So I assume that since License Plates are made of metal they qualify as fair game for a metal maniac such as yours truly. Relatively easy to do I might add.

Just foolin' around this afternoon....I would like to have repositioned the main text better but it was too late in the layer construction for this one.

like that one, dracdonian! good job. not an eighteen wheeler, i hope - those things are scary!

Wow. That's really good. Making something look like metal without gloss isn't easy.

it looks very real

i must confess im not the greatest fan of the whole 3D thing because i think a lot of the times it doesnt look very realistic
its some meta pseudo realism-thing going on

BUT
this license plate looks almost photorealistic !
good job Draconian !!!

i especially like the grunge you made

Thanks everyone. Esper - The grunge was from a set of brushes by Smirnoff Sweetie and I think I got them from DA. To get the surface texture, I used a very light gray (almost white) background, then duplicated it and rendered RGB noise (correlated) then used levels to thin it out a bit, select by color and delete to get rid of the gray. Once I had the noise isolated, I alpha selected it and filled the selection with white making all the dots white against the light gray background layer.
Sort of a very light glitter effect like the coating of a license plate. The rest was creating the layers to use as a bump map to get the raised lettering and edge effects. I made some mounting holes and added some stickers and shadows and it was a done deal. Like I said, I wasn't really hard to do.

I saw a similar PS tut and had to create it completely from scratch in gimp because the PS tut was of no use because of the dissimilar functions. That's why mine turned out a little differently. I just saw it and figgured I could do something similar and was surprised how easy it was.

EDIT: Found the link for the grunge scratch brushes....

http://smirnoff-sweetie.deviantart.com/ ... s-96905862