Create an automated reusable software box model

We've all seen those amazing 3D software boxes and there's even many tutorials on the internet on how to make them. But they all have one thing in common: they're meant for creating a single box. If you want to create another one, you'll have to go through the same painful monotonous process again. This tutorial will teach you how to make a 3D model of a box in Photoshop and apply different textures in a few seconds. Unfortunately, creation of the box cover (texture) itself cannot be automated since it is a creative process, but we can at least automate the box texturing process. Even if you need only a single box, this tutorial is also useful for you.

To make a software box, we'll need two files: the first one will be our box 3D model and the other one will be the template for all your software boxes. You will design the box in the second file and then use an automated process to texturize the 3D model. Let's get started!

Let's start from the second file, because it's an easy one. We'll make our models pretty large in case we need it in the future. You can always downsize the end result, but it's better to have an original size pretty large. So press CTRL+N and create a new document:
Width : 900 px
Height: 1220 px
Background contents: Transparent
Resolution: 72 pixels/inch
Now press D to set the default colors, then X to exchange them and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill your background with white. Now go to View > New Guide ... Create a vertical guide at 216 px. Now save the document. Name it whatever you want, it will be our cover graphics template. You will be designing the box on this template. As you can see, there's a vertical line on the left side of the template. This is the boundary, splitting the side of the box from the front. All the stuff that you want to be on the front of the box will have to be on the right of this boundary and all the stuff that needs to be placed on the side of the box will go to the left side of the boundary.

Now let's begin with the model itself. Hit CTRL+N and create the following document:
Height: 1500px
Width: 1500px
Resolution: 72 pixels/inch
Transparent
This time let's fill the background with black color. Make sure if you have black as your foreground. If you don't, press D and X to default and exchange the values. Now fill with ALT+BACKSPACE. Double click on the layer's title on the layers window and rename it to background. Now make another layer by clicking on the new layer button

in layers panel. Rename this one to points. Now we need to create our 3D shape. For this, we'll define some reference points. Take the pen tool

from the tools palette and set the foreground color to white. Now open the info window to see the coordinates of your mouse cursor. To do that, go to Window > Info. You can see that when you move your mouse on the document, the X and Y values in the Info window change. You will use them to add the reference points. Below is a list of points you need to add. Simply move your mouse until the coordinates in the Info window match the required and click once to add a point. You can zoom in for higher accuracy. Here's the coordinates (X, Y) of the points you need to add:
370, 147
540, 68
1135, 262
1135, 1143
540, 1272
370, 1195
Now take the pen tool

from the tools palette. Look at the top of the Photoshop window and find the pen settings toolbar

. Click on the middle button to enable paths mode. Let's make the front of the box first. Click on a new layer button

in layers panel and name your new layer front. If you look closely at the picture, you'll notice that there's a contour of your box already and the front side is the 4 points on the right. With pen tool selected, zoom in on the document and click on each of these points. When that's done, right-click and select Make Selection. Press OK in the box that should appear. Now fill the selection with white: make your foreground white and hit ALT+BACKSPACE. The end result should look like this (don't mind those little white areas all over the place, it's just a text with the coordinates of each point):

Now disable this layer by clicking on a small eye on the left of its icon in the layers palette. Create a new layer and rename it to side. Using the same procedure as with the front, join the 4 leftmost points, make selection and color it white. Now enable the front layer and disable your points layer. Zoom to a 100% and see if there's no empty space between the left and right white polygons. In my case there was some space so i've selected the front layer, then selected the move tool

from the tools palette and hit the Left cursor key on my keyboard to move the polygon one pixel to the left. Now there was no more space. If you do see the space, make sure you're viewing in 100% mode (View > Actual Pixels), because after you make things right, the space might still appear at 50% or some other zoom value (that's normal, no need to fix anything here). So by now you should have something like this:

As you can see, the space between front and side polygons is visible, but that's just because of the decreased zoom. It will be fine in the original picture. Now select the side layer and press CTRL+E to merge it down with the front. Now both of your polygons are on the same layer. So it would be a good idea to rename it to box. We will need to make some highlights now and here we face a small misunderstanding: highlights are white and the box is white as well - we won't be able to see what we're doing. We need to change the color to something else. I've decided that red is quite good. So change your foreground color to red, then select your box layer and click on the lock transparent pixels button

in the layers panel. Now hit ALT+BACKSPACE to fill. As you can see, we had no selection at all on the document itself and yet the operation only filled our box. Normally, filling with no selection would fill the entire document with our chosen color, but if you lock the transparent pixels, they won't be filled and only visible and partially visible pixels will be filled. Now that this is done, unlock transparent pixels by clicking on the same button once again. And now you should have a red box. Your layers panel should look like this:

Now we can add some highlights. Select the box layer and create a new layer. Name it top highlight. Make a selection with a elliptical marquee tool

from the tools palette like the one below:

Now change your foreground color to white and select the gradient tool

from the tools palette. On the top of Photoshop there's gradient settings panel

. Expand the gradient chooser (the leftmost combobox) and select the white to transparent gradient (should be the second one). Also make sure that the first gradient type is selected like in the previous picture. Click and drag it down like shown in the picture below. While dragging, hold the SHIFT key to make a straight line.

You should now have this ellipse filled with a gradient. Press CTRL+D to deselect and make another selection, this time with a rectangular marquee tool

from the tools palette.

