[fazedesign]

The Floating Balls of Suck is my newest digital painting. All photoshop work with a cheapass graphics tablet. Enjoy.

[Robert Ashley]

Dont know what to say about this one except, if you were trying to make it look like it was made with a 3d software. ...you pulled it off nicely.

The lighting looks good.

[fazedesign]

I didn't start off with the intention of it looking really 3D rendered, it just happened to end up like that. No one else has any other comments?

[Tiger Eaten]

This is a two part post.

The first part is that I would like to say that I went to your web site and like your first page, bottom right hand ENTER setup. Very nice style. Congratulations as well on your site being entered in that contest.

The second part of this post is a friendly challenge to you, and I must STRESS that it is FRIENDLY, so please don't think that I am trying to say anything bad about you or your work, that's not my intention.

I am calling you on your statment that this was entierly done in photoshop and would like to see some of your works in progress for this picture if you can post them. I suspect that this was in fact entierly rendered in 3dsMAX, with perhaps some work done in photoshop post render. I have 3 reasons.

1. You have a curved, beveled design mapped onto a sphere, this is a horribly complicated thing to do freehand.

2. I looked at the rest of your gallery (some nice work btw ) and I didn't see anything else that was related to photo realistic rendering of 3d objects, but I did catch on to the fact that you have used 3dsMAX in the past.

3. Your statement "all Photoshop work" in place of the usual "done in photoshop".

Like I said before, please don't be angry, I am more curious than anything as to how you did it. If it WAS indeed done entierly in photoshop then let me apologize now and I hope you can show me a bit how you did it. Very nice work and again, interesting web site.

[docfunkalot]

I want to see the progression not for proof but to learn about your technique, sort of a picture sequence tutorial. How about it? please?

[edible snowman]

spherify?

[Probotech]

Err....If that is done in Photoshop as you say, then it is nothing less then GODLIKE!

Very impressive, the only thing that doesn't look like it's in perfect (i mean PERFECT) perspective is the mass connecting the balls with eachother, but that doesn't look half bad either...very impressive work m8.

[fazedesign]

Tiger: Im not at all angry I understand your skepticism entirely, I've had alot of people assume the same thing, which is why I stressed at the beginning that it was all done in photoshop.
I didn't make any in progress pics I dont think, however I can give you a step by step rundown on my technique and things I used to achieve this. Thanx for the complement about the site too

Also yes, the beveled thing on the sphere took alot of thinking before I actually decided to try it. I'll give a text rundown in the next post, and possibly some in progress images later if i can find them...

[fazedesign]

Ok. Here goes...I hope this helps you understand by the way.
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First off, the concept. I decided to remake an image I'd done almost a year and a half ago, because it needed updating and it was a great concept. It was very similar but way more cartoonish. Someone Mentioned near-perfect perspective, i'll let you in on a secret, i SUCK at perspective so bad...the great thing wish spheres like this, is perspective doesn't matter, they could be as near or far as you want them and you wont notice a difference....

First thing i did was make 4 circle selections of different sizes on one layer and filled them with a desaturated green.

Then on a new layer below this, i painted the basic shapes of the joining stretched thingy's. So now we have basicly a solid green shape shaped like the end result.
Then i reselected the circles layer and filled them all with a slight circle gradient. To add a little shading.

Then I used some Dodge and burn on the stretched joining things to give them some depth.

Now comes one of the key steps. SMUDGE!
Smudge is your friend if used well. I went over all the circles and smudged the highlights and shadows on them to make it look slightly textured. Then I smudged the joins to make them look like they were stretched, as oposed to just joining the spheres. This step took ages of mucking around till it looked sorta ok.

Then I came apon doing the indented thing on one of the spheres, which i did purely cause it looked plain without something else to attract the eye. So I picked a symbol out of some crazy font, Made it huge, did a circle selection around it, cutting off the edges slightly, then spherised it twice.

I resized it to the right size for the sphere I wanted it on, and copied the layer.
I hid one layer, and used it as a shape guide. The other layer, i filled with a gradient, and set the layer mode to Soft light.

The tricky part of course, was the edges, I CTRL+CLICKed on the hidden layer, to get a nice selection, and then, on a new layer, pretty much moved the selection to the left a little, and painted around it on the left side, then moved it to the right, and painted the bit on the right side, etc... Alot of moving selections was involved anyway... To make it look shaded in 3d.

Now we have the indent, but it still looked cartoonish because of the smudged style texture on the spheres.

I flattened the image, copied the layer, and set the mode to Overlay, giving me a slightly deeper colour and stronger shadows.

Then I copied the layer again, Ran something like, Find Edges - something else - and spattered strokes ( something like that ).
Then I set that layer to Screen, and reduced the opacity, and to my amazement, it resembled a marbleish texture. So i didn't really plan on having such a realistic looking texture.
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I hope that answers your questions and any skepticisms you may have. Hell you may have even learned something, who knows

I'll post a few images soon of bits of the image without the texture and overlay on, so you can see the smudging.

(jesus what a long post)

If you have any other questions just ask. I'll be happy to answer them.

[fazedesign]

These 2 are the only ones i can find worth posting. Might give you a better idea though.
One jpg, one animated gif.

[fazedesign]

Enough proof? hehe
(I know deep down you never REALLY doubted me, lol)

Oh by the way. Godlike? hardly. Lots of practice and hard work. I never put anything I do down to talent, because basicly I believei have very little. No way in hell am I a "Natural" at graphics, its all been learned over the 3 years I've been experimenting and learning. Also there are people hundreds of times better than me that post on these boards.

[ October 28, 2001: Message edited by: fazedesign ]