Possum Roadkill

I would be happy to. It's really very easy but very time consuming. Also you never get the same thing twice. Give me a day or so and I'll try to write up something. I just got my laptop back, my video card cooked last week. I've been using a borrowed laptop for the past few days. I'm glad you like it, I can't wait to see what you will be able to do with it, you do such amazing things on this board.

That is just so good i don't even know what to say. Beautiful.

Great effect ! I love stone of any kind and I'm always looking for a new way to use it. This is what I came up with from this tut with a little additional fun stuff. These are some more stone effects that I've messed around with the past few weeks since starting with Paint.NET.

Love the effect this gives to text. The extra work to get the bevel is really worth it. This is using the font Exocet Light. Original with color adjusted for a more yellow gold. Done with the Curved 3D effect With an added pleated leather effect for a background. Then that led to this... And finally my most recent sig

I see what you mean, it looks more 3D'esque. In retrospect, there are a couple of things I wish I had thought of in the process of making this image. Making the boxes more transparent is one, maybe other colors than the blue, and also a cool background behind the honeycomb effect, like maybe a nice blue sky and clouds. I'll have to redo it at some point and try something different. Thanks for the tip, I like seeing the honeycomb through the boxes it looks more glass-like. I've been working on the 3D-Engraved Text effect a lot in the last few days and I have taken some of your suggestions and applied them to a logo I'm doing for our local message board. Here are a few of the ones I've done.

That is very nice. Very realistic looking. Beautiful !

Very nice ! You did the 3-D part much better than I did. Can you give me any tips to get mine to arc better, yours is so smooth and even. I think: Play with the depth radius of the sphere. Good tut... Thanks, I'll give that a try. That is one really complex plug in. There are so many variables it will take me a long time to really understand it. Thanks for the tip !

This is my first and second try at this tut. Very cool effect ! I guess I need to work through it a few times and play around with the angles and the hi-lites a little cause mine looks a little goofy compared to some of the ones on here. Wow you guys are really really good. Thanks for a great tut and a very cool effect. Oh, and the alpha mask is essential to get the sharpness needed for it to look realistic. Man what a useful tool ! My first one, pretty bad, but hey I'm tryin', but it looks more like gummy worms. This is my second try, I think it's a lot better, but still not what I want it to look like. It does look more like a hard plastic though.

Very nice ! You did the 3-D part much better than I did. Can you give me any tips to get mine to arc better, yours is so smooth and even.

Thanks very much, I can use all the experience I can get. I did a tut tonight that used the alpha mask and it is very helpful to get a smooth edge for the text. It's pretty cool how you can use it to cut out and cut into an object. I did the Gold Text tonight and was really pleased with the final results and feel that I learned a lot from it. I can't wait to try it out on this effect. This is really one of my favorites so far because it can be used in a variety of ways, not only on text but on objects as well. Thanks again !

Thank you very much. I tried an outline on a font but I did it wrong. I think I understand now that you have explained it. I'll try it right now. This effect looks very hi-tech professional as if it were done with a high end 3-D imaging software. I really like it combined with a metallic finish, but at some point I'm going to tackle the clear glass tutorial and use this effect with that kind of finish. That will be very cool if I can do it. Thanks again for the tip on getting a better outline on the font. I see that as being critical to display the effect properly. Thanks again for your help, it is greatly appreciated. Edited ** Thanks for the tip ! I gave it a try and this is what I came up with using a solid font and the Outline Object plugin. I also used the effect I learned in your 3D curved text on this honeycomb grid.

Woo Hoo ! I did it. Wow I'm tired. I can see what you mean about the bevel having more flexibility if done this way. I will try it with the bevel plug in though just to see what happens. I can't wait to try this on a different font. I used Bernard MT Condensed but I think a more rounded font might look pretty good too, like maybe Cooper Black. Has anyone tried it with a more complex font like a Gothic type font? I do have a question about the beveling steps, if you made the settings a little higher would that give a more pronounced bevel or would it just mess it up because of the ratio to the alpha mask? I'm not sure if I'm saying what I'm thinking it's kind of hard to explain. Anyway, here is my first shot at this, thanks very cool text effect. If you mess around with the luminosity and the color balance you can get a more yellow gold look, but it gets a little edgy so you might need to redo the alpha mask. Then if you apply the dither plugin you can get this nifty Disco Possum effect !

Thanks ! Very nice effect. The tut is easy to follow and explains things very well and that's a plus for a rookie. I finally found the alpha mask plugin after quite a while of looking through the search. Wow the search returns over 700 entries ! I guess that means I'll be using it a lot. It's a very well written plugin because it does exactly as advertised. I tried both the invert and mix alpha on this piece. It really works great. One thing I found out right off the bat is that the font is very important. I tried several with little success because the black outline was too thin. Since I didn't have one that seemed to work right, I went with a solid black font and was pretty happy with it. I will be back at the free fonts website with this in mind however. I like the font in the tutorial and will no doubt download it now that I realize how important the thick outline really is. Anyway, this is what I came up with, I tried several things and threw in some stuff from another tutorial just for practice on those effects.

