Step 5: The next effect works great for many 3D style pieces… we’re going to create a subtle shadow at the base of the text that will really bring out the 3D effect without it being in your face. It’s a simple trick to do, but looks awesome. Start off by selecting the Ellipse Tool and make sure your background color is set to black.

Now draw a super skinny oval shape along the base of the text. Make it a bit wider than the text itself on both sides and make sure you keep it quite thin… if you go too thick with your oval, it’s going to look strange.

Now we’ll apply a Gaussian blur to our shadow. I went with a 3.7 pixel blur in this example, but feel free to play around with different numbers for a varying degree and sharpness of shadow.

Now go to your object docker, and drag the shadow object to the bottom position so that it’s under the text and reflection objects.

Start:

Finish:

And finally, we’ll adjust the opacity on this object as well to tone it down. Right-click on the shadow object and tone it down with the opacity slider:

Our shadow is now complete! Not exactly mind bending, but it looks great! next up we’ll add some background highlights.

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