Easy 3D Text Effect In Adobe Illustrator

1. Easy 3D Text in Adobe Illustrator: Hi. My name is Dicky and I'm a digital artist and illustrator from Nairobi, Kenya. My illustrative work is often fun, colorful, and fairly silly. I try to add little elements or techniques to make my work pop. In today's class, I'll introduce you to one of those techniques. In this tutorial, I'll be teaching in detail how to create vibrant, realistic 3D text in Adobe Illustrator. During the class, you'll learn how to set up a project, how to use the 3D Extrude and Bevel tool, learn about color theory and the Gradient tool. Finally, how to export the final image ready for Instagram. The class requires zero plugins and is welcoming to all levels of students. Let's get started. 2. Class Intro: In this section I'll just walk you through a super-quick checklists just before you get started. As a class indicated, you're going to be learning over the course of this tutorial how to make this. As far as requirements, all you need is your computer already installed with Adobe Illustrator. Secondly, I have provided a couple of class resources and you will find two color swatches available for download, as well as a link to the font that I use in a class, if you'd like to use the exact same font. Over the course of the tutorial, you're going to learn how to use the 3D revolve and Extrude tool. You're going to learn how to use the Gradient tool and the Pathfinder tool, primarily, along with a couple of others that we'll touch on. That's about, it's fortunately, this class does not require any plugins. Once you've downloaded and installed all of the class resources, you're good to go. 3. Project Setup: Let's get started. When the Project Setup section and what I want you guys to do is to first of all go up here to the preset details. You run to name it something. I don't. We can call it 3D Miami Vice. You want the width to be 1200 pixels and the height to be 1200 pixels. I'm hoping that you guys will make a project that's really great and you will want to upload it to your Instagram. We're going to make it square format to begin with and then lastly, you want it to be RGB color and that's really the only the final thing that you need in this Project Setup section. Go ahead and create this new document and there you have it. You have a square document, square artboard to begin working. First things first. I already prepared a couple of switches that you guys can use as we head through this project and to import that first one all you need to go is to file up here, click on place and then navigate to the folder where you downloaded the class Elements. Click on the Miami Vice swatch and take place and then we'll just drag it out. I think we'll have it to the side of the window today and just drag it out, and that's it. Let's go ahead and get started. First thing, let's set up the background. The background, we're going to have this nice blue color and we're just going to draw a square so from one intersect and then click and hold Shift and drag it all the way to the other corner, release and then hit "I" on your keyboard, which is the eyedropper tool, which is this one here and then click on the blue and your background is setup and we're just going to name this layer because naming layers is good manners and then just lock it. That's all that we'll be doing in that left for the moment. Now, we are going to set up the text. I think we'll do the texts mix. Once again, you can hit "T" on your keyboard or come over to this text or type tool on the left. Hit "T", click, and then let's type as it should in the little preview. What we're going to be typing is good vibes only, but you can choose to type whatever it is that you liked by the way, it doesn't have to be exactly what I'm writing. Also, by the way, this 3D revolve feature is heavy on the machine. The less text that you have, sometimes the better. If your at all struggling later on in this tutorial, just feel free to change the text to something shorter. Maybe you can just write, I am or I love or something, just something shorter and will help the process go back a bit more smoothly. There you go, [inaudible] typed out the text, I've set the point size or the font size to 350 and I'm going to go ahead and set the character style. I believe it was coco goose condensed and I've provided link to download the text if you would like to use this exact same texts. Condensed regular, perfect. There we go. We have cocoa goose condensed regular in 350 text. The last thing that I'm going to do is that I like for the characters to be slightly closer together and when I'm doing 3D texts, I'm just going to set the distance between the two letters, the distance between each letter rather and this is called the tracking, and I'm just going to set it to negative 50 and that's it and I'm just going to center it so we have the good done already. Now let us Alt, click and drag down and that is how you're going to set up the second bit of text which is only and I think for this text, I also added a bit smaller just so that it sits at the bottom quite clearly. I'm just going to set it to 335 and that's about it. We're just going to center this text as well and boom. At this stage, we've already set up the text. We've already pulled in now swatches and our background is looking nice. Next, I'm just going to rename this layer to text because renaming layers is good and then finally, I'm just going to select both by clicking and dragging, hit "I", which is eyedropper tool, and then select this yellow-colored, a brighter yellow color and that's it for this first section of the setup. Now I'm just going to remind you guys to save, just to make sure that you don't lose anything as you're going through this process with me. Go ahead and save that. In the next section, we will go ahead and make this 3D and start to introduce a bit of a gradient and the colors that we have here and make it look a bit more like the final thing that we're doing. 