Oh no, I didn't mean that it would be an improvement, more of a variation on a theme. The effect is really perfect like it is. I just see something in my head that uses this effect but I can't quite get it from there to the screen. Still pretty new to this and just don't have the technical chops to get there yet. I did another tutorial last night and realized just how much I have to learn. It was a disaster to say the least, but I did learn something from it. Anyway, I really like what you did on this and I used it on a logo for a website submission and it looked so cool. Thanks again. I'll keep trying.

I have not used the alpha mask yet at all. I have not gotten to the more advanced stuff yet, as I'm still learning. The tutorials really help ! There is no way that I could figure out this stuff without all the people who are real artists and understand the program side of it. I make a living as a cartographer/spatial analyst so I don't have a lot of experience in art. I guess there is a little artistic aspect in cartography, but mostly it's technical kind of stuff. I only got into this because I needed to make some graphics for my GIS website and really got hooked on it. I've done some graphics for three websites now. Anyway, I tried it on an object, an outline of my home state that I did for a mapping project, and then added chrome letters. I'm real happy with the way the state turned out, the letters not so much. I don't know what I'll do with the finished piece, but I know I'll use the Metal Indiana in a map or website. I might use the finished piece in a video. I do video projects for my You Tube channel and it might look good in one. But to answer your second question, yes, I would really like to see the alpha mask in this tut as I'm sure it would help me learn how to use it. I know I really need to learn how to use it at some point but I've been reluctant to try it yet because I'm more chicken than possum. So thanks again for the really great effect. I always wanted something that looked like this and could never figure out who people did it. (Insert big grin here) I really like it.

Thanks (blush :oops: ) It's a really cool tut. Thanks for posting it. I see so much possibility in what can be done with this effect. I'm trying it out on something else right now. I have so much to learn but you guys are so good and are so good at breaking it down it makes learning a lot of fun.

This is one that I did after seeing a commercial for a show about a firefighter. A few of my buddies are firefighters and we all like science fiction movies. I had been doing stuff for a club I'm in all week (Dead Possum Society) and was in a Possum mood, so this is what popped out that night. Both of these are reduced from the original but not by much as I have a pretty small laptop screen that I'm working with. I was going through a tutorial on here the other night and I just couldn't get it right. I was tired and frustrated so I started messing around with some of the stuff in the tut and one thing led to another and this all came out of one accident after another.

Very cool tut and very easy to follow. I like the effect and I really like the way some of you have used it. This is my try at it, I know it's a little over the top but I kind of like it. What do you think? How did you get the silver/metal effect on some of them? That is so cool ! I could really use that. It reminds me of the second Chicago album. Any of you remember that (from like a hundred years ago) ?

Love this text effect. Very nice and very easy. Here are a couple of my efforts. The second one I just added the relief to it and I got a more liquid mercury effect. Thanks ! Very cool.

If I missed anyone posting this link, sorry ! This site has 6500 free fonts. There are some really useful fonts on this site but it takes a while to brows through all 6500. http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts.html

Very nice effect. This will take a little while to perfect, and there are so many steps. The final product is well worth it though. I used a font called bobbypin and was pretty happy with it. The part I had the most problem with was, believe it or not, the line at the end. I'm just not getting mine to look like yours. I did try the gradient blur and it was better than my first two attempts using the gaussian blur. There is another text effect that I came up with by accident that I want to combine with this. If it works out, I'll post an image and explain how to do it. Thanks for a very cool text effect. Most of what I do is text related and logos, so I know I'll use this a lot.

That is awesome ! Very good job on guiding users through each step. Even I could follow it, and I am very new to PdN. I can see so many applications for this, I just can't wait to try some more. Another thing I can't wait to try is with other fonts. I used the Realvirtue font which has only serifs on certain letters. I imagine that more complex fonts will give more unusual effects. I did a little different kind of outline on mine, and used the water reflection plugin. Thanks so much ! Wow. http://i396.photobucket.com/albums/pp41/PossumRoadkill/Logos/HCF3D_2.jpg

This is the first plugin I downloaded. I don't quite have it down just yet, but it is exactly what I was looking for. I know after I work with it for a while, I'll get the hang of it. Very very nice effect. Thanks so much, I know I will use this a lot. My geography website is all open source except for the logos and other graphics on the Home Page, I use MapServer for the GIS mapping, but I am committed to using Open Source software just to prove that the entire site can be done with Open Source. Everyone said I couldn't do a mapping site with Open Source but I did and now I want to complete the project and replace all the graphics with images from Paint.NET. Thanks again !