As you can see i have my points layer enabled, because the right side of the selection has to match the corner of your box. I've also decreased the opacity of the top highlight layer to make it easier to see the points. When you have the selection, press CTRL+T and, while holding CTRL key on your keyboard, drag the top and bottom left points to form a shape like this:

Hit ENTER and the transformation is done. We need to turn this highlight layer into a clipping mask. To do this, go to Layer > Create Clipping Mask. What this does is it hides the parts of your highlights layer that are not above the box layer. And as you can now see, the highlights layer can only be visible on the box, but there's no highlight outside of the box area. Select your top highlight layer and create a new layer above. Name it v highlight. Now take the pen tool

from the tools palette and draw a line, matching the front corner of the box. To do that, you need to simply join the two middle points of the box. Now select the brush tool

from the tools palette and, as always, on the top of the Photoshop window there's a settings panel. Choose a 5px soft brush from the brush list (second combobox from the left). Select the pen tool again. Now right-click on the document and select Stroke Path. In the dialog box, a pencil should be selected by default. We need to change it to a brush. Hit OK. Hit ENTER to get rid of the path itself. Now create a clipping mask from this layer too. Go to Layer > Create Clipping Mask. Change the opacity of both of your highlight layers to whatever you like (you might need to change it for every box to get the best results). So by now you should have a similar to the below picture and the following arrangement of the layers:

Go to View > New Guide ... Create a vertical guide at 216 px.

The last thing we need to create is an automation script to texturize this box of ours. To do this, we need a cover first. Open your cover template file and quickly design a cover. There's no need to create anything good looking here, you can even leave it white if you like. Now select everyghing with CTRL+A and press CTRL+SHIFT+C to copy the merged result. Go back to the box model and select the topmost layer. Paste the picture and rename the newly created layer to cover. Disable the points layer. Select the cover layer and paste your cover with CTRL+V. Now zoom out, take the move tool

from the tools palette and align your cover with the top left corner of the document. Here's how it should look now:

And now the automation begins. Go to Window > Actions to open the actions panel. You can create a new actions folder if you want. Press the little folder on the bottom of the actions panel to create it. Now select a folder you want to put your action to and hit the new action button

. In the dialog box that should open, name it whatever you want (i named it Software box automation) and hit Record. Everything you do from this point will be recorded and you'll be able to repeat it with a single click. Select the cover layer make a selection like below with a rectangular marquee tool

from the tools palette:

Hit CTRL+J. This will copy your selection to a new layer. Now holding CTRL on your keyboard, click on this new layer's icon in the layers panel. If you've done it right, the left side of the cover should now be selected. Select the cover layer and hit DEL. What this does is it deletes the left side of the image from the cover. As a result we have the left side on one layer and the right side on another. Enable the points layer. Set the opacity of both cover layers to something from 50% to 60%. Now select the cover layer and with the help of the move tool

from the tools palette, move align this layer with the front of the box. To do that, move it horizontally until it reaches the line where the front and side join and then move it vertically so that the top side of the cover was slightly above the box. Below you can see a zoomed view of the top left corner of my cover. You basically need to do the same:

Now select the left side of the cover (should be the one named layer 1). Align it with the right side. Now press CTRL+T on your keyboard to start transforming. First click on the top transformation line and move it down until it is 1 pixel above the box. You'll need to zoom in quite a lot to do this precisely. Here's how it should look:

The same has to be done with the bottom of the transformation line. Only it has to end up one pixel below (not above) the bottom of the box. Now zoom out a little and let's align the bottom left point. To align this point, you need to hold the CTRL key on your keyboard and drag it to almost match the bottom left corner of the box. Leave it a little bit to the left and bottom of the actual corner point. We don't need these points to match exactly but we also don't want the cover to end up filling less than it's supposed to fill. So the alignment should look like this:

Once again, don't mind the numbers in the picture. Go to the top left point and align it with the top left point of the box exactly the same as you did with this one. Hit ENTER to complete the transformation.
Now select the cover layer and do the same for its 4 points as you did with the left side. Only this time you need to CTRL+CLICK the points on the right and not on the left (obviously). When that's done, change both of your cover layers opacities to 100%. Select the left side of the cover (layer 1) and press CTRL+E to merge it down with the cover layer. Now drag this layer below the top highlight layer. And you get something like this:

But we're still recording our actions, remember? Go to the actions window again and hit the stop action button

. Delete the cover layer and save the document. Aaaaand ... we're done! Finally! Was this difficult? I think it was, but now we have an automated model and we won't need to put ourselves through this horror ever again :) Shall we test the model? Offcourse! Open up your cover model document. Copy the cover from it (CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+C). Go back to the box model document. Select the topmost layer and paste the cover. Rename the newly created layer to cover. With the help of the move tool

from the tools palette, align the top left point of the cover with the top left point of the document. Now open up actions panel, select your action and press the play action button

. If you've done everything correctly, the cover should now be applied on the box model and you should have the box ready. As you can see we don't need to waste our time aligning the texture to the box and we don't need to waste our time adding the highlights as we normally would. From now whenever you need a software box, just open a cover template file, design the box there, paste it in the box model document on a new layer, called cover and align it to the top left corner of the document. The play button will do the rest. Automation helps us save some of our time.

I hope you've learned something useful and new so go ahead and start making your own software boxes :)