Hello and welcome back to another video my
name is Mike Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to wrap text
around a cylinder using GIMP. I'll be using GIMP version 2.10.22 which is the latest
version of GIMP 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 GIMP, Inkscape and darktable
tutorials on here. You can 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 GIMP 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. Alright so here is the composition we'll be creating for
today's tutorial. This is going to be using all built-in tools found inside of GIMP. So let's
dive right in. For starters I'm going to create a text composition which we're going to use to
wrap around the cylinder. So to do this I'll go to File>New. Your composition size can be any
size really, but I like to keep things simple by going with 1000x1000. You do want this to be
a square composition - so you want your width and your height to be the same - and I'll come
over here and click OK - at least in my opinion that is easier. Next what you're going to want
to do is add your text to the composition. So I can do that by coming over here and grabbing
the text tool, and I already know I'm using the font "Impact Bold Condensed." The reason I'm
using this font is that it is a nice bold font, a thick font, so it's easy to read even when
you are wrapping it around a cylinder - nice and prominent as well. So I'll come over here
to font, and I'll start typing "Impact..." and here you can see Impact Condensed - I think I
called it Bold Condensed.... same thing. And then for the size I went with "pixels" as my size. The
color you can have be whatever you want it to be. In this case I'm going to go with white as my
color and click OK. And we don't really need this line spacing - we're only going to have
one line. But I'll just set that to 0 just to simplify things. Alright so now that we have
all of our font settings - and by the way you can always scroll through the fonts here if you
want to use a different font - but I'll come over here and click on my composition, and with the
caps lock key on I'll type "FREE SOFTWARE," and I recommend from this point making adjustments to
the size or the font, if you want to change this, before we go to the next step. But after you have
set your font up the way you want it, now we'll come over here to the transform tool group and
we're going to go with the Rotate Transform tool, and making sure the "Transform:" mode is set
to layer here I'm just going to click on this and drag, and if I hold the shift key that'll drag
this based on 15 degree increments over here. And so what I'm doing is I'm just making this so that
it's going vertical now instead of horizontal. And I'll come over here and click "Rotate," and
of course once you transform the text layer it's actually going to convert the text layer to a
pixel layer. So if I hit ctrl+z there it's a text layer, ctrl+y now it is a pixel layer. So here's
where you should be after you've rotated this. Now let me come over and grab my alignment tool,
and I can click once on here on our text layer, make sure you're clicked on the pixels of
the text layer just so it gets selected, and then we're going to come over here to "Align"
inside of the Tool Options and change this to "Image." So we're aligning this relative to the
entire image. Now we're going to center align this both vertically and horizontally. So now we
have some nice center text here. By the way my background color right now is like a bluish color
- that doesn't matter because we're going to get rid of that background here in a second. But now
we're going to duplicate this text layer, and the number of times we duplicate the text layer is
going to depend on how many instances of this text we want wrapping around the cylinder. If you
want tons of instances you're going to want to go with probably around 8 to 10. If you want there to
be few instances you can go with as little as one. So just keep it at this current text layer or you
can go with something like 2, 3, 4, whatever. So let me come over here to my "FREE SOFTWARE" text
layer and duplicate this. I'll go with six layers total - so we'll just go five more. So 1, 2, 3,
4, 5... So now we have 6 of these layers total. Once we've done that, with my alignment tool
still selected I'm going to click and drag my mouse over these layers - so this is called the
"rubber band" feature. And if you wrap the rubber band around all of the layers inside there it
will select all of the layers underneath - as opposed to just that top layer. So now when
we come here to the alignment tool options, down to the "distribute" option, we can distribute
this from left to right. So when I click that option it's going to evenly spread out my text
here across the entire composition. So if I were to add seven or eight layers of text this would
be more tightly aligned here, and you might even start to get some overlap. So I think six is
a pretty good number here. But now what we'll do is merge all these layers together. So let's
come down here and just click this "merge" icon, and we're just going to merge everything onto
a single layer. And then we're going to make the layer the same size as the composition.
So we'll go to Layer>Layer to Image Size, and finally let's come over here to the background
layer and we're just going to delete this layer. So there you can see we just have our text, and
then I'm just going to add a blank layer above this. So we'll create a new layer, let's name
this "blank," my caps lock key is still on, and fill this with transparency and click
ok. You'll see why that's important here in a moment. But now let's come back here, click
on the "FREE SOFTWARE" text layer, make sure this is active for the next step - the next step
is actually mapping the text to the cylinder. So to do that we're going to hit the forward
slash "/" key on the keyboard or go to Help>Search and run a command. And I'm going to type in
"map," and we're going to go with this "Map Object" option. So double-click on that. Right now
this is set to "map to a plane." What we're going to do is change this - so we're going to go with
"cylinder," and we want a transparent background. So there you can see this is in a cylinder shape.
