Picture Post: Read

So with a few Hive themed manips the last few days, I felt I've learnt a lot to get me started on the image side of things with SymCity. This morning with a little of a free time left I have this weekend, I decided to give Magic theme a go.

As you can probably guess already, each main MC theme in SymCity will have a colour theme as well. Green for Hive, red for Magic, and Traditional / Tech theme will be blue.

This piece took surprisingly long, even factoring in the need to find and learn new techniques. I guess the biggest problem with ethereal effect is that there is very little to no margin for "error" for things to look right.

I started by experimenting with smoke effects. I thought cloud render would be the obvious approach but I couldn't find anything that looks realistic enough. I ended up finding this tutorial which I felt achieved the best result really, and after a few experiments and tweaks I feel it's the way forward.

Next up I did the light swirl around the subject which again involved some basic paths and brush dynamics. I had to create my own lightning brush (following this tutorial's effect) since the vein brushes are too dense for realistic looking lightning.

The words around the head was the hardest thing to figure out, as my googlefu failed me. I'm sure there're tutorials out there but I just couldn't find them.

Basically the Text over path approach wouldn't work since the text wouldn't flip over as it goes around the subject. So instead I experimented with warp transformation to literally pull the text over itself. It's not perfect and I'll keep hunting for better approaches (I'm sure Tabico and Callidus did something like that in their work), especially since I can't spiral the text around the subject with transformation warp - as there aren't enough anchor points...