Design a God of War III Inspired Cracked Text Effect in Photoshop

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June 7th, 2009

Filed under Inspirations, Text Effects

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In this tutorial, I will show the processes involved in designing a God of War III Inspired Cracked Text Effect in Photoshop. I personally have been a fan of the God of War Series for a long time and got the inspiration for this tutorial from the game title text effect, and thought I could make a tut for it :)

Along the way, I would like to show you the use of custom brushsets in Photoshop and how to use them to create eye-catching effect for your design work. There are also techinques such as layer blending mode, masking and image adjustments. Have a go!

Here is a preview of the final text effect for this tutorial:

Alternative version:

Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need to the following stocks:

Grunge Brushset

Font

Crack Brushset

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px * 800px, fill the background layer with Black colour. Create a new layer called “background texture” on top of the background layer, and we’re going to do some painting with the Grunge Brushset we have just downloaded.

Firstly we want to load the brushset into Photoshop. To do this, press the “B” key to select the Brush Tool, and following the steps as shown in the following screenshot:

1. Click the down arrow next to the Brush shape/size

2. Click the right arrow on the top right corner of the brush palette

3. Click the “Load Brushes” option on the menu

1-load-brush

After this, you will see a window pop-up and simply select the Grunge Brush set you just downloaded/extracted, and you will see those brushes appear in the palette as shown below:

2-after-load

(The yellow highlighted part indicates the brushset we have just loaded)

So now we have a set of grunge textures we can use to create our background texture. On the “background texture” layer, use those brushsets we just loaded and paint some irregular, grungy patterns on it:

(Hint: don’t just stick with one brush, try out a combination of them and adjust the flow and opacity for each different brushset, experiment and see what result that bring you)

Here is what I have after a bit of painting with the grunge brushset:

1-after-paint

Step 2

Now we have a grungy style background texture. Let’s type some text onto it by using the font we downloaded at the start of this tutorial:

2-type

On this text layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Drop Shadow

2-drop-sha

Inner Shadow

2-inner-sha

Bevel and Emboss

2-bevel

Gradient Overlay (Hint: you can adjust the position of the gradient by left-click and drag on the text)

2-grad-overlay

And you will have the following effect:

2-effect-1

Duplicate this text layer once and make the text look bolder and thicker:

2-effect1

Step 3

Load the selection of the text layer (if you’re not sure how to do so, please take a look at Step 3 of my previous post) and create a new layer called “crack texture”. While maintaining the selection, load the “Crack brushset” into Photoshop and on the “crack texture” layer, use this brushset to paint over it.

You will see because we keep the selection active, the crack texture appears only within the selection:

3-paint

Duplicate the “crack texture” layer once and change the blending mode of the duplcated layer to “Multiply”, you will have the following effect (the crack texture darkened) :

3-duplicate

To create some more variation to the crack, we can add some more layers and on each added layer, apply a different crack texture from the brushset, and set the layer blending mode to “overlay”.

You can add as many layer as you wish, here is what I have after adding two more layers of crack texture:

3-effect

Step 4

Now we can some colour on the text. To do this, load the selection of the text layer again, create a new layer on top of all other layers called “colour overlay”.

Here is the tricky bit: What I would like to achieve is some colour variation, so I use the Lasso Tool with a 10px feather, substract the upper portion of the selection off by holding down the Alt Key while making the selection:

4-lasso

While maintaining the selection, pick a colour and a soft round brush, and paint inside the selection:

4-colour

Load the text layer again, create a new layer above the previous colour overlay layer, this time choose a lighter colour and soft brush, paint it on the upper portion of the text:

4-effect

Step 5

Now we can add some adjustment layers to bring out some colour contrast and lightness for the overall effect. I added the following two adjustment layers (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > …)

Levels

5-level

Curves

5-curves

And here is the final effect for this text effect: (Click to enlarge)

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course add some of your own texture or filter effect and see what the end results are! Remember to always keep your own creativity!

Here is an alternative version I have: (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

User Comments:

By psaddict

My fav game, really good work.

Added to http://www.psaddict.com

By E_Van

what the purpose changing the flow of a brush?
I’m a newbie in photoshop. :)

By Ionut

Links for brushes don`t working.

By James

@Ionut: that should be fixed now. thanks for pointing it out!

By James

@E_Van: the purpose is to add depth and create variety for the background texture, plus to get familiar with the use of custom brush. If you’re new to Photoshop, this would be good for you to start practicing :)

By joyoge designers' bookmark

it look very nice, thanks for effect tut..

By photo retouching

Great result, a lot better than the standard fonts that come preloaded in windows.

By NEWBIE

THANKS FOR THE POST, BUT I SUGGEST IF YOU DONT MIND
PLS. INCLUDE THE DRAWING WHILE DOING THE STEPS 1- 5

By James

@NEWBIE: thank you for the suggestion, I thought of including them in the tutorial, but in the end I thought it would be better to leave them upon your own creativity. In the future I might try and do a basic tutorial on the brush flow/drawing skill seperately, hope that will help :)

By Louwrie

Thanx for a great Text lesson, this was great!!!!

By nave

nave ynaco :D

By Terrance-OXP

This is really great, especially when you are a great fan of GOD of War like me. :P

By P@W

very cool!!!

By Kaplang

wow really cool tutorial and really cool effects :)

By yaren

very veryy easy :) I can do. thanks

By fenheal

GREAT WORK MAN…

By Abhilasha

its really 2 gud ,,…….

By VENOM

nice post dude…but it was a bit easy one….

By bobmarleyisnotdead

the links do not work couldnt do this tut :(

By WAJID ABBASI

Please make a the Video DUde

By jagutiger

hey man…how can we use the fonts?

By Zilva

For some reason my font wont load do you know why?

By Zilva

None of the fonts that i download work…. They say: “Could not complete your reqeust because they are the wrong type of document” What should i do? can i download them in a different format?

By nimar

Nice tut and font! ^_^
For the font you have to paste it in the windows folder and that’s it

By wajid abbasi

please explain me step 4 i can’t understand how to please gIVE Me the example

By M.O.A

Hey man, Nice tut but which version of Photoshop are you using? mine is CS2 and it’s giving me some useless results!!!!!!!!! but really, great tutorial.

By James Qu

@M.O.A: I use CS3 for this tutorial. Yes some steps do require special functions on CS3, but usually there would be alternatives on early version.

By one

do you have a video tutorial on this?.. Nice tut though. Just thought if there is a video tutorial on this.

By Rolf

seriously, the part where you draw the background is impossible with the grunge textures you are giving, theres no way I can make the same amazing background it just seems impossible, really pls help there.