Curved Pipes and Tubes

This tutorial is designed to help out with making the curved pipes and tubes found on alot of graphics and interfaces. This is not a hard one, and there is plenty of room for your own creativity as well.

Start with a NEW IMAGE, 200 X 200 pixels, white, RGB Color Mode. Using the paint brush or pencil tool, paint a small 2 or 3 pixel dot in the center of your image. Do this in red or blue. This will be a reference point for steps to follow.

Select the round marquee tool, click on your reference dot, hold down the SHIFT and ALT keys, and make a large circle, filling most of the image. Go to SELECT> INVERSE, and flood fill the area outside the circle with black. Deselect. Again, with the round marquee tool, click on your reference dot, hold down the SHIFT and ALT keys, and make a smaller circle. Food fill the center of this circle with black. Deselect. The remaining white donut area is going to be made into your curved tube section, so play around until you get the dimension of your donut the shape you want. One quarter of this circle is going to wind up being your curved pipe elbow. Don't worry so much about the size itself, you can resize later, just try to get the fatness and sweep of your future pipe elbow the way you want. For now, the project is still a full circle.

With the magic wand tool, click in the white donut to select it. Make your foreground and background colors black and white. Using the Radial Gradient tool from the Tools pallette, with SPECTRUM selected in the options pallette, click on your reference dot, and drag to just ouside the selected ring, and release. You now have a partial rainbow in the ring. Deselect. Now go to IMAGE> MODE> GRAYSCALE, and turn the rainbow into gray. Now go right back to RGB mode IMAGE> MODE> RGB. The ring will still appear gray.

Create a new image, make it large enough to play with, 600x600 or larger, flood fill with black. Go back to your first image, and select the rectangular marquee tool. Starting on your center reference dot, click and drag up and to the left, until you have one quarter of the ring selected. Using the move tool, drag this ¼ section onto the new image.

You should now have the elbow on a black background. With the rectangular marquee tool, select a small portion from one of the ends of the elbow, as shown. Go to EDIT> TRANSFORM> SCALE, and drag straight out. You should now have a gray pipe, with your elbow on the end.

What if you want your elbow to have something other than a 90 degree bend? After dragging the one quarter section on to the new image, rotate it, as shown. Using the rectangular marquee tool select and cut a piece to square the pipe end. Make sure your cut goes thru the top of the pipe elbow (the highest point in the image), or the bottom of the pipe elbow,(the lowest point in the image) otherwise the next step will be distorted.

With the rectangular marquee tool, select a small section from the end, as in the 90 degree version, and EDIT> TRANSFORM> SCALE, and drag straight out as shown. Whenever you drag out the pipe section, you must drag straight out to avoid distortion.

Now you can go back to the first image, and drag more pipe sections onto Image 2, and stick them together anyway you want. After dragging another section over and connecting it LAYER> MERGE> DOWN the layers so the pipe sections become one piece. Then as before, you can rotate the pipe, cut off the curves anywhere you want, and drag out more pipe.

After connecting all the pieces, you can use the blur and smudge tools to smooth out any seams. Resize your pipe section to suit your needs, add color and shading with IMAGE> ADJUST> HUE SATURATION command, with the "colorize" box checked for color changing, and your pipe section is ready to include in your project.