Here's a good way to make a beveled star using gimp. In just a few minutes of work.

You can make a five pointed star or any other number for that matter.

1. Draw the lines using the pencil tool with a 1 pixel brush.



2. Select the black lines using the Select by Color tool. Uncheck the Antialiasing and bring the threshold down to 0 to get only the black selected.



3. Use the [Select] [border] and set the pixels to 100 and check mark the Feather Border dialog.



Paste black into the feathered selection.



4. Create a new white layer above the initial layer and set the layer mode to Dodge. You will be able to see the darkest black pixels from the layer below it.

5. Now choose the Blend Tool and use a black forground to while background Radial shape and click in the center and drag outward.



It should now look like this.



6. Now click on the bottom layer so that you can use the curves on it to make the 100 percent black into a slightly lower shade of black so that the lines don't show through.



7. Now do a [Layer] [New From Visible] and then drag the dodge layer above it in the layer stacking order and turn it Screen layer mode. And there you have it a perfectly shaped beveled star in minutes. Now you can do another [Layer] [New from Visible] again to preserve it for future use.



pegly

thank you pegleg !
while i was trying to get my bevelled star i was thinking you would probably know how to do the effect, with all you experience in heightmapping

Very good PegLeg44

ok, i tried it

its a cool technique, problem is, you get all these artifacts
is there a way to get rid of them ?



also a bit hard to get the star out of the bumpmap-layer...



EDIT:

trying some more

Nice results and thanks for the tut.

Esper those are looking good, sometimes I have managed to use the selective gaussians blurr to get rid of the noise.

Excellent tutorial. Afterwards you can use the color balance plugin to get some nice results also.

Nice results in my opinion.

Good one!

PegLeg44
Interesting that technique
I fumbled trying to follow the steps, and I could only get close.
But I will try again another time!

PegLeg - Thanks for the tutorial, You have definitely earned your......

pegleg44: great tutorial, i'll have to try it .

and nice looking stars, everyone