last upd8 i made puella magi based meenah and aranea sprites using this and this and i thought some folks might maybe want the blanks?
Have some 8/05/13 updort rips. I messed up on a few, though. :c Hopefully that won’t be too hard to fix if you want to.
alright, so the chances are that if you read my last tutorial, you get the general idea of how you can make a really shitty version of john’s planet, but you’re still wondering where the hell you’re supposed to go from there. alright, cool, you can make some place with earth-like geography and a shitload of clouds, but how are you supposed to make something awesome like, say, dave’s planet?
the short answer is more or less with the help of this tutorial, which is less of a tutorial and more of just me swearing and pretending I know things
the long answer is the rest of this tutorial
alright, I’m going to make a planet called the LAND OF CHILL AND CIRCUITRY, which is DEFINITELY a very original idea that I came up with on my own.
alright, well, making an ice planet is pretty easy. basically just a really pale blue color with a gradient, I don’t need any textures for that. but then…….. what the hell about circuitry? how do I make that look good?
I mean, I know what circuit boards look like. they’re messy, with wires and conduits and transistors and ok I’ll admit I actually know jack shit about circuitry but this is what I got from a google image search so it’ll do.
I can’t really…… use this image as a texture, though. there’s no way that will ever look good, no matter how hard I try. I’ve got to try something different.
thankfully, on top of being incredibly attractive and having an amazing voice, I am also a genius, so I have a solution to my terrible problem.
first, I use the magic wand tool to eliminate most of the green shit and other unnecessary stuff. I have a black bg just so it’s easier to see what I’m doing.
next, I use the brightness tool and general buffoonery to mess around with the colors and details of the image. the most noticeable change is that now, everything is white.
next, with interpolation off, I scale down the size of my silicon clusterfuck, making some small modifications with the binary tool to help it looks more circuit-y.
then, I use the paint bucket to fill in the area around my ice planet black. I use the magic wand tool to cut this area and paste it on a layer above the planet.
after that, I make a new layer between the planet layer and the black area layer, which I’ll use to place my circuit pattern.
well, I plastered down the pattern a whole bunch of times, but it still doesn’t look….. good? all the depth that the planet had before has been lost, and there are too many ugly little diagonal lines sticking out!
to solve this problem, I turn off anti aliasing and go around with a small eraser, fixing details and leaving a spot in the center for something special. I even add a cool glow effect to the circuits by duplicating the layer and blurring it slightly. looks even cooler in hi res!
………. but the planet still totally looks like a flat disc. what the hell do I do now?
first, I hide all layers except for the circuit pattern layer. I then use ctrl/cmd+a to select everything, and use the select by color tool to select all of the circuits and make a pretty radial gradient going from white to a mid grey.
it looks like this.
After a few minutes of fixing gradients and redoing the glow effect, I merge the black area with the circuit and glow layers and then delete it, leaving me with this nice, neat planet.
and now I do the other stuff!
obviously, unlike LOHAC, there aren’t any huge, towering structures on this planet. circuits stay pretty much entirely on the ground, but having a planet with a flat edge just doesn’t really look that great. hey, radio towers look pretty cool, and fit with my digital theme! how about I put some of those down?
after a brief google search, I find a pretty nice, simple picture of a radio tower that’ll be easy to rip from the image, since it’s all one color.
bam, ripped. awesome.
alright, so I’ve thrown down some towers. looking good, but I don’t think it’s quite enough.
how about some power lines?
this looks pretty good!
ripped.
oh, cool! I like the look of it!
And now, a finishing touch…
rhythm plateau!
well, this looks like another successful cheap knockoff to me. I hope some of the techniques I used here helped you to be fucking awesome and do cool things!
Erm, I dunno how helpful this is but I found this nice website a while ago and it has helpful constellation symbols. The name and meanings are also just text, so control f works wonderfully if you’re looking for something specific.
I made a base for Meenahbound/Openbound walk sprites. I didn’t do the sitting frame though, I forgot. Used Hussie as a reference.
Here are some more alchemy symbols that can be used for fantrolls. You can see that there are some zodiac signs on the list, so it’s not completely new. It also comes with fun colors!
