Advanced Floor Making

Wood Floors in Perspective: Vertical Wood

If you have not seen any of the other room tutorials, you will need to review CarMel's Room Tutorial since we will be starting with her basic room setup.  You can download a zipped template1 file of the basic room which has been done through layer 6 with the floor section selected for this next step.

Open the template.  The marching ants are dancing in the correct place, and the baseboard layer is active.  This is the area where we are going to lay down our nice wooden floor.  Open wood08.jpg.  The first thing you will notice is that it is horizontal.  Rotate the wood so that it is vertical.  Copy it and paste it as a new layer called floor1.  Click on the deform tool.  The first thing I'm going to do is to squish the wood down some.  Place the cursor on the middle square and move down.  Now don't apply the deform just yet.  Place the cursor on the left square corner.  Hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard.  When the trapezoid appears over the square, take the cursor and move to the right, still holding down the Ctrl key.


How much you move the cursor over depends on how much distance perspective you want with your flooring.  This is the perspective that I chose.  Click on the select tool to apply the deform.  Now deselect the marching ants so that you can copy and paste floor1 layer as a new image.  Why?  This way you will have the first section of your flooring as a new image to copy and paste as a new layer for more sections if you need it.


Now go back to your floor1 layer.  Click on the deform tool again.  Move the cursor to the right corner and hold down the Ctlr key.  If you notice this room, it has a slant to the right.  I'm going to adjust this first section of flooring so that it fits the flow of the room.  Once you have the right look, click the select tool to apply the deform.  Now move that floor1 layer so that it is fitted at the bottom of the baseboard.  You can now either copy this layer and paste as floor2 layer, or you can use your copied new image.  Lay the floor2 layer to the left of floor1 layer.  Do you see the angle difference?  You will have to use the deform tool to angle it correctly with the first layer.  Sometimes you have to play with the deform more than once to get this to look correct.

Try moving the second floor layer into the correct position with the baseboard.  If you are sightly off in the angle between the two layers of flooring, just use the deform tool again until it is correct.

Now repeat these steps again to add your floor3 layer.  See how nice it's starting to look?  We just have that little section to the right.  Oh, and do you see any difference in the baseboard in these next two images?  My baseboard was a little off, so I made that layer active and used the deform tool to slightly alter the angle along the left wall.

Anyway, I copied that last layer, floor3, and pasted it as floor4 layer.  I used the deform tool to angle it more, then moved it down along the baseboard.  Then I changed the opacity of that layer to 20 percent so that floor3 layer showed through clearly.  I've moved it up in this next image so you can clearly see it.  But, move yours into the correct position along the baseboard.  With it being only a 20 or 30% Opacity, you can clearly see where it overhangs on floor3 layer.

Click on your freehand tool and bring up the Tool Options.  Set it to Point to Point.  Now with the cursor, left click on the bottom left where the two layers meet.  Next, left click where they meet on the left up at the baseboard.  Next, left click to the far right of the baseboard, then come back down and right click where you first started to get the cursor to release.  Now invert that selection and delete.  You have removed all the overhang of floor4 layer.

Well......I was still having some baseboard problems.  Because the baseboard had been beveled, it had a light shadow of white along the wood that I didn't like.  I made the baseboard layer active.  I pasted it as a new image.  I selected the slice of the baseboard and air brushed it the shade of the back wall.  Then I pasted it back on my room as a new layer and moved it to the top.  You can either do all this too or download the baseboard template here.  And here is the finished flooring.

Flooring 1  I  Flooring 2  I  Flooring 3  I  Flooring 4  I  Flooring 5