4. Explore 3D Tool: Now, we're going to take a look at the 3D Revolve and Extrude tool. But for the moment, I'm just going to walk you through the tool, show you how it works. I'll show you some of the presets that we have available. Then we're going to use the default settings that are provided just so that we can make something quickly without you guys really having to struggle with figuring out the tool, at least for today. Good, so now I'm going to click on the word "Good" and then come up here to object. No, come up here to effect and click on "3D" and come to Extrude and Bevel. This is the tool that's going to enable us to work on the 3D-fying of this text. As you can see, we're already inside the tool, but you can't really see anything happening here. That's because my preview is turned off. I'm going to go ahead and click on the "Preview Button" and just check it. Now suddenly you can see it's turned my text slightly to the side and given it a nice little 3D feel to it. This is the tool. It has some really awesome, preset positions already and I'm just going to quickly walk you through those. We won't be using them, but I think it's still important to just have a look at them if you guys actually interested in using them, you can definitely do that. As you can see here, we have different options. They're all really lake well-named. If we take on front, as you can see, nothing is happening. The reason is that, and you can see it in the preview here, is that this square is facing directly at the camera, I guess, which is you. Because it's straightforward directly perpendicular to the camera, you can't really see any 3D-fying of it at all. One that I can start with maybe is this off axis front, which is the default that it was to set to when you first clicked on the "Preview Button". On off axis front, it's showing you the front. But as you can see once again in this little preview here, that the square is now turned slightly away from camera, and that allows you to see a bit of the top and the side of the object. These are a couple of different options that they have. They have from the back, they have it from the left, they have it from the right, and from the top and bottom and a couple of other cool ones are these isometric ones. I'm sure you've seen some really cool isometric design coming up. I think it's a really popular style right now. Yeah, so there's a couple of the available options, but we're actually going to use a custom option, which means we're going to set our own degrees here like the degree of turn or twist on the letters. The first number that we're just going to input here is minus seven. Here we're just setting this to look exactly how it is in the preview. There's not going to be too much design stuff happening here. We're just trying to set it so that it looks exactly how it is in the preview. I provided these digits in the about section, but also I'll probably paste them up on screen and post. There we have it, we have it sitting quite nicely. You can just see a bit of the 3D-fying in the background there. But we actually wanted to be a lot more, and so what we're going to do is set this extrude depth instead of 50 we're going to set it to 200. Now if we click somewhere else in that, now you can see that it's clear, this is 3D text and it's still legible. You can see the front face quite nicely. You can see that it's quite deep as well. Now we're just going to click "Okay" and go ahead and set up for the word only same process. Come up here to effect, click on it over 3D. Click on "Extrude and Bevel". Here we're going to have slightly different numbers than we did in good. Those numbers are minus 10, five, and one. Once again, I have the preview turned off so you can't see anything happening. Minus 10, five and actually this should be minus one not one. Perfect. Once again, we're going to set the extrude depth to 200. Let's just see what that looks like. Yes, that looks great. We're going to click "Okay", and there already we have quite clearly 3D-fied text. I'm going to click on the "Good". Right click on it and click on arrange and bring to front because I want it to seem like the good is sitting directly on top of the only. Now as you can see, maybe I'll just go back to what it looked like before. Because of this area here. As you can see, the G is quite clearly sitting behind the O in this section here and what I did just now is to click on the "Good" right click "Arrange" and bring to front. What that does is that the G is now quite clearly sitting in front or on top of the O, and if I drag it down a bit now its clearly in front of the O or on top of the O. That's how I wanted it to sit, so that now it looks like the good is just sitting casually on top of the only, which is what it looked like in the preview and how I think it looks quite nice. There you have it. Now we have the 3D text sorted already. Like I said, if anyone is struggling with the 3D "Extrude" tool, it might be a consequence of how heavy it is on the machine. What you might want to do is to use shorter words and maybe just start with even a number. Maybe your favorite number just started like a seven or a 15 or whatever it is, just to reduce the taxation on your machine, and then I think it should work fine. Yeah, there we have it. We have our text sitting pretty already on the background looking quite nice. One final thing that I need us to confirm is if we click on this and we need to change something about the 3D that we don't like, what we can do is to just click on the "Word". Come over here on the right to appearance, click on "Appearance" and it shows you here quite clearly you have the 3D and Bevel effect included. If you double-click on that, then it opens back to exactly what you had set it as. Now you are still able to make changes and not have to introduce another effect on top of the 3D effect you had already used. One final thing we need to do is to come down here, we don't need the plastic shading we're instead going to use the diffused shady and you're not going to see any change here. But it will be important and I'll try to remember to explain why when I get to that point. We're going to do the same for the only, double-click, make sure preview is set so you can see excellent and just hit "Diffuse Shading" and "Okay". Now we've done quite a bit, so I'm going to encourage you guys again to save so that you don't lose any of this work. One final thing that we're going to do is to add the vibes text. We don't want to go too deep into the project before figuring out a nice font and size that we'll work there. What I've done is, I have locked the text layer and that has the 3D stuff, and I've opened a third layer, which is currently called layer three but I'm going to change to call vibes. In this layer we're going to have the text that says vibes, that just sits here in the center so that it reads Good Vibes Only which is what we are writing here today. Just go ahead and click the "Text" once again over here on the right, the type tool click somewhere and just type vibes. Do not worry too much about the size at the moment, so there we have it. We're going to make this white just so that it stands out a bit from the background. Finally, we're going to make it to significantly smaller, maybe that's too small. Let's go for something like maybe double that size-ish let's go with 170. Yeah, that looks nice. We are going to set the text style to pacific or regular is what I use. That's looks nice already actually I'm going to leave it where it is, that looks pretty sleek. I mean, this already looks nice. In the next section we're going to go and really refine it and make the colors pop and all of that type of stuff. But this is already a step up from what we had initially, which was this, which