SBURB PLANET TUTORIAL
I said I was gonna do this months ago and totally forgot so uh.
let’s do this
OK so basically, the main trick to this is COOL COLORS and interesting textures.
this was one of the first planets I ever made, and while it’s not exactly one of my best products, it’s a somewhat ok example of the kind of thing you might want to do. by the time this tutorial is over, you will hopefully be able to do something WAY COOLER than this.
thankfully, my planets aren’t the only examples I can use here, because as it turns out some asshole named andy hussrew or something made a shitton of them and they’re REALLY GOOD.
the land of wind and shade is the first planet in homestuck that we ever see. in my opinion, it’s one of the best looking, and there are a lot of reasons for that. first of all, the bright blues and bluegreens contrast really well against the black sea and grey clouds. this isn’t a color theory tutorial though so I can’t really help you pick colors. just make it look good ok
second great thing about LOWAS is that the texture of the land below makes the hand-drawn gradient cloud layer actually look good. always, always, ALWAYS use textures or some random shit you’ve pulled of google images when doing this kind of thing. well, unless your planet is the land of flat and red, in which case you can just draw a huge goddamn red circle and be happy, nice job asshole.
third great thing about LOWAS is that it pops out! it obviously looks like a round sphere, which is helpful when you’re trying to make a planet that is a round sphere. this is actually a really easy effect to pull off, and you need almost 0 actual knowledge or shapes or perspective to do it.
let’s walk through how hussie probably did this.
STEP 1: GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH SOME COOL LOOKIN TEXTUREY SHIT
here I’m using some starry night sky picture because chicks dig that shit. yeah woo let’s go look at the stars all sentimental and stuff
the higher the resolution the better! this image is 1280x1024, which is fucking huge but kind of necessary, and you’ll see why in a second.
STEP 2: GET SOME IMAGE EDITING PROGRAM AND EDIT THE SHIT OUT OF THAT IMAGE UNTIL IT’S NO LONGER RECOGNIZABLE
the first thing I did was sharpen/brightness/contrast to reduce some of the depth and make it look more like a mysterious, dark land covered in shiny mushrooms and silly yellow salamanders.
also, GREYSCALE (unless you want to keep the colors of your image exactly the way they are)
now, duplicate the layer three or four times. assuming you know how change hue saturation, make each layer a different pretty color. if I were you, I would choose a few colors in a somewhat close range (here I’ll be using reds and purples).
WOW PRETTY!!!!
now, on all layers except the bottom one, you can take some blurry, low-opacity eraser and just go to town on those beautiful layers. mix em up so the image has a really pretty and awesome color range.
when you’re done, just merge the layers, and bam, you have a thing.
if you did it right, it should look kinda like this. wow cool!!! color filters are rad. and you gave the image an interesting color range without covering up the awesome starry texture of the image, which is what would happen if you just tried painting over it.
now, probably the hardest step. if you weren’t already using one, I’d suggest getting a tablet out now.
ADDITIONAL STUFF FOR THIS STEP: maybe you don’t want the land to be all one texture? maybe you want it crazy and rough looking like the planet I showed you at the beginning of this post? well, go find more textures, throw them down, play with color filters some more, and keep fucking with it until it looks nice. you may have to use a lot of layers.
STEP 3: DRAW SOME OCEANS AND RIVERS (skip this step if you ain’t got liquids on your planet)
the oil of LOWAS is easy to draw, because it’s all one color. This means he didn’t have to use any texture for the ocean, and it still looks good. if you want to do a solid color ocean, just skip this, but I think that I’m going to do something special and have an ocean of piss BEAUTIFUL GOLDEN WATER so I’m going the extra mile now.
I’m gonna google something like “water texture” and play with it a bit.
the image I chose is kind of huge. whoops.
first thing I did was scale the image down to fit my canvas, putting it on a layer below my terrain. then I did the standard brightness/contrast/greyscale stuff. I could do filters, but instead I’m just going to make this a solid color, because the terrain I made is crazy enough already.
bam. beautiful sea of piss. ok.
nooooooow you’re gonna take an eraser tool and erase parts of your water to make land formations. if you’re like me, you’re probably going to suck at this and instantly hate everything and want to give up.
