creating glowing stars

can anyone advise me of a tutorial to create stars for second life.......i can make the texture but have failed to cut away the background sucessfully as I want to retain the fading edges and Im ending up with quite a hard cut edge. It must be similar to creating clouds and retaining the transparent edges. Ive been at it 3 days now...ive done the design, but as soon as i alpha them and bring them in they harden ????? anyone able to advise....pleeeese....Ammber

It's really quite easy. Remember that transparency and opacity are not all-or-nothing states. You can get anything between 0% transparent and 100% by using shades of gray in the alpha channel instead of pure black and white. So, if you want soft edges on your stars, open the alpha channel image and edit it directly, using whatever tools you want to soften the sharp edge between your white and black areas. (Try the blur tool, for example.) You'll get a soft, fuzzy star.

I'm sure you'll think of lots of other ways to do this, too, once you step back and look at how this simple approach works.

Thanks for that Rolig, my problem was that I had the stars exactly as to my liking and had jiggled with the alphas and greyed the areas that I needed, I had my fuzzy as exactly right...but still when imported into sl there was white behind the area where I needed that softness...........My thinking was that i should have started creating on a transparent background initially but even when I did this it still didnt work.
Thank you for taking the time to reply.

It sounds as if maybe you have made your alpha channel image incorrectly. Let's try this, simply as an experiment.....

Open a new Photoshop file. Then, add a new layer above the background and draw a simple shape in it. A circle is nice -- all you have to do is drag your marquee tool. Now, fill the circle with the foreground color. That gives you a basic design to play with.

You can create an alpha channel to match this design in several different ways, and you can make your soft outline many ways too. Here are two to try:

(a) Se!ect all pixels in the layer with the circle in it (right click on the layer icon and Se!ect Pixels), and then Se!ect >> Save se!ection ... OK. You have now created the alpha channel. Go to the Channels Palette and look for it. It's called Alpha1 by default. Click on it and you should see a filled white circle on a black field. It has a hard edge, just like the circle you drew, so deselect the circle and then soften it by grabbing the Blur tool. Use it full strength with a wide, soft brush and watch your hard-edged circle turn nice and fuzzy. Done!

(b) Again, se!ect all pixels in your circle layer. This time, instead of saving the selection to create an alpha channel image, open the channel palette and click the "Create a New Channel" button -- the one next to the trash can icon. You should see a default Alpha1 channel appear. It's all black, and you should see the "dancing ants" outline of your selected circle on it. Now, choose your gradient tool, set it to Radial Gradient, and drag from the center of the circle outward. That should give you a nice, smooth gradient from pure white in the middle to darker gray at the edge. Blur the edge a bit with your Blur tool and again....Voila! ... you have a nice, fuzzy circle.

You can figure out lots of different ways to do experiments like this. Each way will create a slightly different end effect, so choose the one that you like best. If you upload any of your experiments to SL, you'll see that they all fade nicely at the edge, as they are supposed to.


BTW: I apologize for typing "Se!ect" here. For some dumb reason, this forum won't let me post if I type the word correctly.

Just use paint.net on a clear apha and save as ping. no messing with greys and blacks. what you see is what you get. simple things sometimes require simple programs.

Madddyyy, just so you know, if you want to go the WYSIWYG route, you can do the exact same thing in Photoshop. Paint.net is not "required", nor is any other program. Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because one program is more complex than another that both can't do the same simple tasks.

If you happen to like Paint.net, fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But don't try to talk people out of using Photoshop just because you have little if any experience with it yourself. I can promise you there'as absolutely nothing Paint.net can do that Photoshop can't.

In any case, the drawback to WYSIWYG methodology is it tends to take longer, and it's much harder to edit after the fact if you want to change any of the transparency values. People who have little or no understanding of or experience with alpha mapping methodology don't tend to want to believe that, but it is the truth.

The only thing "simpler" about WYSIWYG intuition. It happens to be a the most obvious way to work. But as far as the actual performance of the task goes, alpha mapping is much easier, much faster, and infinitely more powerful. You just need to be willing to devote a little energy to the learning process is all. Once you understand it, there's no better way to work, which is why it's been standard practice for so many decades.



Rolig, in case you didn't realize, you can spell 'se!ect' properly as long as it's not followed by the word "from" anywhere else in the post. Select, select, select, select. As long as I don't type that f word again, this post will go though just fine.



Ammber, the simplest way to make a convincng field of glowing stars is just to dab some white paint on black canvas with a soft brush. The soft edges will automatically anti-alias to gray. Now you've got your alpha channel. If you weren't painting directly on the channel to begin with, simply copy your work over to it now. Then flood the top layer of the image with white, save as 32-bit TGA, and you're done. It's a 2-minute job.

If you want your star field to look like an actual night sky, check out this tutorial: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html#tut . I would only change one or two things about it, if it were mine. Where the author says to use the eraser, I would suggest layer masks instead. That way you won't have to start all over again if you don't like the results. Also, if you want the background to be transparent instead of black, simply copy the (flattened) final result to the alpha channel of an all white image.

Cool! I know there had to be handy incantation. Thanks, Chosen!