Alien planet tutorial

July 8, 2006

Now with the blog up and all I thought I’ll post a tutorial that I’ve been planning on for a couple of years.

First begin with making a nice background with the cloud-filter, the colors doesn’t really matter at this point, it’s just to get a nice structure.

Next we use the most overestimated tool among beginners (and the most underestimated tool among pros ;)), lens flare. Use it, use it like there were no tomorrow, and don’t stop until you throw up every time you hear the word lens flare. You could of course make a layer with a couple of lens flares and then copy it to save time but that come with the risk of the picture being to symmetrical (which is not good in this case).

Now that your hand is cramping, invert the whole picture. This operation makes the lens flares in the picture look like craters. Then apply some plastic wrap with high detail, low smoothness and quite low highlight strength so that the picture becomes more 3d.

Next increase the contrast and lower the intensity (this is of course optional).

Now apply plastic wrap once again, but this time with more detail, less smoothness and almost maximum highlight strength.

At this time you can make the picture monochrome so that you can choose new colors and blend them with the picture, or just continue editing the colored version.

Here are some variations of the final picture:

Share/Save

Filed under: Graphics | Comments (0)