I've been painting for quite a while and found good techniques for most everything except painting a nebula. I tried, but it took me two hours and looked like total junk afterwards. The tutorials I found really weren't helpful. Are there any good techniques to do this?
Reference pictures are your best friend, look at them, look at how the different colours mash with eachother and how it's shaped. Don't outright copy it, but don't be afraid to at least mimic some parts of the reference picture you use.
I tried that, it turned out like this:
[img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1467131/Awful.jpg[/img]
:saddowns:
Add more stars! :)
Nebulas are photographed with super long exposure times,
so there's always a shitload of background "noise".
[QUOTE=Spetzaz;27791860]I tried that, it turned out like this:
[img_thumb][URL]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1467131/Awful.jpg[/URL][/img_thumb]
:saddowns:[/QUOTE]
Oh cool it's the lifestream.
Ok, I'm getting the hang of it - it's still fucking ugly, and there's a pointless lightsource I merged for some reason, but - eh.
[img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1467131/Better.jpg[/img]
Stars, you need more of them, because it just looks strange with only one or two stars. Also nebulae(?) dont usually come on they're own, there's usually some background gas
Also nebulae come as 3D objects, so you need some depth
I used soft edged-low opacity brush with large size.
I am assuming you are using photoshop? What you can do is render one layer (or two, or three, it depends on the colors you want the nebula to be) of difference clouds. The colors are based on whatever you have for your foreground and background colors. I suggest going with black and white since you can choose the color later with Hue and Saturation. Now what you want to do is mash the living fuck out of Ctrl + F until you get a cool looking blob. Then, you set that bitch to screen and pick whatever color(s) you want. Once you got your colors and everything squared away, whats left to do is erase (with a soft and big brush) whatever part of the nebula you don't want.
If you do everything correctly you should get something similar to this:
[img]http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7729/finishedx.png[/img]
If this is a different "Nebula" then what you asked then my bad. Otherwise I'm sure you will find this information useful in the future.
Ok so what took me 5 minutes in photoshop took me 45 minutes to upload. (Comcast is going to get murdered).
the problem with difference clouds is that unless you do something drastic to them, they're EXTREMELY obvious
[QUOTE=lexus04;27801471]the problem with difference clouds is that unless you do something drastic to them, they're EXTREMELY obvious[/QUOTE]
I think that has something to do with them being extremely overly used.
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