Hello and welcome back to another video my name is Mike Davies and in today's tutorial
I'll be showing you how to wrap text around a cylinder using GIMP. I'll be
using GIMP version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial.
Before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As
always I have tons of GIMP, Inkscape and darktable tutorials on here. You can get more by becoming
a DMD Premium Member, and I have tons of free software Help Articles so definitely check that
out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy.
And as I mentioned you can get more by becoming a DMD Premium Member, and I'll include a link to
this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video. Alright
so here is the composition we'll be creating for today's tutorial. This is going to be using all
built-in tools found inside of GIMP. So let's dive right in. For starters I'm going to create
a text composition which we're going to use to wrap around the cylinder. So to do this I'll go
to File>New. Your composition size can be any size really, but I like to keep things simple
by going with 1000x1000. You do want this to be a square composition - so you want your width
and your height to be the same - and I'll come over here and click OK - at least in my opinion
that is easier. Next what you're going to want to do is add your text to the composition. So I
can do that by coming over here and grabbing the text tool, and I already know I'm using
the font "Impact Bold Condensed." The reason I'm using this font is that it is a nice bold font,
a thick font, so it's easy to read even when you are wrapping it around a cylinder - nice
and prominent as well. So I'll come over here to font, and I'll start typing "Impact..."
and here you can see Impact Condensed - I think I called it Bold Condensed.... same thing. And then
for the size I went with "pixels" as my size. The color you can have be whatever you want it to be.
In this case I'm going to go with white as my color and click OK. And we don't really need
this line spacing - we're only going to have one line. But I'll just set that to 0 just to
simplify things. Alright so now that we have all of our font settings - and by the way you
can always scroll through the fonts here if you want to use a different font - but I'll come over
here and click on my composition, and with the caps lock key on I'll type "FREE SOFTWARE," and
I recommend from this point making adjustments to the size or the font, if you want to change this,
before we go to the next step. But after you have set your font up the way you want it, now we'll
come over here to the transform tool group and we're going to go with the Rotate Transform tool,
and making sure the "Transform:" mode is set to layer here I'm just going to click on this
and drag, and if I hold the shift key that'll drag this based on 15 degree increments over here. And
so what I'm doing is I'm just making this so that it's going vertical now instead of horizontal.
And I'll come over here and click "Rotate," and of course once you transform the text layer it's
actually going to convert the text layer to a pixel layer. So if I hit ctrl+z there it's a text
layer, ctrl+y now it is a pixel layer. So here's where you should be after you've rotated this.
Now let me come over and grab my alignment tool, and I can click once on here on our text layer,
make sure you're clicked on the pixels of the text layer just so it gets selected,
and then we're going to come over here to "Align" inside of the Tool Options and change this to
"Image." So we're aligning this relative to the entire image. Now we're going to center align
this both vertically and horizontally. So now we have some nice center text here. By the way my
background color right now is like a bluish color - that doesn't matter because we're going to get
rid of that background here in a second. But now we're going to duplicate this text layer, and the
number of times we duplicate the text layer is going to depend on how many instances of this
text we want wrapping around the cylinder. If you want tons of instances you're going to want to go
with probably around 8 to 10. If you want there to be few instances you can go with as little as one.
So just keep it at this current text layer or you can go with something like 2, 3, 4, whatever. So
let me come over here to my "FREE SOFTWARE" text layer and duplicate this. I'll go with six layers
total - so we'll just go five more. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... So now we have 6 of these layers total.
Once we've done that, with my alignment tool still selected I'm going to click and drag my
mouse over these layers - so this is called the "rubber band" feature. And if you wrap the rubber
band around all of the layers inside there it will select all of the layers underneath - as
opposed to just that top layer. So now when we come here to the alignment tool options,
down to the "distribute" option, we can distribute this from left to right. So when I click that
option it's going to evenly spread out my text here across the entire composition. So if I were
to add seven or eight layers of text this would be more tightly aligned here, and you might even
start to get some overlap. So I think six is a pretty good number here. But now what we'll
do is merge all these layers together. So let's come down here and just click this "merge" icon,
and we're just going to merge everything onto a single layer. And then we're going to make
the layer the same size as the composition. So we'll go to Layer>Layer to Image Size,
and finally let's come over here to the background layer and we're just going to delete this layer.
So there you can see we just have our text, and then I'm just going to add a blank layer above
this. So we'll create a new layer, let's name this "blank," my caps lock key is still on,
and fill this with transparency and click ok. You'll see why that's important here in
a moment. But now let's come back here, click on the "FREE SOFTWARE" text layer, make sure
this is active for the next step - the next step is actually mapping the text to the cylinder.
