Blankaex's Gimp Tutorials

[AcrylicBlaze]

That's actually the first time I put so much stuff in there, but all being overwritten by each other. At least it was the first 'original'!

[blankaex]

Nice work, Blaze. I can't immediately tell which tutorial you followed, so I suppose it is "original", as original as sigs can get.

It looks great - that's 100% truthful - but you see, the thing about sigs...
Something I had trouble on a lot before, and even today, it's meant to look like the picture is part of the background. Most sigs I see now are a nice render plastered onto a nice background, which, true, can look good a lot of the time, but doesn't really flow. I can see you tried to blend your render some by colouring it a bit, but it doesn't look like the natural setting for Kirito to be on.

Example (bad):


It looks nice, but it doesn't really feel like it's correct.

Example (good):


Due to the render's pose and whatnot, it looks realistically made, like it's a cropped snapshot, when, in actuality, I made the whole background.

[AcrylicBlaze]

Ahhh I seee. UNDERSTOOD. Will put that in next time. Yeah, the colouring was a last resort at the end, the render looked too different from the background and didn't go well. Sweet Nagato sig, and borders with shadows :>

[FailFTW]

Now the next step is to draw your own characters :3

[blankaex]

Just rendered this and made a sig out of it. Couldn't help myself, Kanako is way too hot. I had to pause the game and save a screenshot. Feel free to use it.

[Wyatt]

That's good. That's a really good vector right there. What I may recommend to you though, is for saving vectors themselves with transparency on here, try adding a slight gausian blur as an outline, so it blends in to the color around it. Just makes it look less jagged is all. How long did this one take you? Cue Lex post about me criticizing

[blankaex]

Curves are really hard to get right, I always get them to be off by a couple of pixels. I always feather it before I use it though, so it looks fine. I prefer to share the original stock rather than a feathered-edged one because,
#1. It loses some of the image and, although it looks nicer, isn't as good when working with it, and
#2. Anyone can smoothen the edges themselves anyway.

I think it took me somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes to trace it with the paths tool, then go back and cut out between her hair and fingers.

[AcrylicBlaze]

Nice vector! But is it possible to remove the leaf/tree shadow on her leg, other than trying to smudge/blur/clone it up at best?

[blankaex]

Nice vector! But is it possible to remove the leaf/tree shadow on her leg, other than trying to smudge/blur/clone it up at best?

Well, no, since that's how you remove it. Or you could just crop out the leg. By the way, why did both of you say vector? I'm pretty sure vectoring is

Turning this:


Into this:

[Dae314]

OK first of all...

How on earth did you get such a nice vector out of a bitmapped image!?

Next is that I'm also not familiar with the way Wyatt and blaze are using the word vector ^^. I was thinking of vector graphics like you were blank. I dislike working with vector graphics because I really don't like inkscape as an editor :(. I want Adobe Illustrator T_T. At the moment if I'm making my own graphic I will usually do the base image in inkscape to make it scalable, then I'll save it as a png at the right size and edit in details with gimp. I believe that Ai would allow me to do that all from the vector editor :(.

While we're on the topic of renders I recently found a bunch of Pokemon related images which I'm in the process of slowly (very slowly...) rendering ^^. So far I've only done 2 of the 8 I want to render. No idea what I'll do with them when I'm done yet though.

Spoiler!

Spoiler!

For these images I've been combining several render techniques that I have to get a pretty nice render I think :). Here's the general process:

1) Do an extremely rough cut of the character with straight lines generated by the lasso tool.
2) Drop the cut out character into a new image with a transparent background.
3) Carefully (i.e. trying not to eat notches out of the character's outline) delete most of the background using the magic wand.
4) Add a layer mask (white full opacity), and proceed to do fine corrections by painting the layer mask black with the paint brush tool where there's incorrect color. Results usually in a pretty nice outline of the image.
4a) If your character's just plain missing outline in spots or there's color bleeding from the background fix it with the color picker/air brush or the clone tool.
5) Using either alpha-to-selection or by using the magic wand and selecting from the layer mask. If your selection doesn't match the character's outline that means you didn't erase the background well in those spots (happens a lot) so go back and correct it.

6) Add a new layer and stroke the selection on that layer with 1 pixel (you can feather the selection first but I usually like to just apply a Gaussian blur to the new layer)
7) Apply a Gaussian blur to the new layer with a pretty small value (usually 1-3)
8) Get your character's actual outline selected again, invert the selection so you're selecting everything but your character, shrink the selection a bit if necessary, feather by a small value, and delete any of the outline layer's markings that went outside of your character's outline because the blur usually thickens the line a bit too much.
9) If your character's outline is not black, colorize the outline layer to match your character's outline.

The first 5 steps are normal rendering stuff. I prefer to use the layer mask because I feel like it gives a much better edge than the eraser tool. Plus if you decide to undo something you did a while ago all you need to do is paint that part over in white (if you erased/deleted it you would need to undo all your work till that point).

However steps 6-9 represent a technique I thought up after a while of rendering using blank's method of feather and delete to make the character less aliased. To begin with, the layer mask method of erasing provides a good level of feathering as you go, but more importantly, I noticed that blank's method of smoothing tended to eat away at the character's outline. This is usually undesirable, but even if I rely on the layer mask technique's feathering I still inadvertently eat parts of the character's outline because I'm human :P. So I made this technique up which I'll just call outline correction that gives your character a slightly better feathered outline (doesn't need to be heavily feathered because of the layer mask) AND helps to correct any mistakes you made when rendering the character and make the outline look more natural.

The down side to this technique is that if your character has a really thin outline, the outline layer will bleed a bit of color into the parts of the image that are right up against the outline. Even if the character has a thick outline, this is a slight problem. I haven't thought of a way to fix this yet, but the images I've been rendering with this technique don't really suffer from this flaw (evidence above). I haven't played with the layer blending options for the outline layer yet either. Using a different blend may yield something more effective.