We're going to create a new layer from the result of this. And I like to have the "update preview"
live option checked. If you have a slower computer I don't recommend keeping this checked, but
I have a pretty fast computer so I'm going to keep that checked. The anti-aliasing
here is going to smooth out the result, so you can turn this all the way up to five once
again if you have a fast computer, otherwise keep that somewhere around three - although the result
won't be as smooth. And actually let me turn off the wire frame because we don't really need to
see that. And I can also come over here and zoom out. So I can get a better look at what's going
on here - so this is obviously a very rough look right now at the text wrapped around the cylinder.
Obviously this is a pretty rough look at the text wrapped around the cylinder. So let's change the
look here - let's come over here to "orientation." So you have "position" as well as "rotation." If
I use the "z" position, I can zoom this out a bit and then we can rotate this as well. So here
you'll see we have "x," so that's going to rotate that a bit. We have "y" which is just going
to roll the cylinder basically. And we have "z." So you can play around with the various axes
here and just get this to where you can get a pretty good look at the final cylinder. Alright
so here are the settings I decided to go with for my rotation to get this so that it is upright
not upside down, and also facing the viewer here - so it's easy to read now. There is a lot of
clutter because the top and bottom portions of the cylinder contain text. So let's change that to our
blank layer by coming over here to the cylinder tab, and for the top portion we're
going to change that to "blank," for the bottom portion we will also change that
to "blank" - so that is our blank layer right here. I'll come over here and click "preview" to
update it, and as you can see that has updated and it's way less cluttered. So let's move on
to "lights" because I want to adjust the way the light looks here. In my personal opinion I
prefer to have this set to "directional light." It's not going to look great at first, but
if I come over here to the "direction vector" I can change this to "1.00" for the x value, and
that's going to change the location of where the light is coming from. So that's going to be coming
from the front instead of the back. And you can always play around with all these settings
here just until you get something you like. So there we can bring the y down to minus 0.5
and maybe I'll just go with 0.75 for z for now. So these direction vector settings are just
allowing you to set the exact direction the light is coming from. So you have an x-axis,
a y-axis and a z-axis. So it's a 3D plane. So just play around with those settings until you
get the light in the location you want. But then we can also come over here to the "Material"
tab and we can play around with the intensity levels of the light and the reflectivity
of the light relative to the actual text. And I'm not going to go that much into this stuff
here. I do recommend you guys play around with it, but I'll just add a new ambient setting here. And
then we can also play around with the diffuse... so I don't like that. So I usually go
up and see what happens - you know, above the default value - and if I don't like the
way that looks I'll go below the default value, but I'm just going to go with these
settings here just for the sake of time. And once you're ready you're going
to come over here and click OK. So here we have our text wrapped around a
cylinder, and because we checked the "new layer" option it did create a new layer from this.
Of course there's a bunch of stuff going on behind here, so let's put this on its own composition.
I'll go to File>New, and I always like to place this on an HD composition - so 1920x1080, click
OK. Let's change the background color to black, and then we can come back over here and click and
drag this layer. Come over here to the tab, hold your mouse over it to select this composition,
hover over the composition itself and release. So there you have your text - shift+s, we'll
grab the scale tool, and we can scale this up. If I hold ctrl it'll scale from the center,
and I'll hit "scale." And there's our final result. I do recommend playing around with the
lights so you can get the shadow and everything looking the way you want. In this case there's
not a ton of separation between this line of text right here and the line of text behind it,
but I think you guys get the point regardless. And one last thing I want to point out - if I come
over here and hide this... If you want your text to be a different color or you want to apply even
some sort of gradient to this, I do recommend you change the color of the text before you use
that "Map Object" filter to map this to the cylinder. So right now this is set to white. If
I came over here to the free software text layer, locked that alpha channel, and then clicked
and dragged this black color on here, now we have black text. If I hit the g key on
my keyboard I can then draw a gradient - now we have gradient text. I don't recommend doing
a white to black gradient just because of the way the lighting works, but you guys get the
point. Alright 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.