So to do that we're going to hit the forward slash "/" key on the keyboard or go to Help>Search
and run a command. And I'm going to type in "map," and we're going to go with this "Map
Object" option. So double-click on that. Right now this is set to "map to a plane." What we're going
to do is change this - so we're going to go with "cylinder," and we want a transparent background.
So there you can see this is in a cylinder shape. We're going to create a new layer from the result
of this. And I like to have the "update preview" live option checked. If you have a slower computer
I don't recommend keeping this checked, but I have a pretty fast computer so I'm going
to keep that checked. The anti-aliasing here is going to smooth out the result,
so you can turn this all the way up to five once again if you have a fast computer, otherwise keep
that somewhere around three - although the result won't be as smooth. And actually let me turn off
the wire frame because we don't really need to see that. And I can also come over here and zoom
out. So I can get a better look at what's going on here - so this is obviously a very rough look
right now at the text wrapped around the cylinder. Obviously this is a pretty rough look at the text
wrapped around the cylinder. So let's change the look here - let's come over here to "orientation."
So you have "position" as well as "rotation." If I use the "z" position, I can zoom this out a bit
and then we can rotate this as well. So here you'll see we have "x," so that's going to
rotate that a bit. We have "y" which is just going to roll the cylinder basically. And we have "z."
So you can play around with the various axes here and just get this to where you can get
a pretty good look at the final cylinder. Alright so here are the settings I decided to go with for
my rotation to get this so that it is upright not upside down, and also facing the viewer
here - so it's easy to read now. There is a lot of clutter because the top and bottom portions of the
cylinder contain text. So let's change that to our blank layer by coming over here to the cylinder
tab, and for the top portion we're going to change that to "blank,"
for the bottom portion we will also change that to "blank" - so that is our blank layer right
here. I'll come over here and click "preview" to update it, and as you can see that has updated
and it's way less cluttered. So let's move on to "lights" because I want to adjust the way
the light looks here. In my personal opinion I prefer to have this set to "directional light."
It's not going to look great at first, but if I come over here to the "direction vector"
I can change this to "1.00" for the x value, and that's going to change the location of where the
light is coming from. So that's going to be coming from the front instead of the back. And you can
always play around with all these settings here just until you get something you like.
So there we can bring the y down to minus 0.5 and maybe I'll just go with 0.75 for z for now.
So these direction vector settings are just allowing you to set the exact direction the
light is coming from. So you have an x-axis, a y-axis and a z-axis. So it's a 3D plane.
So just play around with those settings until you get the light in the location you want. But then
we can also come over here to the "Material" tab and we can play around with the intensity
levels of the light and the reflectivity of the light relative to the actual text.
And I'm not going to go that much into this stuff here. I do recommend you guys play around with it,
but I'll just add a new ambient setting here. And then we can also play around with the diffuse...
so I don't like that. So I usually go up and see what happens - you know,
above the default value - and if I don't like the way that looks I'll go below the default value,
but I'm just going to go with these settings here just for the sake of time.
And once you're ready you're going to come over here and click OK.
So here we have our text wrapped around a cylinder, and because we checked the "new
layer" option it did create a new layer from this. Of course there's a bunch of stuff going on behind
here, so let's put this on its own composition. I'll go to File>New, and I always like to place
this on an HD composition - so 1920x1080, click OK. Let's change the background color to black,
and then we can come back over here and click and drag this layer. Come over here to the tab, hold
your mouse over it to select this composition, hover over the composition itself and release.
So there you have your text - shift+s, we'll grab the scale tool, and we can scale this up.
If I hold ctrl it'll scale from the center, and I'll hit "scale." And there's our final
result. I do recommend playing around with the lights so you can get the shadow and everything
looking the way you want. In this case there's not a ton of separation between this line of
text right here and the line of text behind it, but I think you guys get the point regardless.
And one last thing I want to point out - if I come over here and hide this... If you want your text
to be a different color or you want to apply even some sort of gradient to this, I do recommend you
change the color of the text before you use that "Map Object" filter to map this to the
cylinder. So right now this is set to white. If I came over here to the free software text layer,
locked that alpha channel, and then clicked and dragged this black color on here,
now we have black text. If I hit the g key on my keyboard I can then draw a gradient - now
we have gradient text. I don't recommend doing a white to black gradient just because of the
way the lighting works, but you guys get the point. Alright that's it for this tutorial,
hopefully you liked it. If you did, don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click the bell
icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to
my resources in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.