| Archive for Rebels A Star Wars Roleplaying Community |
| Lord Invictus |
Mortalis' (NOW INVICTUS) art (accepting requests)
Samples of my new, better artwork include: 
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| Lord Embeion |
smudge much? | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
It was my first image! I meant for it to smudge in order to make the fire I drew realistic. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
The Fire does look good, but the bike is..missing pieces 
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| Lord Invictus |
The fire is supposed to overlap the bike to add a little bit of a terrifying dramatic effect of Mortalis being alive while engulfed in flame. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
should use a wind effect | ||||
| Rive Caedo |
Certain parts of it look wrong (the front of the bike, for instance), but I do really like how the flames as a whole and the flames "engulfing" the lance look. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Star Wars Episode -7
After the fall of Coruscant to the evil Sith Lord, Darth Mulikan, the fearless Jedi Grandmaster, Master Qui-Obi-La, leads an army of two clones, Halosev and Codixer, against the massive armies of the evil Sith.... (coming soon....) 
Darth Maul has a fun time discussing fear. 
Sig for anyone to use: 
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| Dork of Mordork |
Looks ntb, but practice makes perfect. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Problem is, I dunno how to blend an added image into the background. I am still watching that "how to use GIMP" thing and I don't have the feathering tool. I wish I could do what Embeion does with with Banhammer thing. I just don't know how to give an image the same background as the original background. |
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| Lord Embeion |
the feathering tool on GIMP is the lil lasso. | ||||
| Adenn |
Just trace around with the lasso tool on your image, then just got to select>feathering>20%.
Copy it, and place it in your sig. Easy as that. 
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| Lord Invictus |
Quick question. Some of the tools on youtube cannot be used on my own computer and the guides are confusing. Do any of you know how I can convert something like a sword or stick into a lightsaber? | ||||
| Adenn |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa0ELCEosGI | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
Youtube tools?!? |
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| Lord Invictus |
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| Ga'nen |
Be weary of quality young artist, bad quality will ruin an image by making it pixelated and blurry. | ||||
| Io Lee |
I use the fuzzy select tool or wand (It's next to the lasso) to cut out images but it works well when you have a plain background. But if you have different images in the picture then it wont work very well. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Okay, it works. Three questions. First, how do you make lightsabers? Second, I know this sounds stupid but when the screen selects something a yellow or white dotted box appears around it and I cannot work outside of it. How do you deselect that particular image and return to the main image? And finally, this also sounds equally stupid, how do you choose how the images overlap one another? | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
..go to dialogs and open the layers window. Should help with some stuff..
and some things are best learned on there own. |
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| Io Lee |
Go to youtube because explaining how to make a lightsaber is long and difficult. |
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| Adenn |
...
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| Lord Invictus |
Just testing lightsabers.... |
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| Lord Embeion |
Use better quality pictures, don't scale them more then 200 overall size. After that it starts to stretch the picture a lil' much | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Alright. Embieon, I'm sorry I have to tell you this. I'm spoofing your artwork: 
And revised Sora:
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| Lord Embeion |
Nah, that aint spoofing.
That qoute is the big line on the movie trailer. |
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| Lord Invictus |
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| Xander Vos |
That 300 one looks really odd... | ||||
| Rive Caedo |
You're improving, but your problem still seems to be that you're using too low quality images to work with. So the overall image ends up looking grainy.
See how much sharper that is compared to your blurred/grainy version? |
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| Ga'nen |
He might be saving it at a very low quality or he's transforming the image instead of just image resizing. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
I try to resize it but when I save and load the new thing on photoshop it ends up the same. Resizing it makes it look actually nice. It just won't appear here. Anyway, I'm now accepting some less detailed requests so um.... come bring your images here! | ||||
| Adenn |
*photobucket
Instead of putting in .jpg, try putting in something like .PNG |
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| Lord Invictus |
I almost always do. Well, I'm making a relatively good and small one now. Spoofin' Harry. | ||||
| Ga'nen |
.png saves nice quality but too large. Go for .jpg but don't go to save as go to "save for web" which will compress the jpg without trying to lose too much quality. Set the thing to about 60 or seventy and you're good. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
.png ftw | ||||
| Ga'nen |
.png is for newbs who can't properly save a .jpg. 
