3D metallic effects

Bring a new dimension to your vector artwork with 3D effects, custom lighting, and metallic materials.

Published December 18, 2025

00:01

Introduction

Do you want to take your designs to a whole new dimension?

I'm Andrew Hochradel, and in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how to create stunning metallic 3D designs in Adobe Illustrator.

All you need to do is select your text and then go to Effect,

00:11

Creating 3D text with the inflate effect

3D and Materials and click on Inflate...

From here it's going to inflate our text to give us a little bit of that 3D look.

00:23

Adjusting orientation and smoothing edges

If we want to rotate around the Y axis, we can grab this vertical line and click and drag or the X axis is this horizontal line to click and drag.

If you want to free transform, you can click and transform to any orientation you like.

Now you can see we have a hard edge on our 3D which we don't want.

So I'm going to click on Inflate both sides to give us that nice bubbly look.

If I ever get lost, I can scroll down and change my Preset to something like Off-Axis Front to make sure that everything looks good and we're good to go.

Next, we're going to click on Materials

00:57

Adding metallic materials and lighting

and scroll all the way down in the Properties panel and change Metallic all the way up to 1.

This will give us that nice metallic reflective shine.

From here we can go to Lighting and change the lighting of our design.

We can click and drag to see the results in real-time.

We also could scroll down and use these sliders to change the Intensity of the light, the Rotation, or even change the Height of where the light exists.

01:25

Enhancing depth with shadows

From here we're going to scroll down and turn on our Shadows.

This will allow us to cast shadows behind or even underneath our subject.

So we're going to click here and do Below Object to change our lighting and add some different shadows.

When we scroll back up, you can see that we have our light here, that we can click and drag to change where these shadows are appearing, and we want them to appear right below so that each of these shapes are reflecting on each other.

01:54

Rendering the final 3D metallic design

From here, to render out our final design, we're going to click on our Render settings, turn on Ray Tracing, use High and hit Render.

Once our design is fully rendered, all we need to do is deselect.

We can close our panel and now we have a gorgeous design that is reflective metallic text right here in Adobe Illustrator.

Now it's your turn.

Go and play with the settings, change the lighting, add new materials, and have fun creating 3D text in Adobe Illustrator.

What you'll learn

Add rounded dimension to objects

Convert your vector art to 3D and inflate each shape to custom depths.

Find the perfect angle

Rotate your art and apply presets to keep your 3D dimensions consistent.

Apply metallic textures and custom lighting

Create dazzling metallic textures and lighting for a reflective effect. Ray trace for ultimate realism.

Instruction by: Andrew Hochradel
Design by: Andrew Hochradel

Try these tutorials with Illustrator

Create illustrations and other graphics with vectors.

View all plans

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