is just really plain and flat and doesn't have any personality at all. But now we can clearly see we have a nice 3D text. You can see that there's a source of light and that it has some depth and a bit of an interesting field to it. I think that's already looking quite sleek. In the next section, I'm just going to show you guys how to refine this, make it look really clean and make everything defined, introduce a couple of colors just to make it pop a bit more, yeah. Catch you guys in the next section. Remember to save. Don't forget to save. 5. Refine 3D and Colour: Now in this section, like I said, we're going to refine everything. First things first, I think we'll just hide the vibes layer. Lock it, just come over here to the right. Make sure to lock the layer, and just hide it and then let's unlock the text layer where we have all of the good and only. Let's get started on coloring. First thing we want to do is to highlight both of these and then go up to object at the top of your screen. Click on it, and you want to expand appearance and then come down here, right-click, and Ungroup and then do that again, and again until the option to ungroup doesn't exist. At that point, every single item here is a own individual thing. Once you have that, what we're going to do is to select the faces only. The brightest colors that are sitting at the front, we want to select those only, and sit them in their own separate layer. I'm going to select the front of the G, the O-O-D, the Y-L-N, and O, and then we're going to hit "Command X", which just cuts it completely, and then we're going to come down here to the Layers panel, and just create a new layer. Now we have layer four, and we're going to command F, and just paste it back into a new layer and now we're going to lock that layer, and hide it. Now as you can see, we only have the parts of the text that form the 3D file of it. Basically, the areas that extend out from the face are the only things that we have left in this text layer. Now we are here, we have all of these 3D [inaudible] areas of the text in a separate layer and what we're going to do now is to group all of the things that are connected. For example, what we want to do is to connect. Right now, all of these individual sections are on their own and what we want is for all of these sections to be connected into larger pieces. Let's take this piece that I've just clicked on, to begin with this the side of the G. What we want is to have this, and this, and this, and this. I've selected all of them by holding shift, while I click on the new sections. I want all of these pieces to be considered one single piece. How am I going to do that? I'm going to go over to my pathfinder tool, which is over here on the right. If you don't have it open already, just come up to window, slide down, click on Pathfinder, and it will pop up somewhere on your screen. There we have it and now while we have this stuff selected, while you have all of the sections that we want to become a single unit selected, just come over to your pathfinder, and you want to click on this Unite button, which is, I don't know how to explain it. It just looks like two squares that are attached, I guess. If you hover over it, it says unite, and that's the one you're going to click on. Click Unite, and now, as you can see, all of those sections are just moving a bit. All of those sections that we just highlighted are now one single piece and that's exactly what we want. Let's go ahead, and do that for the rest of the pieces. For the G, this piece is currently two, or three different pieces. Just highlight all of them, and click on Unite and then this one is currently three, or four different pieces, and we want all of these to once again be the same. We're just going be patient, and click through all of the pieces. Just click on that, click on that, click on that, and the little piece at the end, and click Unite. Actually, I can see I've missed a piece there. I'm just going to highlight both, and click Unite. Now that's one piece. Now that's one piece on its own. That's one piece, that's one piece. We missed one, as you can see. We'll just highlight, Unite. That is one piece and now we want to do this last piece for the G here, and click "Unite". I'm going to do the second letter and then I'm going to do the L, just to show you something a little different and then I'll fast forward through the rest of this process just so that you guys don't get bored of me saying, click on this, click on this, and Unite. Once again, same process. Click on one piece shift, click on the second piece, shift, click on the third piece, and Unite, and then this one is quite simple because it's sitting on its own in the middle, we will just drag, and select all of it, and Unite. We're going to go through the same process for all of the letters and I'm just going to show you the L because there's something else that you can do if you want to take it to the next level is, anywhere there's a 90-degree angle, a sharp corner. What you can do in fact is to highlight, and I'm going to do it down here instead of up here so is to highlight one face, so one side of a 90-degree angle. You can highlight that individually. Maybe we can take the curve also, click on that, and then click "Unite" and then for this piece that's sitting on its own up here, you can leave it independent. Now just go ahead, and click on this next piece, and these other pieces, and click "Unite". Now, here we have three pieces where even if they're all connected, we have three pieces. That would give us a bit of independence later on in the project and I'll show you why. But it's not necessary. It's not compulsory. But for those of you who want a bit more detail later on in the project when you're coloring, then that might be a nice option to have. But for the rest of them, I'm just going to go ahead now, and speed through this, and highlight, and unite everything else together. Catch you at the end of this little process. There we have it. Completely done with setting all of these up as independent pieces, and that's looking sleek. I know this is like a tedious part, and maybe even a bit difficult to understand. But this is the only way that I now how to do it. If anyone has like better ideas or has seen something work even better, let me know in your messages. I'll definitely do a video to just adjust this, and make it easier for future students. But for now, that's just slightly complicated path that you have to get through, but I guarantee that's the hardest part of this tutorial. Well done for getting through that. Now we have all of the sections separate. I'm just going to turn on all of the layers so that we can see what it looks like now and as you can see, it doesn't look too much different. But now we're getting into the fun bit. We're going to start the coloring and shading. Step 1, let us hide the vibes