Aircraft Paints - Rivets the easy way

Rivets : The easy Way.

As long as the texture file resolution is high enough, this is a very simple way to do rivets in Photoshop. The technique uses the brush spacing settings to paint a line of dots instead of a solid line, from there it's just a matter of how you apply the paint brush, and simple Layer Effects.

This is the texture I'll use to illustrate how the rivets look against different colour values.

Create a new layer above the one(s) to be riveted, and name it Rivets.

Open the brushes palette and click on Brush Tip Shape (near the top left), the palette should look as below - in older versions of PS it may look different, you should look for a setting called Spacing. Set the spacing to a high value (experiment & undo the brush strokes until it looks right), usually between 250 & 400 seems to work. Here I've selected 300, with a 2 px size brush, set the colour to black and deselect all the options such as Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, etc., (just to keep it simple), use them if you need them for an effect.

To create a straight line of rivets: If you hold down Shift, click and drag, you'll get a straight line of dots, restrained to 45 degrees (i.e. vertical, horizontal, or at 45 degrees to those planes). If you hold down Shift, click, release the mouse/pen pressure, but keep holding down Shift, then click again, you'll get a straight line between the two points you clicked on. It's easier to do than it is to explain... Combining the two techniques also works: You can Shift Click & drag for a straight horizontal line, then release the pressure & click on another point to get a straight line from the end of the horizontal line.

I've drawn two lines using the 2px brush, with 300% spacing, then drawn another pair of lines with a 5 pixel brush and 200% spacing - this is just so later stages will show up clearly:

Either: Select Layer > Layer Style > Bevel and Emboss, OR, Double click the layer icon to bring up the Layer Styles dialogue box, then select Bevel and Emboss, OR click the FX icon in the layer palette and select Bevel and Emboss.

There are a lot of options in the Bevel and Emboss dialogue box - and it's worth experimenting with them - they're mostly quite intuitive, and you can preview the results as you play around. The default Inner Bevel setting looks pretty good:

However, to make things stand out a bit more here, I've changed to Style: Emboss, set the Depth to 21 and Size to 3. I've left the Angle at 120 degrees, the default Global Light, but it's worth noting that this has a big impact with some settings. Here's the result:

Obviously the rivets shouldn't be black, and there are a couple of ways of dealing with this - as you'll see, we could've started out with a different fill colour, but I've used black so the painting stage would be clear.

First technique is to leave the rivets black, but reduce the Fill value. Many people get confused by the difference between the Fill and Opacity sliders at the top of the Layer Palette. (If you're not familiar with the interface, see the Photoshop Layers section). Here's where it comes in useful - Opacity reduces the overall opacity of the layer contents and any layer effects, while Fill only reduces the layer pixel's opacity, leaving layer effects fully visible. I think Adobe made the interface a bit unclear on that point, but that's how it works. So, I've reduced the Fill to 10% and the black has almost disappeared, leaving the bevel and emboss effect over the underlying paint:

Remember, I'm basing the settings on the small rivets at the top, the larger rivets are there to make the steps a bit clearer, so they look a little exaggerated. Also, note that you can still reduce Opacity to make the rivets more subtle. You could even select the Transparency Lock in the Layers Palette & fill the layer with another colour; say the base colour was dark green, you could fill the rivet layers pixels with a lighter green to give the effect of worn paint on the raised rivets...

The second technique I've illustrated by filling the black rivets with 50% grey (by locking pixel transparency on the layer & then selecting Edit > Fill). However, it would be best to start painting with 50% grey (r128, g128, b128), unless the object you're painting is very close to that colour & the rivets are hard to see. Once the rivets are all painted & you want to lose the greyness, just select Overlay as the blending mode for the layer: Mid grey is a neutral colour for this blending mode, so any pixels that colour won't be visible against the layers beneath, however, the layer effects will show through:

Note how similar the results are...

If the paint file isn't high enough resolution to allow rivets made with a 2 pixel brush, just use the same painting technique, but don't try to apply any layer effects. In the middle here I've painted a line of rivets using a1 pixel brush, and reduced the layer opacity to 40% - it could probably go to 20 - 30% for an aircraft paint:

To apply rivets along a curved line, it's best to draw the line using the Pen tool, creating a path, and then select the brush with the correct spacing, and stroke the path. For the final image I created a circular path with 2 clicks of the pen tool, set a brush of 3 pixels and stroked the path - It took 3 attempts with different spacing until the rivets were even, getting that right on a circle is always going to be harder than doing a simple curve - and of course it's always possible to go in & roughly select one rivet, then nudge it with the Move tool. No layer effects applied: