This material is a little different. It's not a metal or plastic, it's a material that has a vaguely fluid look to it, and can be used as the basis for a number of viscous type materials. We also use coloured lights to give it a fake environment, producing shifts in colour over the surface without needing anything beneath the bevel.

Load up the file 'ringmask.psd'. This file contains the ring from which the selection set to create the material samples was generated.

If you loaded the ringmask file, you can Ctrl/Cmd-Click the layer with the ring to select it. If you didn't, create a new selection for the bevel.

Before you launch ShapeShifter, make sure you have selected a new layer. This will create the bevel without anything behind it. If you have something, say the black ring mask in the background, you might find the edges of the object appear blocky after you apply. This is because the edges are antialiased, and if something is beneath them the antialiasing will appear odd.

When you launch ShapeShifter, you will be presented with the default settings. The material we're about to work on is fairly complex so we'll need to change a number of the basic settings. If you wish, you can load in the Slime! Preset from the tutorial's preset file. The rest of this tutorial assumes that you don't do that.

Note: Depending on the selection you have when launching, you may need to adjust the Bevel Scale in the Main Shape panel to prevent it bevelling too far. Ideally, you want a bevel that looks like a rounded shape and does not 'meet' in the centre causing sharp ridges.

This time, we're going to set up the lights first. Like many of the presets, we use a five light system for highlighting the bevel. This system gives us a nice even wash of light, with two lights handling the highlighting of the object.

We are going to need five lights in the scene, it may just be easier to delete all of the existing ones first.

• Select a light and press the Delete key. This deletes the light.
• When the light is deleted, another one is selected, so keep pressing Delete until they are all gone.
• Make sure the Ambient Glow slider is set to 0%.

The object should now be completely black, and it's time to add some new lights in. First, we'll add a generic light that will apply some light to the entire object.

• Add a new light using the Add Light button.
• Set the Light Brightness to 50%, and the Highlight Sheen to 0%.
• Using the Light Color Picker, select a pale, pastel orange colour (see the image above for suggestions).
• Place this light over the centre of the lighting preview.

This light does not cast a highlight, it just illuminates the surface evenly so that we have a good base to build on. Now we'll add some highlights of different colours.

• Add a new light using the Add Light button.
• Set the Light Brightness to 50%, the Highlight Sheen to 50%, and the Highlight Spread to 87%.
• Make sure that the Highlight Type is Diffuse by clicking on the Sharp/Diffuse button.
• Set the colour of this light to a pale Cyan (see the image above for suggestions).
• Move this light to the top left of the lighting preview.
• With this light selected, add a new light using the Add Light button. The new light is a clone of the one that was selected.
• Set the colour of this light to a pale Magenta (see the image above for suggestions).
• Move the new light to the bottom right of the lighting preview.

The only thing left to do is add some diffuse lights to illuminate the bottom left and top right of the bevel.

• Add a new light using the Add Light button.
• Set the Light Brightness to 50%, and the Highlight Sheen to 0%. This gives us a diffuse light that adds no highlight.
• Make sure this light is white, we just want to illuminate rather than tinting.
• Move this light to the bottom left of the light preview.
• With this light selected, add a new light using the Add Light button. The new light is a clone of the one that was selected.
• This light should also be white to avoid tinting the result.
• Move this light to the top right of the light preview.

We now have a setup that gives us some colour to the lights, and lights the surface subtly. The position of the lights gives the material an almost pearlescent look.

The Environment panel contains the next controls we need to look at. Right now, your material is probably looking blue, and if you applied to a flat layer it's probably also slightly transparent. Here, we're going to fix that and get one more step towards the lumpy slime we're after.

We're going to correct the colour first.

• Using the Color Tint thumbnail, click and drag to select White as your material colour.
• Make sure the Mix Tinting Color slider is set all the way to the right. This means you won't get any colour from the image underneath the bevel.

This alone should make a huge difference to your result. With white as the colour you can see the tinting of the lights far more easily. The default blue just doesn't show them up properly.

Just to make sure that things are looking good, check to make sure that the Plastic/Metal button reads 'Plastic', and that Internal Reflection is set to 0%. A metallic surface would create interesting effects (if the Color Tint was something other than white) but we don't want it here.

Given that we're aiming for lumpy slime, it's time we added the lumps. This can be done using the Bump Map panel. This panel allows you add bumps to the surface of the bevelled object. For this slime, we're going to use a Perlin Noise to produce some slight lumps.

• From the Bump Map menu (just beneath the preview) select 'Perlin Noise'.
• Set the Bump Scale to 33%, or higher if you have a larger selection set. The aim is to make the lumps look less like noise and more like surface waves.
• Set the Bump Height to 7%, we only want a small amount of bump.

The Bump settings give the surface a lumpy look, breaking up the shiny smoothness.

The mixture of lighting and bumping used in this tutorial can be used to create a large range of other effects. Just playing with the properties of the lights can produce some fascinating results, and when you try different bump types (or load your own) you can get some varied finishes to the surface. One tip to remember is that sharp variance in the brightness of a bump map produces small bumps, the smoother the 'white-black' gradient of the bump map is, the better the bumping looks.