Cloud Text (image heavy)

[danielbleazard]

This tutorial is available as a PDF. Click here to view or download it

Hello, today I'm going to demonstrate how to make text look like it's written in clouds. We'll start with a simple

blue background, with some different shades of blue blurred in, gaussian blur about 120.

OPTIONAL: You can add in dents or render clouds on a low transparency, but here I'm keeping mine simple.

Next we create our text on a new layer, write whatever you want.

If there's no fire, you've done it right! Now we need to apply dents, Scale 200.00 (sorry, I went wrong writing this first time and deleted a load, so can't find out what the others were. I can just guess a low number on all the others).

Blur this on about 15 to 20 then duplicate the layer 3 times, and merge it down again. This just makes sure it's easily visible and not half-transparent. Now we apply dents, Scale 25, Refraction 25, Roughness 10, Tension 10, and whatever quality you want. I always have to use bottom quality levels as my computer will otherwise become ridiculously slow and occasionally crash.

Gaussian blur this again, around 15 to 20, and duplicate and merge layers until happy, and hopefully you should end up

with this:

Thanks for reading, have a good day, but not a better one than mine.

[danielbleazard]

Well, my tutorial hasn't exploded yet. Hope it stays that way.

I've done better than this though, my personal favourite:

I'm fairly sure that I did something with render clouds this time, but anyway, I love this one.

Somehow it just feels a lot more realistic _

[pdnnoob]

Nice work! I've already made a few pictures with my name in the clouds for my desktop xD

One thing though, shouldn't this be in "text effects?"

[danielbleazard]

One thing though, shouldn't this be in "text effects?"

Oops. Just realized that was there, lol. If it's moved I'm perfectly happy, but I can't believe I'm really that stupid. Thanks for pointing it out though, and thanks for the positive feedback.

EDIT: whoever moved it, thanks!

Edited July 24, 2011 by danielbleazard

[Mike Jones]

I want to use the effect as it looks like just before the last step. As I then want to fill the text in with a flame effect background, which I think will give an authentic flame text effect.

I've played around with dents, and have a half decent effort, but it doesn't look as good as it does here in picture four.

I'm failing at the first step here.

No matter what I do, I can't get the dents to replicate the look in the third picture.

Any ideas? I've played with the settings. But 200 just seems too high.

Can anyone else replicate this? and let me know what settings you used at this step?

[Ego Eram Reputo]

200 is fine if you lower the Refraction and Roughness settings (as danielbleazard said in the tutorial).

[Mike Jones]

Thanks for that. I can now replicate the fluffy lettering (but didn't look so good when I set the backround to flames, and set the layer to multiply). Think I'll stick to Tom Jackson's plugin.