Now it is ready.
Here is the tutorial about this metal text effect:


Please let me know if the tutorial has some errors.
What is your opinion about the layer overview?
I*m not sure if it`s helpful.

Cool Chris. have it bookmarked...thanks for sharing

you put a lot of effort to make the pdf look great
thumbs up for this !

i couldnt get this effect to work so far....
tried different textures, because that website requires an account and i was too lazy to create one
also the address is wrong at the beginning

could you give a direct link to the textures you used, because i couldnt find them ?

bumpmapping the text with itself is not a good idea, because i got some very rough metal texure, with the texture i used
so a normal blurred white bumpmap would be better (or a saved blurred channel)

will try later again

Open an empty image to practice on, click the rivet brush, adjust the spacing on the brush until you have it spaced the way you want, then stroke.

You install the brushes the same way you do with scripts, patterns, plug-ins gradients. Open up your user/gimp-xxx/brushes folder and paste them in that folder.

Esper: do not use the texture layer1 for bumpmap. You must make a copy from the original text and add blur.
Good information for me, cause the tutorial is may misleading.

For all: good metal textures can be found on deviantart ->http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/textures/?order=9&q=metal
So there is no need to register.

I add all my new brushes, scripts, gradients etc, into my own gimp user folder. I never add anything to the default Gimp/share.

If you are using Linux, the path is /home/molly/.gimp-2.8/brushes. If you are using windows, the path is a bit different. The slashes are \ instead of /.

I had this going really well until I got into that color paint brush, then I couldn't get it to paint black. I tried to put it to gray scale and worked for hrs trying to get it black so that is where I messed up, big time. drats!

so it only painted white ?

why not just invert the colors ?

If you downloaded the colorstripe-brushes, use the colorstripe number 3 and 4 for the tutorial.
You can paint with color you want with it.

@Esper...I didn't invert the colors cuz it made all the layers white instead of just the brush.
@Chris...Thanks, I didn't see the black brushes in my brush list cuz they were separated in there and missed them. I guess it is too late to fix my image, maybe I will start a new one. I still couldn't understand why you put in the black circles, then the pop rivets later on another layer.

molly: i think your result was fun, it looks a bit icy with the white stripes instead of the black ones.

i have no idea why this happened, because all the settings seemed to be the same, but the shadows in mine are all over the place . and the rivets suffered from too much pre-bump blurring, they're supposed to be hexagons. i'm too busy now to play more with this one, but like a bad horror movie character i'll be back...

Yours turned out better than mine. Anyway, I did another one but I don't like it either. I find the instrucs confusing in some places.

@AnMal: Looks good! I like the hexagon-style.

@All: It is difficult to write tutorials so that all steps are explained in detail when you have some steps automatically makes.
So it can be that you must make different settings for the Blur or Bumpmap.
Sorry if it`s written to complicate. Please ask here, i will help you.

Chris , I found it quite difficult. Probably if I had used your files it would have been easier. But I wanted to make my own stuff which I did (except for your color stripe brush, Thank you for that ). I was going to use it on the rivets , but It was very cumbersome and I did not like the effect. I am still using Gimp 2.6.11 and perhaps that is another reason I had some trouble following your tut. Or perhaps because I did not use your metal templates . I had no idea of size and my steel plate photos were too big to start with (4272 X 2848 pix). Also the shrinking to a manageable size has deteriorated the quality. Anyway it was a very pleasant exercise and a nice tutorial. Thank You.

Nice job wooble, what brush did you use for your rivets? I used the pop-rivet one but yours looks more like a regular solid head on yours. Anyway, I like it.

Very nice!
Here is the original-file from me.

molly: i really like the rusty look !