![[Comic 173] Lousy Shots](http://www.thefarreaches.com/comics/2008-04-04-0173_lousyshots.jpg "[Comic 173] Lousy Shots")
Apr 04
This was fun. I love doing special effects and making things blow up. Sometimes I’ll have to share my tips for easy and realistic explosions. It mainly involves a seamless explosion texture I made, a pattern adjustment layer in photoshop, which allows me to adjust the scale of the explosion, and a layer mask. The whole mask is filled with black so that the explosion texture is invisible, and then I use a custom cloud or smoke brush with a white color to paint into the mask and make the shape of the explosion appear. It may not make sense unless you’re familiar with Photoshop. Also, I was originally going to 3d model and render the dashboard, but then it occurred to me that it would compete too much with what’s going on outside the car. So I simply used the pen tool and a black shape layer to make the cockpit silhouette and then added controls in my usual manner. Then I used a contour layer style to make the highlights on it. It took less than ten minutes, and I think looks pretty good.
That is a clever way of doing explosions really. It is effective too. How do you make the smoke trails, if you don’t mind my asking?
Artistic value aside, I really liked this strip. Quite the punchline. Well done sir.
Thanks, I’m glad you like it. The smoke trails are pretty simple. I have a number of custom brushes in Photoshop that will paint them. Basically, I took a smoke cloud from a 3d program and used levels to make it extreme contrast, and made it black and white. Then captured it as a brush. I’ve also painted a cloud with the airbrush and on another layer use difference clouds set to overlay or screen or whatever looks best to give the painted cloud more detail. I captured that as a brush too, although even a simple blotchy cloud will make a good brush. Then in the brush’s settings I played with foreground/background color jitter and scattering until I get a good effects.
Photoshop’s brushes are very powerful. I started with a base color of the smoke trails, then a shadow color, and then painted the colored FX on a separate screen layer. Hope that makes sense. Eventually I’ll try to do tutorials and stuff when I have more time.
Well, your smoke effects always work well. You seem to choose correctly which style to do in each frame. Not to say you don’t pour as much effort into every part of your comics… which according to your blogs you really do. Anyway, probably enough of that… I just figured while I was actually leaving a comment I should mention that I appreciate reading your strips and I appreciate the work you go through.
I’ll have to play around with some of those methods and see what I come up with. Thanks for the info.
Thanks again. It’s always nice when someone appreciates the comic. And I’m glad to help out. I hope those methods work out for you.
I’ve always had trouble making realistic blur lines. I’m stuck with Macromedia Fireworks as my tool of creating comics, and the smudge tool in it is fairly hard to utelize effectively considering its freehand.
Yeah I think the early version of Fireworks was kind of limited. Actually, I have CS3 version and I have a hard time using it. And there’s no books on it either, that I’ve noticed.
The way I did my blur effect was to duplicate the space ship’s layer and then motion blur it in the right direction. Then I move it slightly to the back of the ship. Then I use a layer mask to “paint out” and make invisible or more transparent the parts of the blur that cover the front of the ship. That way the blur is only coming off the rear of the ship. The same technique can be used when blurring backgrounds (although if you don’t have layer masks you can simply erase the parts of the blur layer you don’t want.)
Have you tried the Gimp (www.gimp.org) for doing stuff. Someone else mentioned it since it’s free. I haven’t used it yet, but it might be easier for some things than Fireworks. I don’t know. There’s a Windows version. Also, if you ever save up for a tablet, the Wacom Bamboo Fun is $99 and comes with Photoshop Elements and Painter Essentials. I have them at home though I need to put them on my computer and see how good they are. I’m also going to look more into the Gimp and see how useful it might be for all you artists on a budget.
BTW, and this goes for all you artists on a budget. If you’re in college and are taking a couple graphics or design classes, check out the educational versions of Photoshop and other software. You should be able to pick up the full version of Photoshop for a little over $100 and that’s a bargain. That’s how I got most of my software that I have. I don’t think I’ve paid full price for any of it. The educational version is fully functional and upgradable too. So, that’s just a thought too if you’re in school.
I know that a lot of you are pretty broke though, but that Wacom Bamboo Fun I think is worth saving up for. Even a small tablet makes all the difference.