The June2012 Tutorial Discussion - Planet-Building 101

[Barbara B]

In the June 2012 Xara Xone Tutorial, Planet-Building 101, Gary Bouton takes you on an interstellar excursion (within Xara, so environment suits aren’t necessary) as he guides you through the steps needed to illustrate an out-of-this-world planet. Rings and all!

So get your work clothes on, you've got planets to build. Show'em off here.

[angelize]

This was fun!

I used the new eraser tool to remove the parts of the rings that are behind the planet and I used it to distress the edges of the rings. The shape builder came in real handy for some gaseous clouds!

[stygg2003]

Nice looking planet Francis, not tried G.B's planet tut. yet but will do. Here's a drawing I made some time ago, not Saturn but planet with rings. This was made using Xara and Photo shop, as it was then

Stygg

[Gare]

@stygg—

Looks great. I'd suggest a little stronger shading to emphasize where the star illuminating the planet is.

@Frances—You improvised, and that's good. Two things I noticed, though, that you might want to re-think to improve the composition:

• The star pattern is quite obvious. So you don't use a pattern. I'm attaching a gift to the Xara community, two vector starfields, with almost 800 individual stars of different sizes and random placement. Now if you zoom way in, they're not round—I auto-traced a bitmap image of noise—but let's assume your finished composition is a bitmap, and you haven't zoomed in so closely the true shape of the stars is obvious. I didn't put any big planets or stars in the composition, but it's something you might want to do manually. The starfields come in two different sizes/spacing.



• I think the rings need more perspective. The back side around where the planet obscures the rings looks to be very close to the width in the front, over the planet.



There are a number of ways to do this, aside from the Mould tool, by the way.

And I like the idea you had, Frances, of just erasing the back of the stars. I couldn't bring myself to write this technique because it's version 8-specific, and specific to the Pro version. I'm trying to write to artists who own just about any version.

So folks, help me out and upgrade, okay?
(That was a real cheesy advertisement, and The Xara Group had nothing to do with it, honest!)

My Best,

Gary

[Antspants]

Thank you Gary.

All new to me so bit stop-start and head-banging the desk a few times.

Used different fill for the rings-white with transparency then ctrl-C and added feathering to the overlay.

Not brill, but a start!. Will play around with the technique.

[angelize]

Thanks for the star fields Gary. The eraser tool is I believe also in the new version(8) of Photo & Graphic Designer, the shapebuilder is only in Pro. However I understand the need to make the tutorials do able for those who haven't upgraded.

I also have a tip for using the colour template from the tutorial download. What I do with some of my templates is to create a folder for them elsewhere on my hard drive and add it to my designs gallery. To add your template after downloading and unzipping it I opened it in DPX and made sure that delete unused colours and styles when saving and loading is unchecked, then I opened the colour gallery and because I don't like a lot of clutter on my colourline I right clicked and unchecked show on colourline.

I saved the template to my extra templates folder with a new descriptive name (I think I called it Bouton's Colours) and updated the folder in the designs gallery. Now when I want to add those colours to something I'm working on I can just drag the document from the gallery on to my page and the colours will be available in the colour gallery and I can chose to show them on the colourline or work with them directly from the gallery.

[Gare]

@Antspants—

Nicely done for a first try. No pressure, mate; the tutorials aren't for scores or points or anything!

@Frances—

Okay, I stand corrected. The entry level version of Xara Designer does have the Eraser tool, but not the Shape Builder tool.

Unless I'm told otherwise, I try to keep some of the steps in monthly tutorials available for Photo & Graphic Designer MX 2013 (I think whoever named this got paid by the word), and previous versions of Xara. As a rule, I try to run the tutorials I write in version 4, and look/see if there's anything a user cannot perform.

This month, the only thing a version 4 user can't perform is the soliloquy from Act IV of Green Eggs and Hamlet, the epic tragedy by William Seuss.

My Best,

Gary

[steve.ledger]

Here's a planet I've built ready to add to any needy galaxy.
I used the Planet-Building 101 as inspiration but used my own techniques for drawing this in Designer (I'm hopeless at following tutorials )

[Gare]

It's good, Steve.

Try reducing the opacity of the rings. From great distances, with NASA telescopes and such, the debris revolving around celestial bodies appears to be partially transparent.

My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

Here is a rework of my saturn, thanks for the star fields Gary!