Weathered Metal

by DarkGarden

There's a difference with this tutorial (hopefully) though. As a series, I'm going to take you through the finer points of texturing, and try to point out when to use thissamajig, and where to play with thattamajig. Hopefully by the end, you can construct any industrial/fantasy/worn/weathered/battle scarred graphic you please.

OH, and there will be one more BIG feature. Though I love the use of photographed textures for achieving a decent realism, this tutorial contains NO premade textures. Yes kids, we're going to learn it from the ground up. Strapped in? Got your version of Photoshop open? Wearing your x-ray specs? Good, let's go.

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We're making a battleaxe (stop looking at pictures of your mother-in-law). Starting from the basic shape, straight through to the last scratch.

Let's start with a New Document, and for the purposes here, we'll make it 250x250 pixels.

Now, to start the shape of our axe, we're going to select the Elliptical Marquee Tool, and then open our Marquee Options Palette. In the Style box, select the Fixed option, and then set the width, and height to 200 pixels each. Doing this will ensure a perfect circle for our elliptical selection.

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Now make your marquee selection by clicking in the top left corner of your document. Create a new layer, and fill the circle with whatever a medium grey.

Now let's center our circle. With the filled circle layer selected, go to Select>>>All and then Layer>>>Align To Selection>>>Vertical Center and Horizontal Center as well.

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At this point, we're ready to start giving our circle it's axehead shape. We're going with a really simple structure right now, by using equal cuts out of the top and bottom of our circle.

PC users, hold down your Ctrl key (MACheads use Option), and click our circle layer. A circular selection is formed. Select your Marquee Tool now, and click within the selection, dragging it down so that the top of the selection is well below the half way mark of our circle. Select EDIT>>>CLEAR to delete the masked area out of our circle.

Repeat this step, dragging the circle upward this time. When we're completed this step, the basic form of the Blade is now our old "circle layer"

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Using our Ctrl key method again, click the Blade Layer to make it a selection.

Now we go to the Channels Palette, and create a new channel.

Now fill our Blade Selection on this new Channel with white (making sure the background is black).

When that's done, we should have a channel that is black with a white duplicate of our Blade Shape in the center of it (see top figure below).

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With the Blade Selection still..well...selected ;) Create a New Channel.

Fill the selection with white again, on the new channel, and go to FILTER>>>BLUR>>>GAUSSIAN BLUR.

We want a smooth gradient blur so we'll use the Gaussian Blur function 6 times in this case.

(The first blur used in the example, is a setting of 20. The second a setting 0f 13, then 8, 4, 2, and 2 again, to smooth our edges.)

Once all the blurs are done, and we have a nice gradient, SELECT>>>INVERSE. Then EDIT>>>CLEAR. This will remove any of the so called "halo effect" of brighter pixels at the edge of the selection.

Now, for this example, we wanted a "raised" section on the side of the blade. To give the blade a thicker feeling in the center. To do this, we go to SELECT>>>MODIFY>>>CONTRACT, and contract our selection by 16 pixels (the max allowable contraction), then repeat the contract step, but this time only contract the selection by 2 pixels.

Use our Eyedropper Tool here, and select one of the lightest shades in our gradient. Now, using the Paintbrush Tool, paint the selection completely full. We now have our initial "Lighting Channel". Deselect the mask, and we're ready to move on.

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Let there be Lighting Effects.

Go back to our Layers Palette, and select the Blade Layer. Next we go to FILTERS>>>RENDER>>> LIGHTING EFFECTS.

When the lighting effects dialogue box comes up, look over all your choices (especially if you're unfamiliar with this filter). This is a very powerful filter, so knowing how to tweak our settings, is essential to getting the effect we want.

Lighting Effects will automatically give us a Spotlight from the upper left, shining down across our graphic toward the lower right. The first thing we'll do, is change the type of light here, by clicking on the "Light Type" box, and selecting Directional. Now shorten the length of the line that's showing as the light source, to give it a wider lighting focus (which will make it seem more intense in how much it "brightens" our layer). Keep this directional light white.

Click on the Light Bulb at the bottom of the dialogue window, and drag into the graphic area. A new spotlight will appear. Click on the colour box in the dialogue window, and select a colour for this spotlight (a soft yellow/brown colour was used in the example to show a reflectory/secondary light source throwing a bit of yellow haze across the blade). Aim this spotlight from the bottom right of the blade, diagonally toward the top left. Play with the intensity, and width of focus as you want, to get a decent reflecting look.

Now in the Texture Channel box, select the Gaussian Blurred "Lighting Channel" we created. Make sure the White is High radio button is checked, and adjust the height to only a few pixels (3 in the example). Now, for the sake of the tutorial, use 59 as the Gloss setting, 46 as the Metallic setting, 0 for our Exposure setting, and 3 for the Ambience setting.

Click OK, and watch as Lighting Effects gives our Blade Layer some three dimensional depth.