How to Apply Texture to 3D Text Rendered in Photoshop

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In this Photoshop tutorial, I will show you the method I use to apply texture to 3D Text Rendered in Photoshop. This is really an easy process and will give your text a great look. Have a try!

As an example, we will apply tree bark texture and apply it onto our 3D text in this tutorial.

This is an intermediate level difficulty tutorial and some steps can be tricky.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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

Font

Tree Bark Texture

If you’re having difficulty with Step 3, check out this video tutorial here:

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1400px * 670px with white background. Use the Gradient Fill tool to with the following colours, fill the background layer as shown below:

Use the font downloaded, type some texts onto our canvas, place the texts at the centre of the canvas:

Step 2

We will render our 3D text in this step. If you have a more up-to-date version of Photoshop, you can follow the settings in this step. If not, you can just download my PSD File here and skip this step.

Select the text layer, and go to 3D >> New 3D Extrusion from Selected Layer:

Adjust the Infinite Light settings as shown below, and make sure the light comes from the top right:

Apply the following 3D settings:

Mesh

Deform

Cap

Coordinates

Materials

Render the text by pressing Ctrl + Alt +Shift + R, then we convert this text into a smart object:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

We will be applying texture to our text in this step. Load the tree bark texture into Photoshop and select a piece of it as shown below：

Copy and paste the selection onto our document, make it a clipping mask to our text layer:

Change the texture layer’s blend mode to “Overlay”:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 4

As you would notice, the texture covers only the dark part of the text so far, what about the white parts of the texts? To add some textures onto the white area of the texts, we simply duplicate the previous bark texture layer, and set the layer blend mode of the duplicated layer to “Multiply”, and reduce layer opacity to around 50%:

As you can see, we now cover the remaining white part of the texts with texture:

I further applied the following image adjustment layers as clipping masks on top of the texture layers:

Hue/Saturation

Color Balance

and here is my effect so far:

Step 5

We will add some extra effects for our text in this step. I used a particle brush to paint some small particles around the texts:

Also added some cloud effect around the texts:

Use a small soft brush, paint some shadow under the text:

We can also add some more tree bark texture around texts:

Step 6

For final touches, I flattened the image and applied the following Smart Sharpen filter to the background layer:

I added a selective colour adjustment layer on top to add some colour for the overall effect:

and here is my final result: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! If you have any questions about the steps, please contact me or leave a comment below. I will try my best to answer them.

Till next time, have a great day!