“hey, even without the urine, this doesn’t look good at ALL!”
well, here’s something you can do. go find a map! if it’s a map of earth, somebody’s probably going to recognize it and call you out on it, so I would recommend randomly generating a map that suits your needs.
make sure the map projection is square, and the image height is enough to suit your needs. I’m using the full height of 2000, because it’s easier to scale down than up.
the map will take a while to generate. be patient.
this is the map I got! I tried to get as much mixing of land and water as possible.
I chose my favorite part of the map and fit it to the canvas. alright, cool!
after that, I used the magic wand tool with a medium tolerance and selected as much water as I could. then, I switched to the terrain layer, and deleted that from it.
suddenly, I have a strange world of piss and mystery!
if you want to add some rivers like the ones on LOWAS, or you just want to edit the geography a bit, get out your eraser tool and have fun! neato.
finally, you’re gonna want to posterize the image, because for some reason that’s a thing that hussie does and yeah ok sure whatever.
STEP 4: MAKE SOME CLOUDS (obviously, skip if you don’t want clouds)
make a new layer! now’s a good time to turn off anti-aliasing, since otherwise you’ll have some gross edges.
use a solid color and just make cloud-y shapes all over. this is kind of heartbreaking because a lot of your beautiful work gets covered up, but it’s also an opportunity to choose the best stuff to show off! if there was a bad balance between amounts of land and sea before, you can cover up more of one than the other to make things look better. as you’ll notice, I covered up most of the tragic piss ocean because it was huge and ugly, and piss must exist in moderation.
you can add more or less clouds than I did depending on what you need. if your planet is covered in a thick fog, try using a lighter shade and only showing little patches of land! if your planet is a mostly sunny place, you can just throw down cute little cloud blotches.
now, if you want the clouds to look even better, select them with the magic wand tool and replace them with a circular gradient of two similar colors, one light and one dark, to show off the fact that spheres are round and when light hits them, some areas are darker than others.
I was a dumbass and accidentally used a linear gradient which looks terrible. don’t do what I did, ok?
STEP 5: BULGE!!!!!
the moment you’ve all been waiting for!
if you haven’t already, change the dimensions of your image so that it’s actually a square.
NOW BULGE THAT SHIT UP.
to do this, I used the lens distortion filter in GIMP. you can use pretty much anything that makes something look like this.
as you can see, the middle area has barely changed size at all, but the outsides are tiny! super tiny! dang! and that’s why your image had to be ridiculously hi-res. spheres are fuckin crazy.
crop your bulge to make it a circle, and resize it so it’s somewhere between 500 and 600 pixels wide. hey, we’re almost there!
STEP 6: TOUCH UP
now, put your sphere thingy on a canvas of about 700x700, so you have some room to work with.
the first thing you want to do is MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ANTI-ALIASING OFF. then use an eraser to go around the edge of the sphere and give it that beautiful, pixely border everybody loves.
if you can use the paint bucket tool to fill in a solid color around your planet without any ugly border then you’ve done it right! congrats.
I used this opportunity to fix my awful gradient mistake from earlier, and retouch the edges to give it a little depth, since the clouds are obviously floating above the ground.
well, that looks pretty good, right? maybe we’re done touching up?
NOT YET
if you look at the hi res image, you’ll notice that the once crisp, clear, beautiful terrain is now ugly and blurry, and that just won’t do! this needs to be dealt with.
I used the magic wand tool to select everything but the clouds, then applied another heap of sharpen and posterize.
alright, good enough.
and now that’s done with.
STEP 7: ADD EXTRA DETAILS
draw some clouds! wow cool. clouds sure do look pretty great.
if you want, you can also add a house with a little light grey line on top.
and that’s pretty much it!
it’s all about textures, color fixtures, sharpness, and depth. combine any amount of these different elements to create what you need.
if you need any more help, just send me an ask and I’ll respond as soon as I can!
enjoy wasting hours of your life on making fake planets.
MORE THINGS TO NOTE:
LOWAS looks so much better than the land of piss and mystery because hussie is a better artist than I am. he did a better job with color choice, making the clouds dark enough to match up well with the land below. also, it’s more than likely that he didn’t use the bulge effect when making the clouds, and is just good at drawing that sort of thing. you can try that too! play around with colors, and methods. don’t limit yourself to the few simple tricks I’ve given you! become better at this than I am.
cool
