Thought I would do a quick little tutorial on creating a text effect wallpaper, here is the result.



For this Tutorial you will need to install the script 3D Extrusion.

If you want to change the location of the script then have a look at this thread

1. Open a new image in Gimp 1600px * 1200px, Go view and make sure "Snap to Canvas Edge" is ticked. Add a horizontal guide at 1050px and a vertical guide at 150px

2. Make sure foreground colour is set to White and background colour is set to Black.

3. Select the Blend Tool and with settings as shown below, blend the background layer with a white to black vertical gradient, holding down the ctrl key will help keep the gradient straight.



4. Create a new transparent layer and name it Colour.

5. Change the foreground and background colours to two colours of your choosing, for this tutorial I have changed the foreground colour to Gold "ffd700" and the background colour to Crimson "dc143c".

6. Select the Blend tool again and using the same settings blend with new gradient from top left hand corner to bottom right hand corner.

7. Change layer mode to "Colour"



8. Depending on what colours you chose to use you might find you have a stripping effect Like I have, see below, so with Colour layer selected go Layers>Merge Down then Go Filters>Blur>Gausians Blur and set X & Y to 50. This should smooth out the stripping, if not then try a higher setting for the blur.



This is the results after the blur



9. Go Filters>Render>Clouds>Fog and change colour to Warm Grey "aea79f" and click ok.

10. Select the layer named "Clouds" and change layer mode to "Grain Merge".



11. Your wallpaper background should now look something similar to the image below.



We are now going to look at creating the text effect for the wallpaper, we will be doing this in stages to show some of the effects that we are able to achieve.

12. To begin with select the text tool and enter some text, I will be using Ariel Black set at 250px and the colour grey 808080, Also for this effect to work better you will need to use all Capital letters.

13. Type in text and then highlight text as you would in any word processor and click the "Bold" button, this just thickens the edge of our text even more.



14. The next step is to close the gaps up between the letters and the space between the lines of text, we can do this by adjusting the two highlighted controls on the text Dialogue, see image below.



15. Now to run the 3D script, if you haven't changed the location of the script then you should find it at Xtns>Script-Fu>3Dtext>Make 3D, use the settings shown below and click O.K.



16. Select your new 3D text layer (Should be second layer from top), you'll notice its very stripey, so to smooth it out go Filters>Blur>Selective Gaussian Blur and with settings as shown in image below click O.K, then repeat the filter.
I tried different settings but felt I got the best results by running the filter twice on these settings.



17. After the blur the edges can go a little bit transparent so duplicate your 3D text layer to add a little more depth on the edges, then merge all 3 text layers together,I renamed layer to "3D Text". Go Layer>Autocrop Layer and position layer on our two guides we created earlier.



18. Go Layer>Layer to Image Size, At this point you could experiement with the different layer modes as they can give some nice effects, but for this tutorial change Layer Mode to Grain Merge.

19. Create a new Layer and name it "Texture" and fill this layer with the pattern "Slate". Then lower this layer so that it is below your "3D Text" Layer.

20. Select your "3D Text" layer and go Layer>Transparency>Alpha to Selection, Now select your "Texture" layer and go Layer>Mask>Add Layer Mask and use the settings below, then Go Select>None.



NOTE:-
The pattern needs to be very irregular for the effect to work, try it with a stripey pattern and you'll see what I mean, Also if you go for a lighter pattern you may find your better setting your "3D Text" layer to mode "Multiply".

21. We are going to create another text effect, so first duplicate your Layer "3D Text", Select this new layer and Change Layer Mode to "Normal".

22. Set Foreground Colour to Grey bfbfbf and Background Colour to white 000000, also make sure Gradient selected is "FG to BG (RGB)", then go Colour>Map>Gradient Map. This gives us quite a nice White text effect.



23. What I want to do now is combine the white text effect with the Slate text effect, so I am going to change the layer mode of the white text to "Grain Merge", now its still not as white as I would like so I am going to duplicate this layer and change opacity to "50". So now we have a very nice effect.



24. The last thing to do is to create a shadow for the Text, Select the layer named "3D Text" and go Filters>Light and Shadow>Perspective Shadow and using the settings shown below click O.K.



25.Then select the layer "Perspective Shadow" and lower this layer to below the layer named "Texture", and thats it finished, you should have a screen and layers dialouge similar to mine below.

looks excellent, he4rty

will try later

Looks like another good one he4rty

he4rty: oh finally! i was looking forward to this one, i liked that texture on the 3d text. but do you remember i had problems with the gradient background? to get away from the striping i had to make the background in three layers - colour layer (set to normal), white to transparent layer (set to screen) and black to transparent layer (set to multiply) and blur the two last layers with 100 px. i think you have to use magic or something since you get your gradient so smooth just by blurring it!

Esper, Odin - Thanks for the comments.

AnMal - Yes, secretly I use a magic wand rather than a tablet with my version of Gimp, It does seem to be very colour dependant wether you get stripes or not and maybe you've managed to find an even worse combination of colours.

Gramps- Really nice, you've got one up on me, as I have never bothered to change the splash screen and still would know how to do it, despite reading all the threads on here.

I like everything about it. The shadows, the 3D, the colors. Excellent!

K1TesseraEna- Thanks for the comments, thinking the displace filter would be the way to go to get the shadows.

Oregonian - Thanks.

Gave this a quick try ... I'll have to try it again when I have more time.

i first made one with the slate texture and the text almost white, just like in the tutorial. no fun! so i experimented with textures and liked this one that almost glitters. then i used the background in colour mode above the whole thing to get some colour on the text.

Mike - Looks Good, Although you have the same issue with the "I" that I have, in as much as it dissappears, really need to find a font where the capital I has the bars top and bottom to try.

AnMal - Thats really nice, what texture did you use.

he4rty: thanks! i used an inverted wet asphalt texture.

Isn't it missing some shadow in the upper curve of the 'S' and on the dot of the '!'?

ofnuts: i don't know. i'll go back to my xcf and take a closer look at the shadow, i think maybe i should have done the shadow by hand instead of using the perspective shadow filter.

AnMal - I think what ofnuts is getting at is the same thing I noticed in my text that in reality you should have a shadow being created by the top part of the letter onto the bottom part, but the 3d script obviously doesn't recognise this.

Nice tut !

Here's what I made using your tutorial...



I added one more step after merging all the layers together, by duplicating it and setting the new duplicate layer mode to multiply and lowering it's opacity a bit.

Wallace - Really nice like the blue tint to everything.

Esper - great work, love how you have got the lettering joining and also the green.

Thanks he4rty, normally I would have gone with purple hues, but blue is cool too.
I like Esper's shadow and all the things you pointed out as well.

Great job Esper!