February 2013 Guest Tips and Tricks - Making Surreal Backgrounds with Xara Fractals

[Barbara B]

Making Surreal Backgrounds with Xara Fractals

Stephen (stygg2003 on TG) shows you this month that the sky isn’t the limit. Come see how to use Xara’s fractal fills and transparency in combination with other features to make a surreal sky. Need a background for an awesome foreground shape? Wipe your feet and come on into this month’s Tips and Tricks at Xara Xone. So show us your work! And be sure to thank Stygg2003 for a great tutorial.

[angelize]

A very nice tutorial Stygg, thanks for sharing it with us

[stygg2003]

A very nice tutorial Stygg, thanks for sharing it with us

Thanks very much Francis, learnt so much from Gary and you thought I'd put a little back for appreciation

Stygg

[TXAlba]

Cheers Stygg, not always got time to play but off sick today so thought i would try this tutorial out.
Nice tutorial and good fun, one small thing is to watch out for is the horizontal line when you flip the duplicated image, the duplicated image is offset about 1 pixel from original, i found the blend tool useful at this point.

I came up with this

Attachment 94572

[stygg2003]

Cheers tx, 1 pixel off hey, must get myself new specs. Love the image you've come up with.

Stygg

[TXAlba]

Cheers tx, 1 pixel off hey, must get myself new specs.

sorry Stygg, should have explained why that was important , not too long ago while using Photoshop to do similar reflections, i found the same 1 pixel line........at first i didnt even see it but on the printed 20" x 20" digital painting it was very obvious. I was left a little red faced. Just one to watch for.

[BeanPole]

tx200man:

I really like the fish jumping out of the water. Could you give a few pointers on how to make the water (& colors) and how to make the splash?

Also, I thought it would be kind of neat to make the ground/water look like sand of a desert. Anyone willing to attempt this variation?

Or even snow! I tried to make snow, but it was so different than my deer picture snow that I just went with the snow in the deer photo.

Or even grass!

[Gare]

Hey Beanpole—

An awful lot of your Wish List for textures can be accomplished by varying the options with fractals and also using fractal fills in combination with transparency, and layering partially opaque fractal filled shapes.

I don't know how tx200man accomplished the splash illustration, but when I need something that's this complex, I use an image. I rendered these corona-style splashes out of my modeling program. Feel free to experiment—that's why I'm posting 'em!



My Best,

Gary

[TXAlba]

just follow the tutorial and use the 'Colour Editor' to get the desired colour and as per the tutorial use the fill tool and move the handles till you get the angle you want for the ground cover (you can really move these handles well beyond the limits of the image your editing to get the right look) .............the splash is just an overlay/layer. Here are a couple of variations for you to see your desert (with snake layer added) and a fun snow scene........Again, Big thanks to Stygg for this tutorial, its been a lot of fun to use.