layer, I'm going to change the name of this text layer because I keep doing that 3D layer and here I'm going to call it the text faces. Just so that we can identify which is which, a bit faster. Cool. Now I'm going to the 3D layer's already locked, and I'm going to hide it also and I'm going to unlock the text faces layer and now I'm going to select all of the faces, and we're going to use this super bright yellow. Just hit "I" on your keyboard, or use this little eyedropper tool, and click on the yellow and now you have this super bright pop yellow which is exactly what we want. That's looking sleek, and then we're going to lock the text faces layer, and hide that and we're going to make the 3D layer visible, and unlock that and then we're just going to highlight all of these 3D pieces and once again, hit "I" on your keyboard for the eyedropper tool, and click on this gradient one now and now, that already looks quite sleek and now, if I turn back on all of the layers, you're going to notice that this looks sick. [LAUGHTER] Just by adding the gradient in the background, and giving this frontier layer a little pop of color, now you have something that has a lot more dynamism. It's a lot brighter, it's a lot more popping from the background. I think that that's looking nice. We made the colors pop already. I think I'm going to, as you saw in the preview, I'm just going to add a little. I don't know what color this is, maroon, pink, fuchsia, I don't know. But I'm going to add a little circle in the background in that color because I think that looks pretty dope. Actually, that doesn't look horrible. But I'm just going to stick to what I made, and just teach what I teach and I've just clicked on a circle, clicked on I, for the eyedropper tool, and I'm going to click on this fuchsia circle, and there you have it. Now you already have this color that's like popping from the background. You see the 3D text is looking sleek. We're already in a good place. Don't forget to save. Save, and I'll catch you in the next bit where we'll refine the coloring, and add a bit more detail just to make it even sleeker. 6. Perfect Colouring: What do we want to do now is to refine it and I'm just going to start with, I think the 3D text in the back is what we're going to start with. First things first, if this was real setup, then this area here between the G and the O would probably be one of the darkest areas in this. If this was a real thing, that would be one of the darkest areas. So this area here between the G and the O, this area here between the O and this other O. This area here between the O and the B, those would be the darkest areas. But as you can see right now, the gradient goes instead from this being the lightest area and then the darkest areas are at the top here. So that stops it from looking as realistic as possible. What we're going to do instead is to adjust how these gradients look at the moment. How do we do that? Click on one of the gradients that you want effect. Right now I'm going to click on this one right here, which is this point at the top of the, maybe I'll just hide the front text to make it clearer. What we want to click on is this guy right here. We are going to click on this and now we have the gradient selected. When you have the gradient selected, you can click on the letter G as the shortcut or you'd also be able to come down here to the gradient tool. Once you have that selected, this thing pops up. What this is is a reflection of the direction that your gradient is going. As you can see, I'll just zoom in a bit to make it clearer, as you can see, the lighter ingredient is on the inside here, and the darkest gradient is on the outside here, which reflects exactly what's going on with this shape that we have selected. So the darkest areas on the end here, the lightest area is on this side. What we want is for that to be reversed. How do we do that? On one of these corners, if you just hover over one of the corners, you'll notice that it allows you to rotate. So if you just go slightly to the edge of one of these sides, it will allow you to rotate it. Now what we want to do is to rotate it the full 180. So we just flip that line all the way to the other side and then now as you can see, everything is now light and the reason is that your gradient is all the way over here. What you want to do is to click anywhere inside this like gradient line, click on it and just drag it back. Now we have, as you can see, the dark area is reflected on this side and the lighter area is on this side, which now reflects what this looks like. I'm just going to zoom out to show what we've done. If we turn that back on, just so that you can see clearly. Now if you compare the two Os, you'll notice that this area that we had highlighted before is now actually dark. While this area that we haven't adjusted yet still light and not to the way we want it. So what we are going to do is to repeat that same process for this part of the O and of this part of the D. So I'm just going to hide the text faces again and repeat the process. Once again, click on the layer that the little piece that you enter effect hit on "G", shortcut G or this gradient tool in your toolbar. Come over to this little line that appears, hover over one side and rotate it, flip it all the way to the other side so that the dark is on the left and the light is on the right and now as you can see, all of this is light because the gradient is all the way to the left here. We want to drag it back in and have the gradient start from there. Now as you can see, it's dark on the inside and light at the top here. If we once again open the text faces just so that we can see what we've done. Now as you can see this section here and this section here looks similar in the sense that it's dark on the inside, closest to the other letters. While this one here, it's still light, so we need to fix it for the D as well and so we're going to hide the text faces once more, click on the D, and I'll just zoom through this one because I think you guys have gotten the gist of it. Once again, hover over the side, flip it all the way to the other side, and drag it back in. Now if we click on the faces, it looks way better. Now it looks a bit more realistic because the color's sit where you expected them to see it. All the dark areas are exactly where you expect the dark areas to be. That's looking sleep, save your walk, and forget to save. Yeah, that's already looking fantastic and now one last thing that I want to remind you of, I'm just going to type the vibes layer. You remember when I showed you how to do the L in three separate sections and we type the text faces again. When I showed you how to do the l in three separate sections, this is the flexibility that it gives you. Now as you can see, we can have a separate gradient for this piece, which is the larger one, even if they're all