Before you start this tutorial, make sure you've installed the Flaming Pears Goodies addon, which you can download here:
http://www.flamingpear.com/dl/freebies.zip
In this tutorial, were going to create nice saturn-like planetary rings. Im using CS3 Extended but the techniques involved should be fine with earlier versions, the only thing you really need in your version is the Polar Coordinates Filter. Right, lets begin...
Create a new document at whatever size you want really, im going to use 1024 x 1024 (keep in mind that the end result is going to be double this size)
Now we've got a blank document, we now have to fill this in with whatever we can really, it doesnt matter. Make sure you darken the parts on this image that are going to be dark rings and lighen the parts that are going to be light rings. Also make sure you make the edges pitch black. This is to prevent annoying artefacts later on
Now add a gaussian noise filter at around 8%, with Monochromatic enabled.
This is now our messy result, doesnt really look like a ring, but thats about to change.
Now resize the image to 1024x1, make sure you make the pixels at the edges of our flat image black, and resize the image again to 1024x2048, our result should look more ring like now.
This is only the transparency map though, now we want to add colour to it. Simply create a linear gradient and add it to a new layer, this will be the colours of our ring. Now duplicate our transparency map so its no longer the background and apply Flaming Pear/Ghost to the duplicated layer, the white parts would have now gone transparent. Ctrl-Click the thumbnail and click on the colours layer and hit delete. As this layer is now transparent, feel free to create a black filled layer under this so you can actually see the ring.
Now extend the canvas so the image size is 2048x2048 and the rings are on the right of the page.
Rotate the ring layer canvas 90 Degrees clockwise and apply Distort/Polar Coordinates Filter to it
Now were nearly done, your 90% likely to see artifacts on the rings. To correct this, simply do a Radial Blur with Amount on 10; Blur Method on Spin and Quality on Good (Best blurs it abit too much).
Now our ring is finished! Simply delete all the layers apart from the Colour and you can save this as a .png to be used as a 3D texture for a space game or you can copy and paste this into space art and overlay it onto a planet.
Until next time!
Serial Velocity
