Making 3D text in photoshop and illustrator. 8-24-09

This Week we're going to look at making 3d text come alive in photoshop. To make our 3d text though, we are going to use illustrator first. Then we'll import that text into photoshop and do all our designing there.

3d text photoshop

To make the text in illustrator, select the text tool with the font of your choice and type out your letters. If you are looking to move, rotate, or size each letter independent of the others you will either need to type each letter separately or right click the finished copy and create outlines. You don't need to use a preset font. If you'd like to draw your own letters feel free. Once you have the letters drawn out and sized properly select your first letter and go to the fx button on the appearance panel and click 3d extrude and bevel. Each letter's settings will be different if you are trying to achieve an effect like I have shown in this example. I'll leave the design choice up to you. You can see the settings I chose for one of my letters on the right.

Repeat this process for each of your letters. When you are finished export the file as a photoshop psd file.

Now let's open up photoshop and give our text some color. WIth photoshop open, go to file open and select your exported file from illustrator that contains the text.

The first thing we need to do is create a new layer to put our letter faces. Next get the magic wand tool and make sure sample all layers is checked, and set the tolerance to 2 (if you want a soft edge you can blur the text face layer by a pixel - this is what I did) and with the new blank layer active, click the face of each letter. Click on each face and give it a gradient (or other color style if you prefer). There is no right or wrong here, just make the face the way you want. I used a linear gradient for each face and tilted it depending on the slope of the letter.

Now we need to go to each of the letters and give them the following settings shown to the right. You may need to tweak the settings for each letter depending on how you set your 3d options up in illustrator.

That's basically it. It's pretty simple, but can create powerful looks. If you wanted to add a watermark effect of perhaps a vector design you made to the face of the text you would do that while you have the face selected. Just create a new layer to place your watermark.