We are going to recreate space ships similar to my fantasy h2h entry up up up.We will create a couple of black ships with glowing ports on a planet background.
using a rifle pic from sxc.hu by PHSV.First we select the rifle and cut it up into a few chunks using whatever method you desire.
[Edited by Moderator on 6/18/2010 3:34:27 PM]
I chose a complicated bit in the middle and duplicated it and flipped one upsidedown using the top menu(edit-transform-flip vertical)then just overlayed the two layers.I merged just that 2 piece part and duplicated it( select the layer, and press ALT while dragging). I then shrunk the second copy to about half the size and placed it below (select the image then drag the corner of the control handles while pressing shift to maintain the proportions.Then I just overlapped the two parts with the smaller one on the top layer.
I used the two copies of the gun barrel to make the back motors with the back copy set up and left of the nearer copy.I then just erased any bits that stuck out beyond the bottom of the beginning of our ship.I squashed one of the chunks from the barrel of the gun to make a small cylinder just by dragging the control handles and not maintaining the proportions, and added it to the tail fin of the ship on the top left. I also cut out a part of the trigger mechainsm to make a fin to go on the the bottom of the ship.which left us with the back end of he ship
The remaining chunk from the trigger mechanism I put on the top layer and stuck on the front of the ship, along with 2 more copies of the shrunken gun barrel which were offset a bit for the illusion of depth, with one on top and the other on a lower layer.Then I copied a couple more pieces of the gun barrel and offset them a bit as before and placed them onto the front of the ship (one on a top layer one behind on a lower layer partly obscured by the front of the ship). I then erased a bit on the ends of each barrel because they were too long.
So as you can see, making a ship is mostly just about fiddling with a few parts and sticking things here and there until you get a design you like. At this point I decided that I didn't like the height of the ship at the back so I grabbed the chunk on top and slid it lower to make the ship smaller at the back.So now we had the basic ship design and I merged al the parts together and tweaked the edges a bit.
I evaluated the design and noticed that I forgot a little fin on the bottom that I should have added at the back, at the very bottom. Now is a great time to add little parts and other little tweaks.It isn't really important, but it can help if you do everything correctly.I also didn't like how skinny the ship was, so i duplicated the entire thing and cut off the front.I then stuck the duplicate layer in behind the ship to bulk it up.
So i had a nice merged design and now the tricky part was ready to be done. I duplicated the ship and set the second copy directly on top. I had to select all the little windows that I wanted to glow on top of the merged ship. For this example I just used the polygon select tool and selected a whole lot of things while holding the shift key. This process is annoying and inefficient. If it were for a contest, I would go back to my sources and select the windows of ONE part of the gun barrel since they are all technically the same source and REBUILT the entire ship keeping all the layers intact in little folders and then dragged all the windows onto a top layer. But you will get the point doing it the easy but tedious way here. I selected all the windows and erased the rest of the top layer. I then labelled this layer "windows" and in the layer pallet set the layer to SCREEN at 100% opacity.
So I had a layer of windows set to SCREEN.I duplicated that layer and turned it turquoise using the top menu bar (image-adjustments-variations) and then hit a selection of buttons like cyan, green, and blue, until i got the nice turquoise I wanted.I then right clicked on the windows layer to change the "blending options" for the top window layer.I clicked on "INNER SHADOW" and "BEVEL & EMBOSS" and just used the defaults.which gave us a nice glowing ship.