Looks good, Graechan.

If you want smooth patterned sides on the extrusion, you can choose to fill with a solid color, rather than a pattern, being it will extrude whatever it's filled with. When you then overlay with a pattern, the fill color and pattern blend together, which fades the pattern a little. I've found that you can compensate for that, somewhat, by tweaking the layer modes, colors, brightness/contrast & curves to compensate. The color you start with is a factor, as well.

The "wacky" pattern you used is dark and fairy complex, but with a little manipulation, I was able to come up with this.



Having a separate "unbumped" end cap above the extrusion is very helpful, which I manually created here. You can lighten/darken or color shift the end cap to add contrast. Maybe that is an option I should include in the script.

very nice Tux, nice and smooth.

Very nice!

Yes, that looks excellent, Graechan.

I might have been a bit misleading in my last response regarding smooth extrusion sides so just to clarify, you can get smooth results by using an active pattern or a color as the Fill Method. It just depends on the pattern.

Anyway, I'm attaching the latest stable snapshot where I'm saving the original fill layer to be used as an end cap when selecting "Extrude Active Pattern Overlay". I place it just below the Pattern Overlay, but you can move it around, manipulate/brightness/color shift (or dump it), depending on what you need. This will allow you to get some interesting/different and perhaps better results.

No End Cap


Same Exact Image But With Stroked & Brightness/Contrast Shifted End Cap


Manipulated & Color Shifted End Cap


My next step is to optimize the extrusion routines. There is really no need to create all the layers, then merge. I can just merge down as I go.

Nice results! You have some deep bumping gong on here.

I find I get the cool results when I use a Pattern as the Fill Method, selecting Extrusion Overlay in Misc Effects dropdown and then manipulating the various layers by color/hue/brightness/contrast/transparency/layer mode shifting. Sometimes the stroke layer is more useful when it's thin and/or similar in shade to the rest of the image. A drop shadow always adds depth too.

You boyz are sure having fun will your extrusions. nice job by the way.

The idea here is that the Extrude Pattern would normally match the Fill Pattern and since the Fill uses the Active Pattern, the Extrusion Overlay would also use the Active Pattern. For this case, you have the option to set the Background Fill to the Effect Pattern. There are times when one might want to set the Background Fill to use the Active Pattern, so that's why both options are included.

To allow for more versatility, I can add another option to set the Extrusion Overlay to use the Effect pattern, which could produce some interesting results, being the Fill & the Extrusion Overlay could be using different patterns.

By the way, the last result you posted looks good. Having the end cap lighter than the extrusion can, at times, give some needed contrast to the text.

End Cap ?

I'm calling the original image layer, the one that's used to create the extrusion, the end cap. It's left in place at the top of the extrusion so you can color/hue/brightness shift it to add some contrast, if you want. It's just another layer to manipulate to get a different result.

Very good thanks... I was looking all over for something that looked like an end cap. sigh... all this terminology

so is the toolbox pretty much done being upgraded for a while? I want to replace my old one, but thought I would wait until you settled down for a while on the upgrades, lol.

2-ton,

All of these recent updates are leading up to a V2.0 release of this script, which should be coming soon. After that, development will taper off for a while.

Thanks. I will wait for 2.0 and then grab it!

Yes. I'm planing on rewriting that script to include some of the extrusion features being developed here for the LT script. Hopefully, I'll be able to pick back up working on the this script over the weekend. I'm a little sidetracked at the moment.