Playing EVE-Online the other night I took a closer look at some of the effects they are able to create within the game. Some of them are as powerful as they are simple. I would like to show you how to create the effect of a screen within you Ventuz project.

First you create the pixel map of RGB-pixels in Photoshop.

Click on the images to enlarge…

Ok, first open Photoshop

Create a document 512×512

Insert new Guides. Go to –>View –>New Guide… start with Vertical and type 256 px

This step is usually not necessary, if you have your snap settings set to –> View –>Snap checked on

and under –> View –> Snap To… –>Document Bounds checked on

But, I found that under some not reproducible circumstances it is not possible to snap to the middle

of a layer.  Here vertical…

Here horizontal…

Should look like this…

now create a new layer, choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the tool box

click in the center of the crossing guides and press the Shift-key (makes it a perfect circle,

is the command for proportional scale) and the Alt-key(scales it up from the center)

now try to get a size were the diameter of the circle is about a third of the canvas

now, if you have set your foreground color to black (if not do it first, and set your background color to white)

you just press the Alt-key and the Backspace key(will fill the selection with your foreground color)

and you should wind up with something close to this.

 

now just duplicate the layer and move each one of them to the top and bottom of your document,

if you have set your snap settings as mentioned above you should just have to press the V-key to get to

the Move Tool select the layer you want to move and while holding the Shift-key(will in this case snap the movement

to an only Y-movement, meaning straight up and down) just pull the layers to the positions you want and let them

snap to the top and the bottom.

now select with the bottom layer still selected click on the rulers to drag out a new guide,

in case you don’t see the rulers, go to –>View –>Rulers checked on

with the Move Tool and the snap settings set as mentioned above you should be able to

drag them to the left and right bounds of the circle, as well as the center

its important to notice that the snap function is only working on the selected layer

therefor you now select the upper layer and drag a new guide from the horizontal ruler

down to the center of the upper circle

 

now create a new layer

in the tool box where you already have choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool you now choose the

Rectangle Marquee Tool and drag from one of the corners of the rectangle that has been formed

by the guides to the opposite corner of that rectangle and hit Alt+Backspace

now shift select all the layers

And hit CTRL+E(will merge the layers)

now create another layer underneath the pill shape

Press “CTRL+A” (will select the whole canvas) and hit “CTRL+Backspace”

(will fill the layer with the background color)

now select them both and merge them again

proceed with creating another layer

with this new layer selected click on the third icon from the left on the very bottom of the

layer window( this will create a mask for the layer), now select the layer with the shape on it

and hit “CRTL+A”(select everything) again, now “CRTL+C”(copies the layers content to clipboard)

then with the Alt-key pressed click on the layer mask that has just been created and press “CTRL+V”

(will paste the clipboard content in the layer’s mask

now delete the layer with the shape on it

 

now set the foreground color to perfect red(255 for the R Value G and B to zero)

now select the layer “CTRL+A” and fill with the foreground color

you can see that everything that is white on the mask is showing and everything that is

black is not showing, by the way this is how a mask works

in the gray scale from 0 to 255 the value determines how opaque the pixels on the depending

layer is going to be shown

so: black(0;0;0) –>fully transparent

white(255;255;255)–>fully opaque

everything in between (51;51;51–155;155;155) –> behave accordingly

but, back to topic, our mask is showing the opposite of what it is supposed to

so hit the Alt-key and with it pressed select the mask

with the mask now selected press “CTRL+I”(will invert the selected content)

now duplicate the layer so you get three of them and fill the layers in RGB colors

shift select all the layers and press”CTRL+T” this will bring up this sort of bounding box with handles

if you now move over the edges you should see wether circular arrows, those are for rotating(as you might have assumed)

or straight arrows diagonal to the layer

if you click on those you can freely resize the layers content

by holding shift while you do that the operation will be performed proportionally

so scale everything down a little so it starts to look something like this

to find the middle of the sectors left end right of the center guides

you simply use the Rectangle Marquee Tool to draw a selection from

the top left corner to where the first vertical guide hits the bottom and grab

a guide from the ruler on the left side and with the snap settings set as mentioned

above, it should snap to the the middle of your selected area

time to repeat something you have down earlier…

since its called RGB you grab the the red layer press “V” for the Move Tool

hold down shift and move to the side until in snaps with its vertical center axis to

the left guide

repeat the same procedure for the blue layer and move it to the right guide

Now select the background layer and “CTRL+A” for everything and “CTRL+I”

to invert it to black

at this point its probably a good time to save what you have done so far

after saving you flatten the image

go to –>Layer and second from the bottom you’ll find –>Flatten Image

in case you have not installed them yet, save under a new version, close Photoshop

go to DDS utilities download and install

after opening your document and –> File –> Save as…

you should be able to save a .DDS-file

put the settings to this and save…

more on .DDS-files coming soon

Ok done,congratulations you have created the pixel map for the Screen in screen tutorial

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 14:13 by Maik Borchardt and is filed under Ventuz tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.