wow Akros

this is not only excellent, i think its also the most professional looking piece ive ever seen from you
seems like from now on, i have to call you master

Ohhh ...
Thx very much .. but not really ... just follow the tutorial. Not even memorized all the steps.
I am pleased to be a mere apprentice!

You are the Master!
The credits are all yours! Having viewed, played and shared this beautiful effect!

Thank you for this most beautiful text effect tutorial!

Huh, I seem to have found a rather unfortunate limitation of the bump map filter...
If you are working at high resolution (300dpi A4) which is industry standard for print, the bump mapping is confined to the very edge, an almost unusable sliver... does anyone know a way around this?

Here is the basic lighting situation I figured the tutorial is trying to achieve.

Very informative CRogers. Thank you

Here's an example of caustics in transparent glass text. I included a quick info bit on IOR (Index of Refraction) which was touched on earlier.

You're quite welcome, molly. Incidentally, I learned a lot of this from working with Blender 3D, another fantastic open source program with virtually limitless possibilities. Check out blender.org if interested (caution! This program will eat up all your time!)

thanks but it is going to take my whole life time just learning Gimp. If I go into too many different apps, then I feel mind boggled, if there is such a word.

If that isn't a word, it should be.

Blender 3D is indeed mindboggling. Much much more so than GIMP. If GIMP were a complex switchboard, Blender 3D would be several buildings full of complex switchboards.

i have my Gimp setup so that everything i do is 300dpi by default
i never had a problem with bumpmapping as ypu describe it

now wrapping my head around the two reference images you made (comments later)
they look extremely good, very nice to have you here !

CRogers

Thanks for the two Charts.

Thanks! Good to be here. It's possible I'm using the bump map filter completely wrong. However, what are the pixel dimensions of your canvas for the tutorial? 300dpi (dots per inch) is meaningless without a number of inches to go along with it. For example, you can print a 300px x 300px image at 300dpi. It will be tiny, only 1 inch by 1inch but still... 300dpi! lol

My canvas is over 3000px wide. Is yours similar?

i see, now that makes more sense
no my canvas is not 3000px wide

i used 800x400px, my tutorials are not intended for printing anyway
tried to make something once at a size that would print out as Din-A-4 and found it very hard for my workflow, because it made every process quite slow

EDIT: i tried bumpmapping on a 3000px canvas and had the same problem as you
even when i blurred the bumpmap by 200px, the result was not very good

@CRogers: ok, i had a go at your first example

i wasnt sure how you made it, so i tried it from two different angles

version one has an Inner Shadow, with no offset
the dropshadow is the text duplicated, made black and then blurred

version two has an inner glow from centre and the dropshadow is the text selection shrinked and then blurred


looks almost the same



EDIT: and here i tried to imitate your glass text
that was a challenge !

Nice results Esper.

Thanks Akros. You may like to see my post here about the star.

Yes, i liked!
Thx for link

Nice results! With your solid opaque samples, you'll notice that the text looks a bit like wax. This is because your diffuse shadow should be opposite the light source (move the bright patch up and to the left should solve that problem).

Incidentally, the waxy look is cool too! The effect is called "subsurface scattering", and what happens is that instead of the light bouncing off the surface and to your eye, it penetrates the surface and bounces around the interior of it a bit then out once more, making the inside glow. This usually happens with translucent surfaces like wax and frosted glass. I'm sure you can have a lot of fun with the effect, especially to produce things that look like frosted ice for drink adverts, or around Xmas time, or candle wax for Halloween (my personal favourite holiday)

Your caustics look really nice! I can't see anything wrong with them at all. I usually apply a motion blur to the shadow, to smear it across the surface, to make a subtly more realistic shadow. Use an angle parallel to the light source for the proper effect. Also, with caustics, sharp angles (like the angular corners of text) can produce refraction, like a prisim, and actually splits the light into rainbows which originate at the point and dance over the surface in an expanding smear. That might be a fun way to further your experimentation, if you wish to. Hint: use a radial blur for that effect, and the "addition" layer mode to save yourself a lot of colouring.

One way to get around the size limitation on the bump map filter is to do it small first, then rescale it large before applying your curves. Since it's a gradient, the averaging algorithm helps smooth out the pixelation a bit. It's not perfect, nor ideal, but it is a usable solution for the time being.

Also, if you are trying to make crisp highlights, you may have an easier time of it using the "Threshold" instead of "Curves".
You can also see the change in real-time by setting the layer mode of your highlight layer to "screen", then bringing up the "Threshold" dialogue to make adjustments. GIMP has gotten much faster over the years!

i dont get it
in my original tutorial the inner shadow was offset, but it seemed in your example it was not, so i went with that

on top of that all the lingo is confusing me a bit

the problem is, i still dont exactly know how you made your examples

it would be interesting and helpful to get the details on your technique
like blur values and basic steps
do you think you could post a short tutorial or at least post the xcf ?
that would be really cool !