As I said before a very nice tut. I thought I'd better show you my results as well. Thanks.

very cool wbool

using this tutorial and the Ribbed Metal Text Tutorial I experimented with this:




wow, what fun and who knew there were so many ways to monkey with metal!


https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/e ... directlink

Beautiful work Cecilia. Nice to know it was useful to you.

Very nice Cecilia. Yes there sure are lots of ways to make metal interesting.

To me, and all of these are amazing pieces and an amazing tut, but they all still lack one thing about pitted metal. When on a 3D object the "pits" should appear to affect the shape of the object, not just appear on the surface of it. Kinda of like a rock that has been struck by many an objects (sometimes I don't even know where I get these references) it alters the way the light effects each individual area, which I think is what is the one key part to any digital attempts. If we could somehow figure out this and how to replicate this I think no-one would really be able to tell whether it is real or not....get my drift?

yup, they still look darn good though

Oh I agree n that.

Well I just got almost to the end of the tute just before the make seamless step and it was a disaster, I deleted the whole thing and then took a tantrum. I will go back at it though.

Never mind Molly, I'm sure you'll get it right next time.

The visual I just got after reading your post was of you slamming down the mouse, emitting some sort of loud sound like a cross between a growl and a scream and storming out of the room, vowing to never do a Drac tutorial again.

Priceless!

(done that myself a few times)

Cecelia - I love the way you "monkeyed" with both tutorials. Great job! Love it, love it, love it.

I think you have a valid point and it got me to thinking. If maybe we split up the "pitted" layers somehow and did them at different depths on the bump map, the resulting lighting effect from the bump process would render the difference you are looking for. I'll have to experiment with that to get more randomness that makes it look more realistic or did I mis your point?

Did you mean the overall shape of the beat up metal? If so, maybe warp it or create a warped shape and use Filters>Map>Displace like you might do with water ripples. Just tossing out ideas. Let's see if someone can come up with some examples to look at so maybe we can "see the layers" in the image and perhaps replicate it. Do yo have an image in mind?

Many thanks for a really great tutorial.

I got a little lost on step 7.



I assumed that we should be applying the Gaussian Blur to the remaining non-transparent areas of both respective layers (middle and top), as it doesn't make any sense (to me) to blur the transparent parts of these two layers - although I am still unsure.

Also the sand texture link took me to a page with two sand textures, one finer and one coarser. I used the coarser non tile-able one. For the installation of the bevel script, I was worried about installing python over a working gimp/python Windows 7 set-up, so I just hunted down the script separately from http://registry.gimp.org/taxonomy/term/122 and put that in my gimp user plug-ins folder.

I used a different font, as I wanted to check out how the overall effect would look with proper-case. had to adjust the bevel depth from 10 to 2 in step 13 to compensate for the thinner font.

Finally, I noticed that merging down layers caused me to lose the nice effects of the layer "grain merge" and "hard light" modes, so instead I "copied visible" and pasted back in as a new layer, hiding/deleting the old layers. wbool63's example in post 23 of this thread http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4269&start=20#p53136 seemed to suffer from this (to my eye he gets a softer, lighter effect), although strangely the original tut does not appear to - the hard light is still there and the yellow is much paler and grainier, which is the effect I was after as well.

For what it's worth, this is what I ended up with:

It looks pretty nice to me fuego.

I assumed that we should be applying the Gaussian Blur to the remaining non-transparent areas of both respective layers (middle and top), as it doesn't make any sense (to me) to blur the transparent parts of these two layers - although I am still unsure.

I'm not sure If I understand. I have never heard of applying a blur to the Alpha Channel. I don't even know how to go about that. Since there is only a transparency, you would not see any thing because there is nothing there to blur. Perhaps I could have been more clear but I was referring to blurring the layer itself. The alpha channel is required in order to use layer modes in the subsequent steps.

Also the sand texture link took me to a page with two sand textures, one finer and one coarser. I used the coarser non tile-able one. For the installation of the bevel script, I was worried about installing python over a working gimp/python Windows 7 set-up, so I just hunted down the script separately from http://registry.gimp.org/taxonomy/term/122 and put that in my gimp user plug-ins folder.

I used a different font, as I wanted to check out how the overall effect would look with proper-case. had to adjust the bevel depth from 10 to 2 in step 13 to compensate for the thinner font.

Anytime you change the font you automatically change the parameters of any adjustments like applying a bevel in this instance

Finally, I noticed that merging down layers caused me to lose the nice effects of the layer "grain merge" and "hard light" modes, so instead I "copied visible" and pasted back in as a new layer, hiding/deleting the old layers. wbool63's example in post 23 of this thread http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4269&start=20#p53136 seemed to suffer from this (to my eye he gets a softer, lighter effect), although strangely the original tut does not appear to - the hard light is still there and the yellow is much paler and grainier, which is the effect I was after as well.

As you may already be aware, anytime you merge down layers you have to start with the lowest layer in the stack that has a layer mode applied and merge it down with the "normal" layer first before merging down anything else above it. For instance if you have an image layer and two other layers above it, both with different layer modes applied, if you try to merge down the top one with the one under it you will lose the effect altogether. You have to first merge the layer above the normal layer then merge down the next one above it . As for any color loss or appearance, that is always a subjective area that you have to decide for yourself based on what you think looks best.

For what it's worth, this is what I ended up with:

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Your image looks very good, however as you can see, using a lower case font makes it problematic getting the reflection to look right. The effect as a whole looks much better when all the letters even on the bottom and the font has aq little "meat" to it so you can really see the pitting efffect. Glad you like the tut.

Thank you very much for your additional replies and explanations, particularly the stuff about merging down the layers, which I hadn't fully realised. Now that I think about it, it makes total sense, of course.

I agree that the effect and particularly the reflection are much better shown on a meatier font. In my example, I squashed (scaled) down the reflection vertically anyway, just to see how it would look. My text sample is particularly problematic because of the lowercase descender on the letter "p", which gives it the whole thing an odd "floating in the air look". I'm thinking that I should have aligned the reflection on the overall baseline and made it look as if the text was on a layer of water, with the p descender submerged Maybe I'll have another go at it.

Anyway, thanks again for the additional explanations. I'm just converting the tutorial steps to Script-Fu as I may use this a few times and I wanted to familiarise myself with Script-Fu anyway.

@fuego, I noticed your reflection and how to combat that, I usually pick a font that are all even so none of the letters go below. That way you can get the reflection closer.
Of coarse there are other ways but that is just one of them.

Even seasoned veterans like to see different ways of doing things. I know I've done some things the same way for years then watched a tut on youtube that does it a different way that never occurred to me. So I say, carry on.

"Sniff something did ya, Rat boy?" (The Abyss)

Thanks GMS. I's always nice to get positive support.

OK, I finished my Script-Fu script, for this tutorial and posted it on my blog. The script can be found at Script-Fu script for Draconian's Pitted Metal Tutorial if anyone wants to make any use of it, or critique it.