connected and you could have just made it a single piece. If you left them as three pieces. This is the flexibility that it gives you. Now I can affect the gradient just on this one piece here. You can effect to the gradient independently of the other two pieces. Now you can change just that gradient or you can change just this one gradient here and make it lean this way and that gives you a bit more flexibility if you want to show where light and dark is coming from and so this is the reason that I had suggested that it wouldn't be a bad idea if you wanted to do this. But this is like our next level, I guess. So if you didn't do this, obviously no worries, your stuff is going to look fire anyway, but yeah, just an option. As you get better at this, you might want to leave the option to have more pieces separate just to give you a bit more flexibility with which direction the gradients face. I think that looks sick, already remember to save. Now what do we want to do? I think for the faces, there's a couple of things that we need to do. Number 1, we're just going to hide these vibes layer and we're going to select all of these faces again. So we can just drag and select all of them and we are going to give them a bit of a stroke. So I just want you to note how it looks like now. The problem that I'm seeing right now is that there is hardly a difference between the face and the 3 divide area like the extrusion on the text. What we want to do is to make that a bit more defined. How are we going to do that? Highlight all of the face texts or the text faces, come up here and just give it like blue stroke. Then make stroke quite thin rather. So we are going to like 0.5 point. Yeah, I think that looks decent. I don't like the blue so am going to change it to maybe the brown that's just below it. Yeah. So now it's quite imperceptible, but I'm sure for you guys who are working on it actually you notice the difference that now this crisp edge to the end of the text faces and that gives you a good difference between what is facing you and what's the extrusion that's supposed to be going backwards. So I think that that looks spectacular am going to saved my walk again. The final thing that we're going to do is to give the faces a bit of a shine on if this isn't necessary and for any one who thinks that they might mess up their work, make sure to maybe save a second document just to allow you to mess around with it without worrying too much about effing up to everything. 7. Make It Shiny: How are we going to do this spot? Once again, I'm just going to hide the vibes tint and what we need to do, I'll just do it again, click on "G" and "O" and all of the text faces. Holding "Shift" to select all of them, come to "Object", come to "Path", come to "Offset Path" and you unset this to minus five point, so that the new area appears inside the letters, exactly and so click "Okay". Then once again, right-click. Oh, sorry. Now click on each of them again. Select each by clicking "Shift" right-click and ungroup and now we have these as separate pieces. Perfect. Just click on each of these new pieces that we've created on the inside, one-by-one, holding "Shift" to select all and then "Command X" and now you've cut them out. You have basically what you had originally, no changes and now we're going to come down here, click on "Create New Layer". Name this layer, we'll call it sheen, which is all that it is. Click on "Sheen" and once you're on the Sheen layer, hit "Command F". Now you have a new layer of shine only surfaces. Now that we have the surfaces in their own layer, we're going to hide the text faces and we're going to hide the 3_D faces and we might as well hide the background. No, don't hide the background, so keep the background. Now we're going to select all of them. We're going to kill the stroke because we don't need that and we're going to add a gradient to them. The way I like to do it is to create the gradient first and then apply it to the letters, so let's do that together. I click on the "Ellipse tool" but the actual shape doesn't matter, so just click on the "Ellipse tool" and then come up here to where you select your text, rather where you select your colors, so just in this drop-down and we're going to click on any one of the gradients, it doesn't matter. There's the white-black gradient. There's the orange-yellow. We'll click on the white-black just for now and now we want to be able to affect the colors and the opacity of this. To do that, you just need to go up to Window and click on "Gradient" and this little pop-up will come up and now we can affect the colors. Right now the colors are black and white, which is exactly what's represented here on the actual circle and now we want to change that. We're going to change it to have this be white also, how you do that? You just double click on this little gradient slider thing. Double click on it and click on the white right here at the bottom, which is perfect white. Cool. Now it's completely white and that's not exactly what we want. We are going to slide this into the center and we are going to create a new little, I don't know what these things, I guess they are supposed to look like spray cans, I guess. We're going to create another spray can and just leave it on the edge there. How you create a spray can is literally to just click anywhere just below the bottom of this line. If I click anywhere below this line, it will create a new spray tan, cool. We have three spray can and now for this center spray can, we're going change its opacity to zero. Now as you can see, you have white on the ends and there's nothing in the middle and then there's color again on the ends and that's precisely what we want. Cool. Now we have that and we're going to apply this gradient to all of these letters. We can just highlight all of them. Hit "I", which is your eyedropper tool right there and select this new gradient from the circle that you have just created and badaboom badabam, you have a nice shiny, sheeny gradient that can be applied on top of the texts that you already have. That's how you create a bit of sheen. Obviously, right now, it's a bit strong and we're going to make some changes, some adjustments to it to make it looks slick but that's the basic idea about how to create that little sheen on them. Let's go ahead and just fix the sheen. What we want to do, number one, highlight everything, come back to your gradient and first of all, let's just make this a lot less poppy. We are going to change the opacity of each of the whites to 60 percent and leave the center one at zero. The center one doesn't need change, that's looking nice already. Now we're going to go into each of them and change how their gradient directions are facing. It looks quite nice as it is. If you're comfortable with that, that's cool and you can skip over to the next section but for those of you who