Some of you may have already seen this picture in ofnuts' thread about his intermediate-path script.


I decided the perspective didn't convey the massiveness I was after, so I fixed it. I added a bit of color mostly to get an idea which way to go. The background is tolerable, but still needs work. The foreground is barely begun. But you can get an idea of where I am going with this. Much work yet to do. Much fun being had.


In case you're wondering, I did the perspective exactly the same way as you would do on paper. Only instead of a ruler I used the path tool to create my guide lines.


Things I still need to fix? Everything;
I screwed up and made all the letters one single block. So shading and coloring them individually is impossible-ish. I have to delete all the extrusion and redo each letter individually. That way each letter can be on it's own layer so I can work between them and tweak each one separately. Obviously the lettering needs color, texture, and lighting to make it fit into the picture.
I'm not entirely happy with the background. The stars are too big and clustered for my liking. The nebula looks respectable enough. But it seems a bit monochrome to me.
The foreground is barely begun. The plan is to make it sort of a rocky, asteroid-like surface. I hope to get adventurous and add people marveling at the site before them. We'll see just how far I get with that.

Anyhow, if you see something I could improve or have some idea how I can proceed more easily, please chime in.

Thanks, Wallace. I'm fairly proud of it so far. At a bit of a loss as to what to do next. But I'll sort it out.

I definitely plan to add stuff. I'm just trying to get the basic structure squared away before I worry too much about details. And I honestly don't know what details I want to add yet.

Alrighty then.

I changed the background. I added some basic shading between the letters. And I gave the land some texture. I'm not entirely sure I'm thrilled with the land. My rock kung-fu seems to be failing me. But I'm happy with the way it's progressing.

I still need to work on the letters to make them less cartoony. And they need to fit into the environment better as well.



There might be a useful tip in this most recent version;
The contour of the horizon line, which is critical to making it seem more realistic vs the original smooth curve, was created by simply running a displacement map on the layer mask of the land layer.

Brilliant work Sasquatch, I'm new to GIMP and I really appreciate the way you also explain how you achieved your outcome - in Peace RJKD

I'm flattered by your praise, RJKD. I'm fairly new myself. And I'm certainly not one of the more capable members of this forum. So what you don't see here is the hours of tinkering behind these modest pictures. I spend most of my time playing with different techniques to see what happens. Occasionally it leads to something useful.

As for the sharing of tricks... well, I'd like to think that's what this forum is about. I consider sharing what little I know to be sort of the price of admission.

I like your text. I still haven't mastered how to do it that way.

Set up the guide paths like I showed in the one post above. Then use the perspective tool to deform the text layer until it fits into the guide paths. Or, use those guide paths to create a new rectangular path and use Saulgoode's "warp text" script to shape the text into that perspective path. That gives you the face. Do the same process to create the rear of the letters. Then ofnuts' "create intermediate layers" and "stroke visible paths" scripts can fill the gap between the two like magic.

Here you go, Sallyanne. The attached xcf has the easy part done. All you have to do is create the paths and fill in the gap. If nothing else, that should at least give you an idea of how I did it.

And here's the final piece. I forgot to turn on one of the layers while I was checking things out. The resulting translucent effect was so perfect that I decided to pursue that direction instead. I'm very happy with the final result. I also decided not to clutter the image with extra bits. I still think the land could be better. But I'll worry about that some other time.

Beautiful. The only thing that might be improved are the stars that shine through the lettering...IMO, they should be less bright so they look more like they are behind the translucent letters.

Thanks. That's a pretty good suggestion about dimming the stars. I'll work on that this weekend. The more I look at it, the more I dislike the terrain. I really need to find a way to create better rocky terrain without using stock photos.

Hi Sasquatch, what font did you use for this creation?

I'll look for it. I don't have access to that computer at the moment. I'll get back to you ASAP.

Yup, that's it.