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sLeeT08 — Rings Tutorial
Published: 2008-07-19 19:44:03 +0000 UTC; Views: 2083; Favourites: 41; Downloads: 71
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Description
Here's a relatively simple tutorial on how to create realistic looking rings around a planet.Related content
Comments: 6
Simple, but effective.
I see that most tutorials about creating planetary rings use "cloud renders" then "swirl" effects.
That's okay, but this does not form complete rings.
With the gradient you get rings that are fully formed.
Nice work!
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Nice!
Usually when I want to try something new, I check out a few (sometimes even a dozen or two) tutorials on the subject, draw my own conclusion from them and start to experiment on my own without directly following any method.
This however is not only the most simple, elegant and effective approach I have seen regarding planetary rings, but is also almost perfect on its own. I must also mention, that this is the only one I have seen where the ring was actually correctly positioned in space (so the center of the ring is the center of the planet in imaginary 3D space).
If you allow me to give a little constructive critique:
1, Using a horizontal and vertical guide both positioned at 50% (Menu:View->New guide) will help you center elements. Enable Snap (View->Snap) and place your cursor before drawing circles close to the intersection of the guides, it will snap the start point to the center. Holding down Shift while drawing will force the circle to be proportional (1:1), and holding down Alt will make the starting point (which is snapped to the center now) to become the center of the circle instead of its corner.
Also, holding down these keys while resizing have the same effect so holding Alt will resize from the center, making your rings stay in place.
2, Instead of cutting out the part that is "behind" the planet, I would add a layer mask to make it invisible so if you decide to change the ring later, you won't have missing parts.
3, Don't forget that the planet should cast shadow on the rings and rings should also cast shadow on the planet! The latter however might be quite hard to achieve without 3D elements (some later versions of PS support 3D so you can make actual real 3D shadows). Also since in reality such rings consist of solid particles or small objects (dust, chunks of ice, etc.), they are not too transparent.
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This is an amazing tutorial! So simple yet it yields extremely powerful results. Thanks for sharing!
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This is soooo much easier than what I used to be doing (a whole ton of blending effects and stuff which didn't look that good). I can finally adjust my ring layer without putting everything else out of proportion! Yay! And it looks GOOD! Thanks so much for writing up this tutorial. It's been invaluable.
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This is a pretty amazing tutorial considering how few people know about it.
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