Create 3D Cracked Concrete Wall Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this 3D Cracked Concrete Wall Text Effect in Photoshop. During the creation process, we will use a 3D text rendered in Photoshop, a concrete wall texture and a few particle and cloud brushes to build the effect.

This is an intermediate level difficulty tutorial.

If you don’t have Photoshop CS6 or above, you can’t render 3D text in Photoshop. But you can just download this file containing the 3D text layer, to complete this tutorial.

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

PSD File Download

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

3D letter render

Concrete Texture

Grass Texture

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800px * 1120px with black background. If you have Photoshop CS6 or above, you can simply type a S letter and use the 3D function to Extrude this letter:

Or you can simply load the 3D letter render PSD file into Photoshop (download link above), and start working from there:

Add a layer mask to this letter text layer, use the chalk brush and soft round brush as eraser, working around the edge of the letter as shown below:

Here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Load the Stone Texture into Photoshop. Select the cracked position shown below with the Rectangular Marquee tool:

Copy and paste the selection to our document. Re-size and rotate it as shown below, then right-click on the layer and set it as clipping mask to the text layer:

Use the chalk brush as eraser, carefully go around the texture’s edge and get rid of the unnecessary parts: (red indicates where you need to apply the eraser)

Repeat the above process, grab a few more pieces of the concrete texture to cover the upper, lower parts of the text. Make sure for all textures, you set them as clipping mask:

Again we make sure the edge of the texture is taken care of:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

We can now add some grass onto the text. Load the grass texture into Photoshop and select a portion of it as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection over to our document. Re-size it to very small scale, place it on the following position:

Use a soft eraser to blend it grass into the concrete texture:

Repeat this above process to add a few more grass spots to the text:

Step 4

This step involves you use custom brush to add special effect for your text. The cloud/particle brushes are plentiful on the internet, you’re free to use whatever brushes you like:

Use a cloud brush to paint some cloud/smoke effect around the text, as shown below:

Use a particle brush to paint some particle effect around the canvas:

Step 5

You can finish at Step 4 if you like your outcome. I further added some colours to the text with a Selective Color adjustment layer:

Here is the my final result: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Till next time, have a great day!