I need buttons!!!

Love it Love it Love it! Don't know how you do it, but you certainly do! I understand if colors dont work, and then beakers or "Advanced Mixing Techniques" would be great. All I need is something that loosely resembles the very specific ideas I have. Great as usual, cause I love it. Keep up the good work!

 

Very nice buttons, and yes better than the orginal. Sometimes I wanted to redo the orginal ones because they are very blury and too optimized.

 

It's funny you should say that, because not only have I used the original buttons as inspiration and example but I even went so far as to apply some noise to the ones I made, to give them that slightly rough look (the originals probably got that from too much optimization like you said, but when I was making these new ones I noticed that without that little bit of noise they tended to look too flat, too boring). Having said that... thank you for the compliment.

@TheNewSaint: I haven't forgotten about the rest of the buttons, still working on them, just slower.

 

no problem

feel free to enjoy the pleasures of a personal life

 

...bump...

 

WOW, these are fantastic!!! I want to play the mod just from looking at these promo buttons! Rabbit, White has set higher standards on this area of modding. Way to go, man!

SilverKnight

 

Thanks SK, and TheNewSaint, I haven't forgot about these, I'm hoping to get another batch done in the next few days.

P.S. That Spore video is mind-blowingly shattering!

 

Ok, here is the final batch (unless I missed a button) - 5 air buttons, 3 eathquake, 4 shockwave, 4 waterball and 3 waterwall (the sample pic doesn't show all the buttons).



The shockwave gave me a bit of trouble, eventually I decided to go with what's on the big pic, but if that's too "busy" or something like that then there is a simpler, cleaner alternative. Here is a sample,



So, if you want TheNewSaint, I can either remove the "impact" from shockwave, or the cracks or both (without the cracks though it reminds me too much of water ).

Cheers

 

I have to admit i love those buttons

Right now i´m trying to do some promotions myself and sometimes it´s really hard to come up with an inspiration for the motives - just wondering where you get all this creativity from

And i´m curious about the technique you use to create those clear forms, I find it rather difficult to do (with Photoshop, that is).

 

Thanks.

As for inspiration, well it depends on what kinds of promotions you're doing right. I mean it's much easier to figure out how a fireball should look rather than something like moral or chance of withdrawl.

I also use google image search a lot, sometimes I'll find something that I can use other times I'll just see something that'll give me a good idea.

I'm not sure what you mean by "clear forms" in your last comment, and what you're having difficulty with?

 

Ok, here´s how i do the work:

I create a selection, fill it with orange, add noise to it, and apply some dropshadow and bevel & emboss.

The difficult part is getting the selection clear and good (without edges etc. - if not intended), the small parts - like in the flames you´ve done - are the hard ones.

Well maybe i need to buy myself a mouse-pen (tablet - if you know what i try to say).

 

Well, some of the flames are actually based off of clipart style images. I find some 2-3 color images of flames or fires, select the parts that I need, fill them up on a new layer, resize if needed and apply effects. For other stuff I simply zoom in real close, like 500-600% and just use the lasso to "draw" out the outline of the shape.

For example the earthquake button was made by hand, but the waterwall is based on a clipart image of a wave. Sometimes I also "cheat" a bit. The vines for the earth staff were created in Flash where I could quickly and easily draw verctor based curves (I'm not as comfortable with Photoshop's pen tool) which I then simply prntscrn-copied to photoshop and went from there.

The tablet I find mostly useful for large images, when you need to make for example swipping curved lines and such. When working with small images I prefer some more "restrictive" tools, in fact I don't use the freeform lasso but rather the polygonal one. It allows me to take my time and think where I want the next line/point to go, and on a 64 by 64 image you won't be able to tell the difference between curves made with polygonal lasso or a circular selection tool.

 

Those are spectacular Rabbit, simply amazing.

 

Thanks woodelf

I uploaded a zip that contains all the buttons in case someone wants to just download them en masse .

And if you got here from my Units Library thread then check out the previous posts in this thread for sample pictures of the buttons.

 

maybe you could use the planet earth beside the weapon
oops too late srry

 

Wow. Wow. Wow. I ran out of words... Wow.

 

Thank you

 

This thread should really be moved to the graphics section, desipte the title. It's very useful, and quite hard to find - I almost missed it but for a link in RW's sig.