Aluminium texture tutorial...

[+Jimbib 745]

Here's how I make my aluminium in Photoshop...

 

Create a new file, with whatever dimensions you want, set the background to transparent. Make a new layer on top of this so you have two active layers, both transparent.

 

Then, using the colour palette, select two different greys, one dark and one light. Something like these:

 

 

Now with the dark grey selected as the foreground colour, fill the bottom layer using the Paint Bucket Tool. Now hit "x" to swap the background and foreground colours, so that the light grey is the foreground colour. Now fill the top layer with the light grey using the same tool again. Should be like this...

 

 

 

With the bottom layer selected and the top layer invisible, go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and using roughly the following settings:

 

 

Now make the top layer visible and select it. Go and add the same Noise filter to this layer using the same settings as the last one.

 

Once this is done, again, make the top layer invisible, and select the bottom layer. This time go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and use the following settings. (Note - the direction is key in which way you want the "brushed" effect of the aluminium to be.

 

Usually, this is horizontal, so a direction of 0 works just fine.)

 

The bottom layer should now look like this:

 

 

Go ahead and apply the same Motion Blur filter with the same settings to the top layer.

 

Now comes the part where you want to blend the layers together a little bit. I have found that changing the blending mode of the top layer to "Overlay" works okay:

 

 

You can play with the opacities to fine tune it to achieve different types and grades of aluminium.

 

You can always take this slightly further by going ahead and applying a texture on top of what you have just created. This may give it a more realistic appearance. Copy a metal texture aluminium (I now get all of mine from http://www.cgtextures.com (thanks Julhelm)) into a new layer on top of the two existing layers:

 

 

Now you can play with the blending mode and opacity a bit to make it look a bit better:

 

 

You may want to play with the scale of the aluminium texture in order to make it look more authentic.

[ShrikeHawk 384]

Very cool tutorial. I use PSP, but the techniques are easily transferred.

 

Thanks for sharing!

[Abhi 3]

i use PSP too,but now i got photoshop too.