Have you considered doing your UI graphics and such in 3D as well? It's the method I use. I construct frames, scroll-bars, etc... as 3D textured objects (cylinders, textured quads, etc...) then render them to bitmaps. This method helps you to add depth, detail and shading to the UI elements with ease, without spending a lot of time in Photoshop trying to do it all by hand.

Photoshop does have a line tool, but you could try a vector program like Inkscape instead.

This is my art webpage, if you see anything there that stylistically resembles the sort of UI elements you want to make, I can describe how I made anything on that page. It's mostly Photoshop or Inkscape.

The pen tool is the pen tool. You can draw lines with it, but it makes more sense to use the line tool. It draws lines, dontcha know?

Click-and-hold on the rectangle tool icon (which, conveniently, looks like a rectangle) and be amazed. Many tools are grouped together in this way.

As for photoshop not being made for creating 2D graphics... photoshop is the highest end and most powerful tool for making traditional rasterized 2D graphics. It's the de facto standard used by basically every professional game company in existence. The complexity may prevent you from being able to quickly produce graphics, but rest assured the program can do what you need it to if you learn it.

Did you try searching for, oh I don't know, this? Or maybe even this? Learning how to search properly is going to help you a lot more than asking on forums. Answering questions by yourself in 30 seconds is more efficient than reading through crass responses by jerks like me ;)

Photoshop is an amazing piece of software, but you can't expect to just jump into it and produce something nice right away; the learning curve is too steep for that.

Quote:Original post by JTippetts
Have you considered doing your UI graphics and such in 3D as well? It's the method I use. I construct frames, scroll-bars, etc... as 3D textured objects (cylinders, textured quads, etc...) then render them to bitmaps. This method helps you to add depth, detail and shading to the UI elements with ease, without spending a lot of time in Photoshop trying to do it all by hand.

I have to admit I laughed at this... different strokes, I guess. Doing it from scratch in Photoshop was my natural reaction.

tgmlatina, did you try googling stuff like "game textures photoshop"? Googling just for general tutorials is bad plan because the criteria are wwaaaaay too broad. As stated above, Photoshop has everything you need, but it's not going to be easy to use right away. See if you can find pre-existing menu stuff someone put up for free and modify it- that's probably your best bet.

If you really want to get into Photoshop, here's a PSD for a menu I did for a project back in the day: Lab 81 Menu Photoshop File* It should give you an idea about layers/effects/transparency/textures, etc. Muck around with that for a while and see if you can figure out how to do some of the stuff.

*Looks like this: