The Photoshop Guru's Handbook - "Creating the NUI" Part 3 - 2D & 3D (inDepth Interface project) Creating Main Interface Sections: Page 1a On with the show: There are a number ways to create the basic foundation shapes for larger, main sections of any interface. You can use any or all of them to create the main body shapes that will be combined to form your entire interface, or just specific parts of it. Here are some of the more common used for doing this: - Rectangle MarqueeAs well as scanning hand drawings in to Photoshop, or importing vector shapes and drawings created with programs like Illustrator, Corel Xara (what i use) or Corel Draw. There are also some vector drawing plugins made for Photoshop that will work just as well. For further information on creating various types of shapes, please refer to Part 2 - "Nutz & Bolts" (pg 3). If you don't wish to go to that section right now, but want to participate in the following example, continue reading. Adding Depth and Dimension to Shapes: The Lighting Filter As in the above, there is also more than one way to do this. The most popular of them being the use of the Lighting Filter. Experimenting with this filter will prove the most useful to you in the long run, as there are so many different settings and light styles one could use to create various effects. And they can't possibly *all* be explained to you in a few short pages. But there are certain types of settings that will produce the most consistently good results. I have one particular Light Style i like to use a lot, so i'll show you here how to set it up and run it. Below is a good Lighting Filter set-up to use. Learn and experiment with the filter more on your own by altering parts or all of these settings, after you understand just how it works. It's a lot of fun to play with! :?) A Good Lighting Filter Set-up - Open a New RGB document in Photoshop. Make the size 400 pixels wide by 100 pixels high. Select White as the background.Ok hold on to your hats kids! You're about to learn my super-easy method of creating those crazy Pill-shaped buttons everyone's wanting to know how to make! :?) - Right-click or double-click (PC) (long click for Macs) on any brush in your Brush palette, and choose 'Brush Options' from the menu. In the editing dialog window, set the brush attributes to these settings:Go back to the Layers palette and click on the Nav-Body layer, to make sure it's the active layer. Open the Lighting Filter. Use these settings: Style = DefaultAnd this is what you should get after applying the Lighting filter to your grey shape: ![]() Now turn to Page 1b > Buttons / Texture Mapping / Adding Text > To the Top < > Back to "2D & 3D" < - Page 1a - |
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