The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Tybae]

Another way to get blue gas giants is to take an image of Jupiter and desaturate it. Then use the color burn gradient, convert it to radial and use a light color in the middle, going to dark. Another option would be to overlay a blue transparent gradient, or use the colorize option in the Hue/Saturation section. Then use a circle the size of the planet and fill it with the darker blue, put it behind the planet and use a radial blur on it to get a halo around it. When you do this, your bottom layer will be the starfield, the middle layer will be the blur and the top layer will be the planet itself. You can add other things, maybe a nebula, ghosted in the background for a more other solar system looking effect.

[chaos_theocrat]

Yes, I recall there were one or two folks interested in Blue Gas Giants who posted on the Vault. I think something like that would be well-recieved, in particular by those who are into D20 Modern, and similar sci-fi / modern modifications of Nwn. Myself, I wouldn't mind seeing a Battlestar Galactica module or two. Especially since there are placeables for Colonial Vipers. :icon_idea:

On another note, that's a well-done world map you've made there, Izk! It looks very professional, like something you'd see included with a classic PC RPG, or even like those you see in epic fantasy novels like Wheel of Time.

[DM_Mask]

* Mask sends an email to the gas-giant-requester*

[Izk The Mad]

I thought these might be useful for d20 too. I was checking out their placeables and creatures a while back. They have placeable planets as well as a slew of spaceships, and there's even spaceship creature appearances. Oh, the possibilities...

I didn't really intend that to be a "blue gas giant", BTW. I like the blue x-ray sun image, and I was thinking of something more surreal. I remembered as I was working on it that someone kept asking for a blue gas giant, and this seemed like a humorous coincidence. I'll have to make a proper one now, using Tybae's suggestions.


@Tybae, thanks for the tips! I've actually been experimenting with some of those techniques already in some of these. You've given me some great ideas about adding my own planets in future skies. The Earth sky is composed of several images overlaid and faded/blended together, including a nebula in the back half, sorta "ghosted" in, like you mentioned. The clone tool came in handy too, for the Earth itself.

[Izk The Mad]

I was looking for some suggestions. I want to create a new base layer of stars for some of these space skies. I was looking at the vortex sky in the CSP and I'd like to make something like that, without the clouds. Basically, an all black field with random one pixel stars that I can add layers over. I was wondering if there was some easy way to do something like that in Photoshop, without doing every dot manually. Any ideas, anyone?

[Tybae]

It's really not all that difficult in Photoshop either. Just make a new layer and spot your stars all over it with the brush in a random pattern. Then use a slight radial blur to make them not so sharp and viola!

Also you can use the Outer Glow function and turn the noise way up along with the range, but that creates too many stars, IMO. You can use the Noise filter as well, but make sure you don't have too many stars in the field.

IMHO, the best way is to do it the first way, manually. It creates less random stars and not too many stars. It makes the sky look a little more realistic.

[Izk The Mad]

Thanks, Tybae. It always has to be the hard way, doesn't it? The one time I want to do something the easy way... I'll save that mouse-clicking fest for tomorrow. I was almost hoping there was an "easy button" I hadn't found yet, but it probably would be best to do it manually. Looking at the vortex sky again, I think the stars are bigger than I thought, and blurred slightly. I want to try the base layer with very small stars just for the background. Then I can add other layers on top with bigger stars, galaxies, etc. The large image size (2048x2048) is why I wanted an easier way. I figure a 1024 square would do, though. That's one side, and I could just rotate and/or flip it to make the other 3 sides.

Even with a larger tga these skies are still blown up a bit in-game, but the high res keeps them from looking too pixelated or blurry. Also, I've found the images are being stretched horizontally, so I've been stretching the image elements in the most recent skies vertically to compensate, and it helps. I even tried resizing one of my previous ones down to 1900x2048, which worked well, and also reduced the file size a little. Don't know yet if the huge tgas will have an effect in-game for people with slower computers, but it's something I'll have to check out.

Anyway, getting late... :bed_time:

[Tybae]

What you could do is make a small area of stars, blur them, then use your transform tool to make them larger than the visible area. Then copy and paste the section to the desired edges, but move them up and down to create a more random effect (that's the reason for enlarging them larger than the visible area top and bottom). That would definately be faster than doing the entire star field by hand.

Then again, most things in Photoshop look better when they take longer. :beatdeadhorse:

Cheers,

Tybae.

[Izk The Mad]

:beatdeadhorse: I hadn't noticed that one before. That's just wrong. I love it. Thanks!

Thanks for that tip, too, I'll try that. I haven't gotten to the stars yet (even though my head's in the clouds, lol). I've been sidetracked lately with my module, but I intend to finish these long before I finish that!

These tips are really appreciated. I've also been exploring PS6 even more. I recently found an option to merge (or was it paste?) images using selective colors somehow, so I can merge these space images without having to erase or mess with transparency as much. I can't remember what it was now, though. Any idea? I could probably find it again, but it may not work the way I think it does, so I thought I'd ask.

Just for the heck of it (and the feedback), I decided to show the most recent skies over at d20, and the comments have been quite positive. It's kinda slow over there, so only a few people have commented so far, but they're respected names. Even got a great suggestion from Jez I'm going to try: an asteroid field. Another use for that base layer of stars, it seems.

[Tybae]

There's a Select Color Range option, maybe that's what you're thinking of. You can copy and paste from there, but I don't think it works the way you want it to. No real blending to speak of.

The Starfield is really a good canvas for a lot of things. Asteroids, meteors, comets, etc. That's why I have one already. I don't mind spending a few extra minutes doing it well when I can use the same starfield over and over again. :thumb:

That smiley is the best I've seen. Beating a dead horse. Awesome.