From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

952 Warping a pattern around an object

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

952 Warping a pattern around an object

- [Instructor] All right, so here we are looking at our candy cane rhino so far. Open once again, inside Photoshop. And even though I've filled the rhino with this seamlessly repeating pattern, which is a very good thing, it's a little bit flat, thanks to these very straight diagonal lines. What I want to do is kind of wrap the pattern around the shape so that we end up with this more plausible piece of rhino-shaped holiday candy. Now if you're feeling ambitious, you could try something like a displacement map in order to wrap the candy around the legs and so forth. However, in my experience, that produces jagged results. So I'm going to take a simpler approach in the form of a predefined warp function known as arc. And so make sure your rhino layer is selected here inside the layers panel and then bring back your patterns panel, which I'm going to do just by clicking on the Patterns tab, and notice that I still have that custom pattern called good candy. What you want to do is drag it and drop it, not onto the rhino, that would just reapply the pattern fill. Instead, drop it in an empty area of the composition in order to create this huge pattern layer which ends up dropping to the bottom of the stack. That's not what I want. So I'm going to do some cleanup here. First, I'm going to right click on that white layer mask thumbnail and choose Delete Layer Mask to get rid of it, and then I'm going to rename this layer warped because I will be warping it, and now I'm going to drag it and drop it to above the rhino layer like so. All right, we don't need the patterns panel anymore. So a double click its tab in order to allow more room for the layers panel and I want more smaller lines. So I'll double click on this thumbnail right here to bring it the pattern fill dialog box and I'll change the scale value to 50%. All right, now what I want to do is go up to the edit menu and choose the Free Transform command, but it's dimmed, and that's because you can't apply free transform which includes warps, by the way, to a pattern layer. And so what you need to do is convert that layer to a smart object by right-clicking in an empty portion of the layer in order to bring up this long pop-up menu and then choose Convert to Smart Object. And now notice if I return to the Edit menu, I can choose Free Transform and that will give me among other options, this warp icon up here in the options bar. Just go ahead and click on it in order to bring up this warp setting right here and change it to Arc. Again, you can experiment with the other ones if you like, but Arc works very nicely. And now I'm going to crank the bend value up to 100%, which is the highest setting possible, and then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac a couple of times to apply that change, and that change, by the way, is editable. And so if you want to go with a different warp setting, you would just return to the Edit menu, choose Free Transform, and then once again click on that Warp icon. However, in my case, this is going to work very well and that might surprise you because after all, I've arced the pattern above the rhino. And so what I'm going to do is just switch to the Move tool, which you can get by pressing the V key. Then you just want to drag this guy down while pressing the Shift key so that the angle of your drag is entirely vertical until you've absolutely covered up the rhino. Now we want to clip this warp layer inside the rhino, and so press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click on that horizontal border between the two layers in order to create a clipping group like so. And now if you want to realign the pattern inside the rhino, then just go ahead and drag it around using the Move tool. And so I want this stripe to kind of cut halfway through this snowy eyeball. And that is a very simple way to wrap a pattern around an object by first converting it to a smart object and then applying a warp function here inside Photoshop.

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