PRACTICAL TUBING "3-D" TEXT
A question frequently
asked is "What use are tubes?" |
PREPARING THE TEXT Open a new square image, 400*400, with a transparent background. Choose a nice chunky font and create a text selection. (I have used "Baccarat" set at 60 pts here.) You can simply make a tube from some regular text with a drop shadow and any other effects you favour. However, the "3-D" effect is made more interesting and effective if you do two sets of your text, one on top of the other, and have some variety of colour, so ... Colorize your text with something nice and bright. Use a rainbow style gradient filter of your choice if you want a colorful result, or regular PSP gradients. I have used Harry's "Mystic Mountain" filter, then increased the brightness and contrast by a factor of 15 each. (Colors Adjust, Brightness Constrast.)
Now do a second text selection, and colorize it as you wish. The first text selection will become your 3-d extrusion, the 2nd (top) selection will be what you see as the text. Place the new selection so that it almost covers the first. (So the background text becomes and offset drop shadow.)
I have used Harry's Mystic Mountain again, but changed the sliders to get a contrast in colours. Pretty lurid I know, but this is an ILLUSTRATION not an indication of my artistic appreciation! *G* Next I applied several cutouts in blue (for no very good reason) to make the foreground text stand out from the text behind it. |
Making your text into a tube Once you are happy with your text, drag a selection (any shape) round it, then click somewhere inside that selection. Only your text will now be selected. Copy and paste the selection as a new image. (That's just a quick and easy way of getting your text with no extra space into the tube you are about to make. Of course you can also use the cropping tool.) Export the image as a Picture Tube from the File Export menu. Call it something like TEXT or TEMP. The only parameters you need to change are Placement Mode to Continuous instead of Random, and Step Size to 1. That's it! |
Using the tube Open a new image of a suitable size and background colour, and select your new tube from the tubes menu. Do one tube image. Hold down the shift key. Move the tube cursor to an offset position (try different ones to see how they look) and place the next tube. PSP5 will fill the space from placement 1 to placement 2 with copies placed 1 step apart continuously. This gives the 3D effect. If you have used gradient colours, you will get completely different effects depending on whether you offset your second tube placement "up" or "down" from the first one. You can have a lot of fun with this ..... if you have a steady hand (I haven't!) you can draw freehand loops and so on. Another fun thing is to draw a single outline circle, colorize it with a gradient, make a tube from it, and then use the tube in the above way to make "snakes" or pipes, or to write some text freehand.
And a totally silly snake :)
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