Thx Molly, it's your fault!
I wanted to test this technique in another form besides texts. Popeye was the victim of time.
So when I finished this tutorial effect on Popeye, I remembered that you had painted the tongue of yours, and the effect was very nice.
I decided to try coloring and see what would.
Thx for the inspiration!

Hi Toni, like much of the golden as the metallic blue, good results!


Esper, not sure if I understand ... But when I add more light sources, my results change with this change.

Hey great results these huh!

I can confirm that if you have the Environment Map enabled in the Lighting Effects Filter, the only lighting parameters that have much of an effect is the Distance Slider in the Options tab and the Shiny setting in the Materials tab. That's why I have the user disable the Emap and run the LE effects again in this tutorial.

Nice results by everyone, by the way!!

Gosh, you do have a long memory. I don't even remember painting the tongue, but I do remember doing Popeye.

Gimp/Inkscape combo

Very nice Esper.

The shiny gold looks great, Rod. Nice font too!




Great work!

gnu tux: thank you so much for putting up this tutorial!! thanks to the tut and the amazing things that everyone did with it i'm finally starting to make friends with the lighting effects filter . i'm not posting my own image from following the tutorial because i basically just did what you did, but i managed to use the technique when i made a birthday card for my brother and i'll be posting that one in another thread.
everyone: you all knock me out! you're so good at this and gave me so many inspiring tips!

nice improvements here, 2-ton !

Argh, tried to make a gold text today for a project but I cannot get two different versions of gimp to recognize the bump map. I tried both with and without alpha channel and I am sure I followed the tut to the letter, but no joy. Grrrrr.

have you tried using a channel instead, 2-ton ?

Well, no, but you tut worked perfectly as written last time I used it, now today, my gimp will not find the bump map layer...the drop down box shows an arrow but nothing comes up. I think my gimp might have degraded a bit, the 2.8.6 one has lost the basic circle brushes.

That is odd, 2-ton. Just about any image should be available as a map under the bump map tap. An environment map can't have an alpha channel but other than that, I don't know of any other requirement.

Did you happen to try the EnviroLogo script, just to see if it works with your GIMP install? It will automatically create and select the bumpmap and use whatever emap you specify (or if you don't provide one, it will generate one).

2-ton: you probably already checked this, but is the bump map layer the same size as the original layer? i've sometimes wondered why a bump map doesn't show up up in the menu and i've had to resize before it does - it seems like the lighting effects filter wants the two layers to be the same size.

Definitely a favorite effect ...

I am going to try again, and yes my enviro-map has no alpha, but I don't remember if I made all layers to image size. Oh lovely Mike...that is just about the right look I want only golden. I want my letters to look like bullion.

*jeez...so I made sure the enviro map, the bump map both had same size as text layer and no alpha channel, and it all worked...but...is there some kind of size limits, does the lettering need to be huge and then shrunk down to a useable size? I did it to the small size I wanted and it was ugly and pixilated. Off to try again.

Way cool Mike, very nice effect using those combinations.

ok, didn't mess with the resolution, just took the 72, and made it many pixels long and got a decent result that I can shrink to fit, I hope. The white sparkles dont show up well on this white background, but it will be on a colored background.