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| Tom |
and JPG, is for the ones who want to live with dimmed down quality of there art, and thus artists should never show art if there art is not of top quality. PNG FOR FORMAT WAR  lol
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| Rive Caedo |
Vwhaaaaat? PNG is far superior to JPG! For one thing, PNG supports transparency, for another thing, PNG is a lossless format. Each time you save a JPG (IE: Each time you need to make a change when you edit it) it becomes more and more grainy - a PNG does not. Also, for high quality images (which art usually should be) a PNG is like... 8 times smaller than a JPG in order to preserve sharpness.
Transparency! Rawr! 
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| Ga'nen |
And all this goes back to the fact that if you save a jpg correctly you won't have to worry about loss of quality and such. .png is for people who want a safe bet, and plus have you read about the problems that spawned originally from when .png came out and how its transparency was not viewed right?
Also I've never actually been told to save my art as .png by any graphic design teacher, they have always stressed using .jpg and saving it correctly. .png is just a suckers way out of knowing Photoshop correctly.
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| Lord Embeion |
lol ITS A FILE TYPE! Stop acting like its the program.
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| Ga'nen |
But how you save it is also important, but anyway, this is not the point of this thread--sorry mortalis. | ||||
| Adenn |
Transparency? What's transparent? All I see is this.
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| Tom |
Get firefox or Internet Explorer 7.0
Because in 6.0 (the one u have) transparency stuff dosnt work, so its a bit of a pain tbh. |
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| Xander Vos |
His computer might not support IE 7 though. I know my old one didn't. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
Firefox ftw | ||||
| Rive Caedo |
Also I've never actually been told to save my art as .png by any graphic design teacher, they have always stressed using .jpg and saving it correctly. .png is just a suckers way out of knowing Photoshop correctly.
Again, I'd say you're confused. PNG and JPG are both encoding formats. PNG is more efficient, especially at high level of detail. It also is a lossless format, so it doesn't lose quality after each time you edit it and save again. JPG is older so it's fully supported by pretty much everything, PNG is not fully supported due to being newer - as we just saw a moment ago, Internet Explorer 6 has trouble with transparent PNGs. That's the real reason most graphic design teachers would stress JPG - because fully standardized. PNG is better, JPG is more global. There is no way to "properly save" a JPG that makes it keep the same level of quality as a PNG for the same file size and there is also no way to make a JPG a lossless format. However, you can be pretty much sure that your JPG is going to show up the same on everyone's computers - everywhere. You don't have that same level of assurance with a PNG. |
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| Ga'nen |
Why would you be re-saving a png? Any person who makes art that's going to be saved again would have a .psd file so that they could make necessary edits. if you mean people stealing art off the internet, well that's entirely different and not all artists are taking into consideration that people are going to take their images. So does it matter if it's lossless? If it's saved only once then it's not losing very much anyway. If you can't remember to save a .psd then perhaps you should have a large image .png that is larger than jpgs.
To sum it all up, jpgs are common and with a bit of anti-aliasing and good compression techniques you can have a good saved image that can compare to a png copy and still be a smaller size. |
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| Lord Embeion |
blahblahgarblegarble... | ||||
| Rive Caedo |
The lossless format is a failsafe. For instance, there was a webcomic a couple of years back - I forget which one, Real Life Comics I think - it had been a simple quickie "for fun" project when the artist started it. Now, it's one of his primary revenue streams. He wanted to color in the old comics so they'd match up with the newer ones. But, because he didn't expect the comic to become popular, the Photoshop/Illustrator files were long gone. Because they were saved as jpgs, they had image artifacts that made the comics impossible to color without major cleanup work. |
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| Ga'nen |
Well, in those cases that's just unavoidable and perhaps it would have been a good time to save it as .png but that doesn't mean that case is going to be the case for everything and everyone. The internet runs a lot smoother on well saved jpgs because the file sizes are a lot smaller than png which has been proven to load incorrectly in older browsers (which not all have upgraded too because they can't or don't like them) and also for people who have slow internets (dial up users, college students) it is a pain. | ||||
| Rive Caedo |
PNG files are NOT large. It seems Real Life probably was the comic I was thinking of, since their format is now PNG.
fairly large image, use of color, text, clocks in at 89kb. "Works on older browsers" is a silly answer, if we used that answer for everything we'd still be running on a purely text-based internet on Commodore 64's. Technology needs to move forward with better encoding methods. 
