Glass Cube Tutorial

The Background

Start by creating a new document, using photoshop give it a 600x600 size. Get your gradient tool a give a radial effect like mine, a simple light blue to a medium blue.

Illustrator

Now open up Illustrator for an easy and fast creation. Create a new document doesn't matter what size, and make a square(hold down SHIFT). Give it the color you like, it really doesn't matter here.

Go to Effect -> Extrude & Bevel this will open up a window and here you will choose how to make your 3D effect. Click the Preview box to have a real time notion of what's happening to your object.

Heres what I came up with. Now select this shape and copy it.

Back to Photoshop

Ok no more illustrator, remember the copied object? Paste it to your document in a new layer and call it "mockup", also put down the opacity to 60%-70%.

Create a new layer and call it "Circle", get your eliptical marquee tool and while holding down shift drag a circle. Go to your gradient tool and select 3 colors like mine, remember you can do whatever color you like, also choose Radial Gradient from the top (it's the second one).

Drag the tool as you see in the picture.

Heres what we got so far.

Create a new layer and using the pen tool trace the cube like I did, remember make your trace, then right button and stroke using brush. Or you can simply use the line tool, this is just to have the feeling of what the cube is.

You can delete your "mockup" layer and stick with this one.

Create a new layer and call it "Cube" Get your Rectangular marquee tool and trace around the shapes, get your Gradient Tool and make a soft gradient like the one in the picture below (important make sure your gradient is set to about 30% opacity). Do the same for all the sides.

Ok Perfect try to match mine here,

You can now delete your Trace layer and voila we have this little nice cube here.Make your Circle Layer visible again and go to Filer -> Gaussian Blur and give it a value of around 6.0.

We don't what this cube to have such sharp edges, so lets make some selections and erase it, see how I did it and do the same for all the other corners. Remember to have your "Cube" layer selected when erasing those edges.

Nice looking good here.

But theres one missing, the one facing us, so make a selection using the pen tool, like the image below hit the right button and make selection, remember to create a new layer.

Get a nice gradient like this one

Make a selection using the Pen Tool (p) like mine here and make this in a new layer, fill it with the gradient tool using radial option.

Now simply erase those edges that stand out. You can do this by using the Eraser or using a Mask Layer. I personaly recomend this last one so you can erase a little bit more.

The Shadow

Make a selection below the cube (see image) and fill with black.

Go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and use a value of around 2.0. Put this layer opacity to around 50%.

More Tracing

Create 2 new layers one name it "outside lines" the other "inside lines" put this last one behind the "Circle" Layer. Grab the pen tool and make selections like I did and stroke them, this time with a 3px or 2px try out different stuff. Don't forget the inside of the cube too.

Select the "inside lines" layer and give it a Gaussian Blur of around 6.

For the "Outside lines" layer give a value of around 3px.

Now duplicate your Cube Layer and make sure your background and foreground are black and white or maybe with a little blue in it. Go to Effects -> Noise -> Add Noise and give it a value of around 5%.

I almost forgot, lets give the Circle a shadow. It's simple, you did it before but this time get your eliptcal selection tool, create a new layer and just make a selection like I did, fill it with black. After that give it a nice gaussian blur or around 5 and drop down the opacity of this layer to a confortable level.