Hello,

I wonder if anyone got an idea about how to create the effect, as if a bright laser beam were in the process of carving a letter into a metal plate, with sparks spreading all over the place and some smoke, the required glow and afterglow of the metal. I have no idea about how to achieve this, and I would be more than glad if someone here said "stupid question, boy. Look, it's kinda easy, just do this and hit that and there you go" :-)

hmm. Any ideas?

many thanks,
Frank

the quickest way to do that would probably be to use a bunch of EyeCandy 4000 filters, like smoke and fire. As for Sparks, not sure, but you could prolly do that by hand. For the glows, you could likely use one of the blending mode options for the layers (inner or outer glow). As for getting it to look exactly right, yer just gonna have to play with parameters. That would likely be the quickest way I think...

Thanks for the tip with the filter. That's what I was looking for :-) I tried the sparks by hand, but I could still use a hint on how to make them look more realistic. Mine don't glow, they look kinda flat .... cheers, Frank

Also, if you have the Wacom Tablet, it comes with Pen Tools. (Not sure if it's for all tablets or just Wacom.) One of which is a 3D chisel. Good for the carving letter aspect.

Bevel and emboss styles work better than the pen tools IMHO.

if you want'em to glow dude, just make the sparks on a separate layer, and then right click the layer in the tool box, and select Blending Modes (this is for 6.0, and it might not be called blend modes, cuz I cant remember it exactly right now, tho its something along that line). After that, select outer glow, and set your parameters, its real time previewing so u can see what its gonna do.

@slynky that was a very good tip, actually. I wonder, why I was even trying to achieve the glow by painting :-) Thank you much Frank

anytime bro

Attached Link: http://www.dwmdesigns.com/tutorialspage.html

I was going to do something like that on my Website a year ago but I decided not to, because something like that would take forever to download and no-one would wait around for that . I did the Glowing metal with the EFFECTS/OUTER GLOW filter, for the Metal I used LIGHTING EFFECTS to give the metal a real metallic look, for the sparks I used a simple LENS FLARE; White for the spark when it first shows and then a Reddish FLARE as the spark is cooling off. I have some simple tutorials on my website they are very simple but after trying them out, you might figure out some new and interesting tricks with Photoshop. The best thing to get a realistic look, is to study real scenes like you described. Movies are great reference for that. Dwmdesigner

Oh no, the image I now came up with is just something like 30 kB, as a start page. I decided not to use metal with sparks, but a beam that "melts" letters into some soft material, which only produces smoke. Above is what I created.

many thanks,
Frank

Well the problem might be, how long it takes to load up the animation.If it takes a long time to load visitors will go elsewhere. You could do it in Flash if you are familiar with Flash , and use the image of your metal as a photo image in the background that would change as you animate the laser effect and for ther laser you could use a transparent line. Someone did something like that on flashkit.com . Dwmdesigner

Ah, now I get your point. The misunderstanding seems to be, that you thought I would like to animate the scene. But I just wanted a still :-) Frank

Oh, that's totally different. You can also optimize the image in Photoshop and that will help with the filesize. Dwmdesigner

30K is actually very acceptable for a webpage.. but, if you wanted it to load even faster.. you could always bring into ImageReady and splice up the image so that the page will load with a table of the images. Personally though, I think you have made a really nice splashpage with a very acceptable file as is :)

@suede Thank you :-) I'll give ImageReady a try and see how it can help. cheers, Frank

If you know how to use photoshop like me you can paint anything without using filters.

@ Curcio2002: Take advantage of the Banner Contest listed above in the Forum Info area and show us whatcha' got! ;) retrocity