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| Adenn |
Why don't you guys make a new thread for this instead of debating in his art thread. 
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| Lord Embeion |
blahblahgarblegarble |
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| Lord Invictus |
It's not the best but I improved a tad. By the way, what the heck do you mean, "blahblahgarblegarble"? You mean blahgagarbenharble?
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| Xander Vos |
Really, use better quality images... | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
Use the feathering tool man
When you go to the lasso tool, there should be 'Antialiasing', 'Feather edges'. Make sure both are checked. Then theres the Radius meter, which effects how heavy and light the feathering is. Feather'd image 
Non-feather'd 
and if your still saving as JPG, I highly recommend you use PNG. Atleast until you learn how to properly use JPG and you see in some area's its better to not feather, but mainly you should feather if you want it to blend more. I didn't take my time there cause I was using it as an example, but you can get the feathering to come out alot better. |
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| Lord Invictus |
or, http://i224.photobucket.com/album...89/KirLandana/coruscantkronos.png It's an avatar or those who want one like this. And two rank images: 
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| Adenn |
If you don't want to deal with images you have to cut, go to planetrenders.net.
Most of their cuts are clean, but you have to be a member to get the full sized render and the render with a transparent background. The membership is free, so it shouldn't be a problem. |
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| Lord Embeion |
lol, nub |
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| Ga'nen |
Feathering works only good in some instances, I like a nice clean blended image which you can use masking for or if you're really savvy you can use the pen tool. | ||||
| Io Lee |
And for rank images there not bad but you don't always have to have the black part with the name like this: 
or add a glow to the name 
But you do what you want, that just me. |
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| Lord Invictus |
Two problems. First, I don't know how to make a font glow. Second, when I try to download a new font it tells me I need to buy somerthing like Winzip or Zipwind or somethin'. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
use 7-zip
free download |
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| Lord Invictus |
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| Adenn |
Making a font glow is just like making a lightsaber. Jsut duplicate your font and start gaussian blurring.... |
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| Lord Invictus |
Okay, thanks. By the way, does 7-zip slow the computer down a lot or just a tad? | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
Doesn't really affect my computer at all. | ||||
| Io Lee |
That pretty good |
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| Lord Invictus |
And evil Dark Lord of the frog known only as Darth Annoyancepest must be stopped at all costs
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| Jedi Erich |
well that is funny |
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| Lord Invictus |
What happens when I run out of pictures to make into good avis and sigs:
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| Tom |
You make them better and improve on your skills, by expanding your knowledge on avatar making. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Okay, it's a bit pointless, but I think it's cool. I just made a sig. It'a for Sith players on this site. Anyone can have it:
This is the complete opposite of the Dark Lords sig. This is a hero (Jedi) character sig: 
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| Xander Vos |
The Jedi one looks better, but they're both pretty dodgy with blending. I had the same troubles when I tried making sigs. Don't worry, you'll get there. 
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| Rive Caedo |
You are improving. The thing I'd say you need to focus on right now is text. On most of your images it's difficult - or impossible to read.
For instance, the text in that "Dark Lords" image you just made is VERY difficult to read - it's red text on a red/orange background. Not a good choice. So I'd say you should start messing around with text options. Font types, colors, outlines, etc. Text isn't any good unless you can read it. And - you may already know this, but ALWAYS add your text AFTER you finish with everything else - such as resizing the image. Resized text ends up looking blurry usually. |
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| Lord Invictus |
Xander Vos wrote:
I do think the Jedi one was more of an improvement and looked overall better, but it wasn't as fun to make The Dark Lords one ended up not having enough paint for fire from the eye of Sauron so I needed to make my own fire for most of it. I also (now I realize it was a HUGE MISTAKE ) blurred the sides of Darth Vader's helmet and the left side of Sauron to make it look a little blurry inside the flame.
Rive Caedo wrote:
I understand that unless you know what it's saying it's hard to read but red was the only good color I could use there. Of course, I could gausian blur it to death and make it brighter .
Anyway, thanks for your quick responses on my art and for your advice. 
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| Xander Vos |
That text moves too fast, I couldn't read it in time. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
I like how you blur it once the text changes. | ||||
| Xander Vos |
Yeah, the rest of it's really good, just maybe slow down the text.
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| Adenn |
Text has to be better. Render is extreme low quality. Other than that it get's a 7.8/10.0 from me.