want to refine it just a bit more to make it look a bit more realistic, this is how we're going to do it. We have the G, just click on the "G" and then click on "G" again. Now we're going to make this just a little less dramatic. First of all, we're going change the angle and now we're going to twist it down and make it go from top left to bottom right and we want this to also stretch longer. Stretching is easy. You just need to click on the same side that allows you to rotate, will also allow you to click on the actual point and move it closer or farther away. We want it to be farther away and we want to also have it sit centrally, so that the sheen isn't too loud. Actually, I think that looks much better. We're going to effect the same change for the remainder of them. For the O, I'm just going to do it maybe two or three more times. Click on the "O", which is in the sheen layer, make sure you're not working on any of the other layers. On the sheen layer, click on "G" and then you want to rotate it, so that the gradient is coming top left to bottom right and then you want to stretch it down, down, down and move it up, up, up, so that it mimics what you have going on with the G. As you can see the G has the sheen in this top area here and then the transparent part is in this bottom area here. That's what you want to do for all of the remaining letters, at least the ones at the top. I'm going to do it again for this O. Click on the "O", click on the letter "G" as a shortcut, rotate again, so that it's going top left to bottom right and then stretch it down a bit and move it up. Maybe we need to stretch it just a bit more, so that it looks similar to its neighbor. Excellent, that looks great. Finally, for the D, we want to rotate, we want to stretch down, we want to move it up and bada bang. Now you have, the top text, I think looks already way better than the bottom text because it clearly shows okay, light is coming from the top left and that's allowing the gradient to fall down that way or to fall down in that direction, which is exactly what we want going on, so perfect. Now, we want to do, before I forget, save your work, save your work. You don't want to be that guy or that girl. We're going to do the same for these bottom letters. The difference though is that we are going to just show it practically. For the O, same thing. We want to click on the O. Make sure you're in the sheen layer, hit on "G" and just rotate it down again. Now we want to stretch it same as before but this time we want the sheen to be at the center and for the transparency to be at the top and for the sheen to be at the bottom. We need to move it a lot higher than we were for the letters above. The reason we're doing that is that, as you can see here, this good section, overlaps over the O and so this area down here is probably going to be quite dark, so we can't have it look exactly the way it does, we can't have this sheen here, that's at the top of the G, also be down here at the top of the O because the G is sitting on top of it and will probably cut off some light. In terms of if you're trying to make it look a bit more realistic, I think that this works a bit better. Here, we're going to do exactly the same here. I'm going to show you one more time. Click on the "N", make sure you're in the sheen layer, rotate it down. Once again, so same angle if you can but you don't have to be too precise. Stretch it down and then make sure the slightly darker area is now at the top here as you did with O and then just repeat that same process. Click on "G", rotate it, same angle, stretch it down, same length and lift it up. Then finally for the Y, click on it, hit "G", rotate it down, same angle, stretch it down, same length and lift it up around the same and voila. Now you have your letters all fully, completely 3_D and looking slick. I think that looks really, really good already. Let's just have the vibes pop back up and just see how that looks. We're going to work on the vibes a bit more in the next section but that's already looking quite spectacular. A couple of final things. Let's actually fix the vibes layer right now. The only thing that's concerning me about the vibes layer is that it's getting swallowed up, you can barely see it in front of the yellow. What I'm going to do with that is to, oh it's still text. Okay. We want to outline that. Right-click and click on "Create outlines". Perfect. Now what we want to do is to give it, I don't know if you guys have seen a glitch effect before. But that's what we're going to go for here and how we do that is to click on the text itself and just hit "Command C" and now you have copied it. The texts that currently exists, we're just going to go up here and change it to this bright blue, I don't know, teal color, tend to look similar to the background. Then we're going to hit our left key, maybe let's do three times. So just hit the left key, one, two, three. Let's do four times and just move it off to the side. Then if you hit "Command F", then now you've pasted the same texts that you copied earlier. Now you can see it's already created a shadow but now with this white, we're going to go up here again and click on this bright fuchsia color. I don't know what this color is called but click on that, that looks nice. Maybe I should just leave it. No. Okay. Let me just create what I made. Now we have this fuchsia vibes and we're going to hit the right arrow four times, so one, two, three, four and now we have basically those two colors overlapping. If you hit "Command F" one more time, then now it has this like glitchy effect, which is a dope effect to have in this Miami Vice, I guess Miami in the 70s poppy color, summertime vibe that we're going for. Cool. I think that looks spectacular already. We're coming close to the final thing that we have to do here, which is, we're going to add some shadows, we're going to add some extra elements that give it the vibe that we are going for but this is, in my opinion, already good enough to post on your socials if that's something you're interested in doing. That's already looking killer. In this final part, we're just going to tweak things to make it look extra super special. I'll catch you in this final section. 