[PS] Star Maps - How?

[mearrin69]

Welcome to the forum!

I don't have any experience with this really but I'll try to offer some advice.

First, if you have money to spare, there's the plug-in route. Flaming Pear has some plug-ins that let you create starfields with nebulae and other things (Glitterato), planets (Lunarcell), and start (Solarcell). I'm sure there are some other ones, maybe even free, that will let you do the same.

If you're going to do it by hand I'll suggest maybe using a big, soft airbrush with the opacity and flow turned down to experiment with nebulae.

For stars you're just going to have to change color, opacity, and size as you make little dots on the screen for the background starfield.

For the "focus" stars in the foreground, try using a soft brush and dab multiple times in the same spot making it harder, more opaque, and smaller with each dab. Maybe a lens flare effect could come into play?

There are some tutorials on this site for planets and such if you need those for your map.

I don't know if you were asking about the grid or not but I suggest drawing it on a layer and then using layer styles and opacity to get the look you want. Try a single-pixel brush and holding the shift key to draw horizontally and vertically. Just draw one line and then duplicate the layer and use the Offset filter to move it x pixels over or down and keep that up until you've got your grid. Then you can group all of the lines into a folder or merge the layers.

Hope some of that helps! I just got Rogue Trader from Amazon a couple of days ago...haven't been able to crack it open because the in-laws are over. Looking forward to reading it though - loved Dark Heresy.
M

[Ascension]

I did a tut on planets that also covers background stars so that should get you started (leave out the planet part cuz it makes a big planet). And there are some other tuts for nebulae and galaxies around here somewhere. This past month or two has seen many people doing such things so you might want to read through their work-in-progress threads.

Edit: upon re-reading my tut I don't think I cover the stars but here's the quick n dirty version that I use...fill a layer with black, fill it with 100% noise, duplicate the layer and set the blend to multiply, duplicate again and set the blend to pin light.