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| Io Lee |
use these sites www.1001fonts.com and www.dafont.com to get better fonts and one I like out of the original set of fonts is Poor Richard | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Embeion wrote:
when I downloaded it and opened the file my computer says it needs to find the program that produced it or comething. Apparantly, I can't download new fonts. 
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| Lord Embeion |
When I first got my laptop I had a bunch of problems were they wouldn't download right or something, I forget how I fixed it, I think I reinstalled all the programs that were involved | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
I, personally, can live with the automatic fonts. | ||||
| Lord Embeion |
Well see
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| Lord Invictus |
OH YEAH! I CAN MAKE SITH LIGHTNING! |
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| Io Lee |
lol thats pretty good. | ||||
| Adenn |
More like blue blobs with a white core.
Nice attempt though, funny. |
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| Lord Invictus |
Well, it kinda' looks like a combo of lightning with blue magical fire from Eragon Anyone got any images for me to practice on? Can you give me a job to do?
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| Io Lee |
Ok give me a Obi-Wan sig since I haven't seen one from you yet. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Okay, I'll have it done soon. | ||||
| Lord Invictus |
Sorry for the double post but I just wanted Io to know, here's your sig:
I couldn't find many good images soooo I took clone wars obi and normal obi and put in a lightsaber. I know the font isn't good but there aren't many good fonts when you first download gimp. Anyway, hope you like it! |
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| Xander Vos |
See there you go, you're geting really good now. | ||||
| Rive Caedo |
Much improved. Left Obi-Wan is sharp and the text is crisp.
You still need to focus on getting text to stand out and learn that if an image isn't large enough to work with - it's not worth working with at all (IE: The Obi-Wan on the right). Incredible progress. |
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| Io Lee |
I'd recommend using 425x125 for sig size Example: 
Also very good, you have improved. |
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| Lord Invictus |
Thankyou for your quick comments. I did notice that the clone wars cartoon Obi Wan was a little small and ended up being blurry (as well as looking unrealistic and looking like he was made of dots of color).
Rive, how do I get the text to stand out? Whenever I post text (which creates a new layer because the text is a layer in itself) and then guasian blur as suggested it just smears into the background. Even with a gausian blur of three or four it smears. Edit: I'm selling artwork on the combine for credits (I am not greedy! Most people on that site do sell their work) sooooo because I'm new to art and people in factions have hired people to do all artwork for them *breathes in* I'm trying to impress people with art so that they start buying it by putting free sigs and avis in my thread. Here's one:
((They only let you do jpg's on that site)) Edit AGAIN! (just to beat a dead horse) Here's my avatar on the site that I made (well, I took an online image and added bullets, a blaster pistol, blast marks in the wall and in my character's chest, and dirt on my character) 
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| Adenn |
That's awesome man, keep up the good work. ^On the Obi-Wan signature, try to use a size of what most signatures are, as Io suggested. Although I only use 350x120 usually, it's good to start with 425x125 |
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| Rive Caedo |
Whoa, whoa. Don't blur your text. I don't know who suggested that. The only time you should be blurring your text is if you duplicate the text's layer, then blur ONE of the two copies. That gives you a nice "glow" around your text. Io's previous signature is a nice example of text with a glow behind it.
It's also a nice example of the primary method of getting text to stand out. Placing it over a single background color that it contrasts with (white text on a green background, in this case). Most of your images thus far have the text going over the top of your images - which makes it harder to read. EDIT: Io's new version of his signature is also a good example, except in this case it's green text on white. 
However, if you DO need to have your text overlap an image, Xander's signature is a good example of one of the best ways to do that - put a border around the text to separate it visually. 
There's a basic tutorial on how to do this in GIMP, here. http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic.php?t=8901&start=1 You could also combine these two techniques. Create a glow via blur behind your text then change the color of that glow. Then you've created a glowing border. Hope that helps! |
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| Io Lee |
Or sometimes when you had a blur to make it glow make sure the glow just doesn't stop at some certain point like this
As you can see it just cuts off. If you run into something like that merge the layer down the kinda smug it. |
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| Lord Embeion |
when your gonna blur or put a light effect on a image it effects the rest of the layer. On GIMP if you right click the layer you should see a "Layer to Image" command, that will prevent it from looking like the Republic Commando cut off there. | ||||