8. Finishing Touches: So here we are in this final section. I'm just going to move this gradient out of the way at the moment. So in this final section we're going to add tiny little elements that will just take it over the top. Make it look a tiny bit more realistic we'll be done, we'll have wrapped it up and done a crazy good job of it. Yeah, so finally, the last thing that we need to add is, we're going to add some gradient. Sorry, not gradient. We're going to add some shadows just to make it look like it's actually sitting on a surface and a couple of extra elements just to give it a bit more summery vibes, like we had in the preview image. First thing, we're going to create the shadows. The first shadow we are going to create, we're going to put in the 3D layer so let's open that first. So 3D layer, we've just unlocked it and the way to create a shadow, super-simple, come over to your ellipse tool which is over here on your left and just draw out a squeezed circle. You can drag, draw out a squeezed circle. That's actually a vibe. If you wanted to instead go for something that's like a spotlight thing this is something that you could do. I did it by accident because I used the gradient from earlier but yeah, you could easily do this if that's the vibe that you're going for. What I want to do is to turn this into a shadow. We're going to click on the ellipse tool, come up here to this color select area. We're just going to click on the dropdown and make it a dark gray or black. I think I'll make it dark gray. The once you have that, we're going to click on it again. Come up here to effect and go down to blur and click on Gaussian blur, I don't know how this word is said. Then we want to make sure we have the preview on and just adjust it to your liking. You want it to be kind of blurry but not too loud. I think that that's the right amount of blur but I think the size is a bit too big so we're going to make it a bit smaller. Finally, as you can see, the gradient is currently sitting in front of these other 3D layers and that's not what we want. We want the gradient to be sitting right at the back so I'm going to right-click make sure I have the gradient selected, right-click, arrange and send to back. Now as you can see, our 3D layers have now popped up front and this should more realistically look like it's sitting right at the back. So sweet. That looks nice. Only concern now is that it's too strong. I'm going to set it to maybe 65, maybe 70, 70 percent capacity. Yes, sir. That looks nice. So our first shadow is set. I'm just going to make it maybe a little thinner like that. No. Yeah, okay. That's perfect. You want to mess around with it just as long as it looks realistic in your eyes then that's what's important. Spectacular, shadow number one is done. I'm going to click on that shadow and copy it and then I'm going to close this 3D layer and open the text faces layer. In text faces, I want you to paste that shadow again and the reason that I'm creating a second shadow is because I'm just going to move it up the way for the second and as you can see right now, the GOOD is sitting on top of the ONLY. So there needs to be a bit of shadow just below the GOOD to show that it is actually sitting on top of the text that says ONLY, the 3D text that says ONLY. That's where I want to place this one. I'm going to hide this vibes layer, just help us set this up properly and then we're just going to drag it all the way to just where we think that should sit which is in my opinion right there. That's where I want it to sit. Unfortunately, at the moment it is sitting in front of this GOOD text and we don't want that. What we want to do is to click and drag, select all of these GOOD text. First of all, make sure that this is the only layer that is open. I'm actually going to close my vibes layer as well but make sure that the only layer that's open is text faces so that you're not selecting anything else and making this a mess. In your text faces layer, select only the GOOD, right-click, arrange and now instead of sending to back, we want to bring to front. I just want you to see what effect that has so I'm going to zoom in a bit and just repeat. Right now you can see it's kind of cloudy on top of the O and the letters, the letters above and the letters below. So what we want to do is to make that cloud go behind this GOOD so we're going to zoom in, just show you what that does. Just notice what happens with these texts above versus the shadow that's sitting just down there. We're going to right click, we're going to click on arrange and we're going to click on bring to front. Now as you can see the shadow is quite clearly sitting behind this text, which is exactly what we want. Because it's what's forming the shadow so it can't also be on top of that text. Yeah, actually, that's already looking mighty fine. I don't know if I really need to make any adjustments because that's looking sleek as hell. Excellent. I think that's already looking mighty fine so we're just going to leave it as is. Let's turn on the vibes just to see what that looks like and yeah, that looks so nice. I also like that the shadow has created a background to allow the vibes to pop a bit more and to have a bit more contrast to the background. That's looking awesome. Final two things that we're going to do to this is just to add a bit of vibrance to it. Like I said the vibe that we're going for here is like a summary beach vibe, Miami Vice ish, GTA vice city sort of thing and what is always at beaches, I would say palm trees are always at beaches. So how about we get a little palm tree. So we're just going to place and you can download palm trees in PNG. There's plenty that are free to use. We then have to be a palm tree by the way, you could easily, I don't know, get a beach ball or I don't know, a convertible, that would look dope. Now we have the palm tree and we're just trying to set it up somewhere nice. I think that looks pretty dope. I think seeing the tree stump is kind of weird or is it? Yeah and so now you can make that decision. I think for me, I'll just have it sit on top of the O and not see the tree stump anywhere. There we have it, that's looking fire. So we don't really have a sun but what we can do is just to add a fake sun. I'm just going to draw out a circle using the Ellipse tool and we're going to make this, maybe we just use this same yellow here. Hit I on your keyboard for the eyedropper tool and we can click on the Sun, go up to effect, go up to stylize and go to Outer Glow. Here we just want to set the screen to normal. We want to click on preview so that we can see what's happening. So right now the screen, I mean the outer glow is black but we want it to be yellow so you'll just come and drag out make it yellowy. Yeah and make it a lot bigger so maybe 20 point. Yeah, so that looks nice. Boom. I think that that looks absolutely fire. I think we've got the vibes absolutely right. I'm just going to adjust the sun a bit, I think it's too big. We've got the vibes absolutely right. I think that the text is popping really nicely. It really does give that summary Miami Vice, GTA Vice city vibes. I think that's amazing. So I hope that you've really enjoyed doing that. I would love if you guys would post this in the lessons just to show us what you've come up with. Alternatively, if you want to post it on social media even better, just post it on there and use my socials. I'll just pin them up here so you guys can tag me on social media. Fell free to tag me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook whatever and I'll even re-share your work if I'm able to but I hope you've enjoyed making this with me. In the next section, I'll show you a couple of prototypes just to make life a bit easier as you're going through. Yeah, I think that'll be probably the final section in my class but we shall see. Yeah, I hope you like this already and I hope that you are looking forward to sharing this with people in your communities. I think it'll be really dope to see what you guys come up with. Good luck. Remember to save. You don't want to be that guy. Yeah, I'll catch you in the next section. 