[Guide] Beginners Tutorial To Creating A Simple Orb [Guide]

SH4D3S · Sep 13, 2008

Beginners Tutorial To Creating A Simple Orb
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Introduction - Hello, this is my ninth guide so far in the User Education. Today, I will be showing you how to create a very plain and simple orb. It's not going to be overly complicated since the title does say it's aimed for beginners. It'll be explained in ten steps which are hopefully going to be easy to follow.

I will be creating the orb using a program called "Inkscape". You can download the program by clicking here. Or, you can just use any other program depending on if it has vendor tools or not, you'll need them. Anyway, I'll move on to the actual guide now. I really hope that you like it and it will help you in some way.
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Step One - I don't you you'll need much of an explanation to this part of the process. Take the circle or ellipse tool and simply draw a circle. Once that's done, you can pick your colours. Take the fill tool, select a colour, then fill the part (either the outline or inside). I suggest using a darker colour for the outline and very light for inside.

Step Two - Okay, I'll go into more detail with this part. Now, you must first create a copy of this circle and choose either a transparrent outline or no outline at all, your choice. Choose a color which is in the mid type of range in terms of the luminosity. Don't forget to give either a circular or radial gradient to it.

Now, your going to need to pick some colours for the new object you've just done. Do not do it exactly the same as your first colour, maybe just a little darker. Here, I've used the "Deep Green" colour for my new object when I used the "Yellow-Green" for my orb. So do something you think will look good when mixed with your orb.

Don't get frustrated about which colours to use. After a few goes at this you'll get the hang of it and know what looks good and what doesn't. I also tryed other combinations by cyan and deep blue. Then I tryed yellow and orange but came to a decision that this colour was the best and fitted very well with the orb.

Step Three - This corresponds to the part above. I mentioned that the little object you created above would end up being mixed with your orb. So here, this was the outcome when I placed what I had done into my orb. Pretty sweet, huh? It's extremelly easy to do, just grab the little object and place it directly into the center of your orb.

Step Four - Now, were going to have to get another copy of the original circle, this time were going to switch of the outline and give it a gradient of dark colour to transparrent. Start with the gradient of dark then from the bottom to the top, make it get more transparrent. The colour must be the same as the one you've used as the your orb outline.

Step Five - Again, like we did at step three, were going to place the object we did in step four in the orb. Once again, we'll be placing it directly in the middle of the orb. This will make it look much darker at the bottom of the orb and still fairly pale in the center. Most people seem to like that affect, hence why I did it.

Step Six - For the third time, were going to get another copy of the circle. For this step, were not going to bother about the colour or all the fancy stuff yet, were just focusing on getting the correct shape/size at the moment, once that's done we'll start giving it that very cool glassy kind of glare.

Step Seven - Now, we need to move the circle we have just made onto our orb. Obviously, it will be completely covering the orb if we leave it at the current shape, so we need to re-size it first. Try and get it as close as you can to the example above. So around half the length of the orb and make it so it just squeezes with the outline.

Step Eight - Now finally, it's time to add in a little bit of colour to our circle. It must be a pretty light colour or you'll come out with a rubbish finish. Look at the circle in step one, either choose that colour (Yellow-Green) or another colour which looks pretty much like that. Once that's done, we can move onto the next step.

Step Nine - Here's where the glam part comes in. Give a faint gradient to nearer the bottom of the circle (not the orb) and keep the solid colour at the top. Also try to make it transparrent and the bottom of the circle. You could either finish at this step but to give that extra ‘oomph’ to your orb, do the final part, bellow.

Step Ten - I'm thinking that by reading this you want to add in the extra ‘oomph’ to your orb. It's very simple to do yet very affective. Just simply change the orb's overall transparency to 0.75 or 75%. Once that's done, it should look like above. Give yourself a pat on the back and congratulate yourself.

And that's the end of this guide. I really hope that you've enjoyed reading this and might consider giving it a go yourself. Comments and rating are appreciated (even if you hated the guide still comment). Suggestions to help me improve this are also welcome. You might also like to check out some other guides in my application.
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Thanks For Reading,

SH4D3S