and I will see you next time

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 17,799

Keywords: Inkscape, Rick Johanson, IronEcho, Iron Echo Design, 3D, 3D Text, Motion, Interpolate, Depth, Isometric

Id: FcwoFAqHXv0

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023