Central Dynamo Interface Tutorial
We'll now work on the right side arm area. After we get the right side done, it's a matter of duplicating the Right Arm layer set, and flipping it horizontally and vertically, and placing it exactly opposite on the left side.
If you look at your paths palette in the CentralDynamo.psd file you'll see the paths I created in order to make the various shapes of the arm. It would take me forever to detail exactly how to make those paths. I will get a basic pen tutorial up soon and link it from here, but for now, go ahead and try to trace the shapes in the "Right Arm Shapes" layer set. It's just the shapes, and you don't need it for visual purposes. I included it so you can hone your path making skills and try to create them yourself.
If you aren't too good with the pen yet, don't worry, it takes some time to get used to. Just use the shapes I have created. You can duplicate the layer set, and rename it to "Right Arm" since that's the name I'm going to use in order to add the 3d effects to the right arm shapes. If you bring in my shapes layer set, place it at the bottom, but right above background in the layers palette. Then, just eyeball it and make it look similar to the screen shot below.
- Create a new layer set (or use mine and rename it) called "Right Arm" at the bottom of the layers palette; right above the background layer.
- Either draw your own shapes with the pen tool and trace mine, or just use mine if you want to. It's up to you.
You should now have something like this:
- Load right arm layer's selection, and create a new channel. Rename the channel to "right arm",and fill it with white.
- Keep it active, and give it a gaussian blur of 6, and then another gaussian blur of 3.
- Deselect, and give it a final gaussian blur of 2.
- Go back to the right arm layer, bring up the lighting effects filter. Filter -> Render -> Lighting Effects
- Input these values inside the Lighting Effect dialog box:
- Lock right arm layer's transparency. Hit "/" on your keyboard to lock a layer's transparent pixels and edit only the actual pixels of a layer.
- Gaussian blur by 1 pixel, to smooth out the results of lighting effects.
- Duplicate right arm, and call it "arm lighten". It should still be locked, so just fill it with a neutral gray color.
- Apply the lighting effects again to this layer, but with these settings this time:
Feel free to play around with these settings and get a better feel for the lighting effects filter. Your results won't be *exactly* like mine, but that's ok. This is YOUR interface. Experiment!
- Gaussian blur arm lighten layer by 1.5 pixels. Make sure this layer is still locked.
- Change this layer's mode to lighten.
- Create a layer below right arm, called "arm stroke". Load right arm's selection and apply a black stroke of 1 pixel outside, to the selection.
- Create a new layer above arm lighten, called "arm inside color".
- With the right arm layer's selection loaded, contract it by 4 pixels. Fille this selection with white, and deselect. Lower the layer's opacity to 60%, and change its mode to Overlay.
- Create a new layer above arm inside color, and call it "arm inside color stroke".
- Load arm inside color's selection, give it a stroke of 1 pixel, black inside. Deselect, and lower this layer's opacity to 50%.
- Make inset areas your current working layer, lock the layer, and fill it with the red color #c62c37.
- Apply these Inner Shadow layer style settings to the inset areas layer:
- Apply this Gradient Overlay layer style settings to the bot pipe layer.
- Apply that same gradient overlay setting to mid pipe, and finally top pipe. You should be able to right click on the bot pipe layer, select "Copy Layer Style", then right click on mid pipe, and say "Paste Layer Style". And then do the same thing to top pipe.
- Create a new layer set between Right Side and Center Circle Area, called "Right Buttons".
I have given you my button shapes, and you can drag and drop them into this layer set, or create your own based on the steps below. If you make your own, you can safely delete my three button layers in the Right Arm layer set.
- Create a new layer. Grab the rounded rectangle tool, and with the radius as 10 px, and your foreground as #aaaaaa, create a 95w x 20h rounded rectangle.
- Duplicate the rounded rectangle two more times, for a total of three.
- Position them as in the screen shot below:
- Once you have them positioned similarly to above, merge them to where all three are on the same layer.
- Rename this layer to "buttons". What else?! ;-)
- Load the buttons selection, and create a new channel called "buttons".
- Fill the selection with white in this new channel. Gaussian blur by 3. Deselect, and gaussian blur again by 1 pixel.
Now we get to add the real metallic look to these buttons with the lighting effects filter.
- Go back to the buttons layer, and apply the lighting effects filter with these settings: (remember to save!)
- Duplicate the buttons layer and rename it to "button hlights". Lock it and fill it with the gray color #aaaaaa.
- Apply these lighting effects settings to this layer:
- Change button hlights mode to Lighten, and drop its opacity to about 60%.
Here is our result so far:
- Create a new layer called "button screen". Draw a rectangular selection of 60w x 16h, and fill it with red #c3151f. Deselect.
- Apply the following Inner Shadow and Bevel and Emboss layer settings to this screen layer:
- Create a new layer called "bot hlight".
- Load button screen's selection, and contract by 1 pixel.
- With white as your foreground color, grab the gradient tool, and select the foreground to transparent gradient preset.
- Zoom in to about 400%, give it a subtle gradient like this:
- Deselect, and create a new layer called "top hlight".
- Create a white rectangle that is 58 x 5, and place it near the top of the red rectangle like this: (nudge it if you have to)
- Drop its opacity to 29%.
- Make a new layer called "button strokes", load the buttons layer selection, and stroke the outside of the buttons 1 pixel, black. I hope you are now a master of making strokes on their own layer ;-) You can include it on the layer you are stroking, but I choose to separate it out, since I may want to change the opacity later on and it keeps the integrity of the shape on the layer.
- Drop the button strokes layer to 70%.
- As you can see, we have one screen that is on the top button. We need this screen to be copied two more times, and placed over the mid and bot buttons. I'll leave it up to you to how you want to do that.
You could duplicate the Right Buttons layer set two times and delete the button strokes, button hlights, and buttons layers leaving you with just the screen. Then, with the move tool, position them as needed.
You should have something similar to:
See you on page 3!