9. Export and Share!: Before we go to the next section, the final thing, because we are done here, the final thing you want to do is to be able to export this and then share with friends, family on social media, show off that sort of thing. What you want to do is to go up here to File which is in your main menu. Come down here to Export and then you want to go to Export As and you'll have all of these options. I think 3D Miami vice is a dope name, so I'll leave that. Then you want to come down here and click on "JPEG" in your formats. Then you want to click on "Use Artboards" which means that it will only export what is inside the black artboard and click "Export." Here, it's fine. RGB is what we had as our document anyway, so that's perfect and Quality, you want it up to maximum. Here, you're welcome to change, but it doesn't really make too much of a difference if exporting for social media. But yeah, you can export up to a maximum of 300 PPI. I'll just leave it at maybe medium and click "Okay." Now, if I go to my files and go to my Skillshare Classes and go to 3D Text, then here, we have Miami vice 1, fully exported and ready to share with the wall. Thank you guys so much for going through this class with me. I hope you enjoyed it. I would love, like love love, like beyond loving, I would love love to see you guys' work shared somewhere whether it's here on Skillshare or on your socials. Please, please, please share your work and make sure to tag me if you do. I'd be happy to take a look at your stuff, make comments, maybe even share it with the rest of the community. Looking forward to seeing all the stuff you guys have done. 10. Pro Tips and Thanks: In this Pro Tip section, I just wanted to show you how, because we've done this the right way, it's going to be super easy to choose alternative pallets to give this a different vibe than you already have. Super quickly. It will take literally like two minutes to make this look completely different. First thing I'm going to do is to save this as a different format. I'm going to hit on Command Shift Save, or Control Shift Save if you're on PC, and just change this to 3D Miami Vice, let's do pink, or something and Click Okay. Cool. Now we have a separate document that we can mess around with without worrying about killing our original dope stuff. Great. Now first thing I'm going to get rid of this tree, we won't need it for the vibe that we're going for here. Then secondly, I provided a second color swatch so if you just go up to File, click on Place, and then Import the pink pastel swatch, and Place. Then you can just Place it, and you have the swatches already available. You're welcome to make these swatches however you like, change them around, fix them around, make them look different. This spot is just to show you that because you went through, for example, separating the layers correctly, and creating the gradients correctly, that now changing it into whatever vibe you want is going to be super simple. That's what I want to show you in this section with the Pro Tips. We'll just go into the layers. Currently I have them all open, but I'm going to lock all except the background. Here you have the background, and instead of this bright blue, how about we go for this pastel pink? look, I mean, that's one change, and it already has a completely different vibe than what we had going on earlier, right? So tiny changes make a big difference. Now we're just going to go into this 3D layer, and instead of using some wing, let me hide the rest. Instead of using this yellowish gold gradient, let's just click on that. Oh, make sure you don't select the Shadow. Deselect the Shadow, by clicking on Shift. I mean, Shift-clicking on it. Instead of this yellow gold gradient, let's click on the "I", or the Ink drop select, and instead use this pastelly to purple gradient. So that's already looking nice. If we turn on the text faces, you can see it's a whole different thing that we've created here. let's go into text faces now, select all of the Text faces. Make sure to Deselect the shadow, and this one, we're just going to I think I have this being white, but maybe a slight gray will be better. Oh, sorry. Just the lightest gray that's available in your swatches use that instead. That's already looking fire. We'll turn on the sheen again, which is now a lot less clear, but you don't really need it. Then we'll turn on the vibes, which is now kind of disappearing. What we're going to do instead is to open the Vibes layer and delete this white one. Now we have just the purple, and we can change this to white. Let's see what that looks like, just to make it pop a bit more. I'm feeling that so there you go. Already in like two minutes, we've changed it from looking like Miami Vice, to looking a lot like more pastelly more modern, just cool calm vibes about it, and that is looking spectacular. I think that one thing that might kind of go with this, so I deleted the Palm tree but, I think something that could go with this is something like a lollipop, I think downloaded one. If we just set the Lollipop somewhere back there, now, you're just looking at a completely different vibe, and that's taken us all of two minutes to do. This is kind of the importance of going through the process. It might look lengthy. I'm just going to send the Lollipop all the way back. It might look lengthy and tedious, but the reason you go through all of those steps, is to make editing, and changing, and switching up things much easier for you. Well done for sticking through the process. Trust the process goes 76 as, that's ultimately the end of this tutorial. I hope you guys really enjoyed this, and I would really love for you guys to share this, whether it's on here on Skillshare, or on your socials, on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever you guys use now. It will be really dope to see all your work. So looking forward to seeing your work online. I will share my socials in the About Us, and maybe just add some also on the InPost, on the graphics, just so that you guys can tag me. I would love to see the work that you've been able to create. I hope you really enjoyed the tutorial, and best of luck with it. Thank you for attending the class. We'll catch you in the next tutorial. Thank you.