Looking for a guide on how to use plasticine toolkit

[Lily_Hammer]

Hello,

I have gone over the Plasticine toolkit many times and I still cannot get my letters to have the 3D look that is showing on the tutorial. The tutorial is really hard to follow. Does anyone have a quick guide make fonts and objects to have the plasticine effect? 

[Myra Ferguson]

Are you using this toolkit from the Adobe Exchange? Is this the video tutorial? They do go fast and make several moves that might be confusing if you're not familiar with the panels or the process. It might help if you pause the video to see what they're doing.

Here are the steps with some interpretation and additional information on where to find the panels. They open the Actions panel (Window > Actions or if the panel is minimized, it appears with a triangle play button icon), go to the panel menu, select Load Actions..., and load the Softening and bumps.atn actions. Then they load the styles from the toolkit (Go to Window > Styles, go to the upper right panel menu, and select Load Styles... Navigate to the Plasticine Styles.asl file and click Load). Then they run the Softening action that changes the text to a shape layer that has smooth edges and is white (in the Action panel click on Softening and click the play button at the bottom of the Actions panel to run it). They turn off the text layer. They change the Background layer to black. They open the Styles panel (Window > Styles or if you have that panel open, it looks like a square with a lighter fx in the lower-left corner). With the Shape 1 layer selected, they apply a style from the panel. (A style is a collection of non-destructive settings that can be applied to a layer to adjust the color, add a stroke, add gradients, add patterns, add a bevel, etc.) They change the background back to white. Then they select the Shape 1 layer again (it appears like it has an outline, but that is just the shape layer being selected). They go up to the options bar and click on the swatch next to Fill to open up the color swatches. They select a color. Then they open the Actions panel again and run the Bumps Big action. A dialog appears to get user input during the action. They select Rasterize. They click on multiple styles to try them out. Each time they click on one, it replaces the previously applied style. They double-click on the layer in the space to the right of the name of the layer to open the layer styles. They click on Color Overlay to open its Layer Style options. In the options area, they change the color. They repeat the process for a shape they put in the background and for the solid background layer.

I hope that helps. 🙂