Planet Rings Using Gimp. By Squallfie66.
This is a fairly basic tutorial, any competent Gimp user should have no problems making the rings. Little Blue has some good suggestions about rings too, so I give him permission to edit or add to this post as he sees fit, and to add his name to the credit.
To get the most out of this tutorial you should follow this tutorial for the planet. http://gtuts.com/design/the-ultimate-gi … t-tutorial And this one for the stars. http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3047
Make an image 1000×1000 and use the ellipse tool to draw a circle that fills most of the canvas, then select > save to path. You could probably get away with a smaller canvas, but I wouldn’t go lower than 600X600 because the rings will look better if you make a high detail image you have to shrink, rather than a low detail image you have to expand.
Next choose select > shrink, choose 20, and again select > save to path. (which is the bottom option.) This makes a smaller circle, or the second ring, as measured from the outside in. You can see the paths on the right of the image.
Then select > shrink, choose 40, save to path again. And then again at 30, and finally at 15. You should end up with five concentric circles with different diameters, these are your basic rings. Select > none, to get rid of the marching ants.
Switch back to the layers dialogue and create a new transparent layer above the background. Then switch to the paths dialogue and double left click the bottom path in the stack, this should make it visible on the layers dialogue. Next choose a dark blue colour as your foreground colour, then with the path selected look on the toolbox window, there should be an option called stroke path at the bottom, stroke the path by 20, then click on any tool on the toolbox to remove the circular line and points.
Now switch back to the layers dialogue and CREATE A NEW LAYER! This is very important, as it enables you to alter the appearance of the rings individually. Then switch back to the paths dialogue and select the second path in the stack (from the bottom) remember double left click to activate it. It is very close to the outer ring, so we will “stroke” the path by a smaller amount, so choose 6 as your stroke width, again select any tool on the toolbox to dismiss the selection. Do the same for the other three paths, remember, you must make a new layer for each path, use these numbers to stroke the paths with, 30 – 15 – 4 for each ring. You should end up with a series of concentric circles that look like this.
Go to the layers dialogue and choose the layer above the background, it should be the outer ring. The white background will be removed later, but for now it helps for contrast against the rings so you can see the detail better. Do the following to the outer ring.
Filters > blur > gaussian blur – 20
Filters > noise > HSV noise, use these values.
Holdness 4
Hue 100
Saturation 60
Value 255
Colours > colourize, use these values.
Hue 200
Saturation 100
Lightness 0
The outer ring should look like this.
I am not going to give you values for each of the other rings, you should experiment a little, I don’t suggest you blur the thinner rings by large values, nor should you alter the HSV values drastically, but you can alter the ring colours to anything you like. I doubt shocking pink is a good colour, but the choice is entirely up to you.
Your image should look something like the following, and it is basically done, but there are a few more things you can do. First save it as it is, then you have a copy if you decide to undo any of the following changes. Then remove the white background layer, then, if you want, alter the transparency of each individual ring layer to values between 80% – 100%. This will allow some of the background to show through the rings. Then once you are satisfied merge the layers into one. Make sure the alpha channel is preserved.
Then you need to put your rings around a planet. This is a ring tutorial, not a planet, I assume you have followed the planet and star tutorials to get this far. Place your rings around your planet like so.
It looks good as it is, however not all views of the rings will be full on, there are several ways of changing the rings perspective and angle. The easiest way is to just scale the ring layer, it is currently 1000×1000, but if you make Height 500 and width 1000 it squashes it down. Then you can use the rotate tool to rotate the ring angle. You can also use the shear and perspective tools to alter the look of the rings, you will just have to practice and find out what you like best. Try adding a layer mask to the ring layer, and then just drag a foreground to transparent gradient through it, towards the light source in your image, this will fade out a portion of the rings, making them look like they are in shadow. Again you are just going to have to experiment. Finally, remember that your planet will hide a portion of the rings from certain angles, so if you use the fuzzy select tool to select the planet on the planet layer, then select the ring layer and erase over the planet, it simply erases the part of the ring that the planet hides.
And that is it!
