#006 GAD BA1 P1: Board Game - The Beginnings of Life.

With the parts ordered for the electronics, I began working on the backgrounds for the board game today. The task to recreate something as complex and as awe-inspiring as space is very difficult. Before even starting creating my design for the boards background itself I spent a sizeable amount of time just look through images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Without going in to too much detail, we sit on the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way in itself holds an estimate of over 500 billion stars. We do not even live in a particularly large galaxy on the whole scale of things but it is a good starting point for research.

Here are a select few of the images I found on the Hubble Space Telescope gallery that represent what I will be aiming for:

          The Veil Nebular and the Carina Nebular

    The Crab Nedular and the Nebula NGC 3603

Dwarf Galaxy NGC 4449 and Supernova 1987A

After looking at these inspirational pieces, I began to start work on my own versions. I knew roughly how and what I was going to do as I had created similar backgrounds while doing my BTEC in Interactive Multimedia for a game based in space. Although I cannot detail most of the processes I use as there are too many to document in detail, I can explain the basics of what I have done. 

I had hundreds of stock photos from my project that I did in my BTEC, all free licensed and permitted to be used for both personal and commecial use. While I tried not to use them, I did draw more inspiration from them as well as contacting the artists about the methods they used. One of the artists in particualr was an experienced background designer who sent me a few zipped files containing some of his self made brushes used in his works as well as tutorials.

So to begin, I created subtle background stars using the noise filter, along with changing the brightness and contrast to create smaller and larger star fields. The outer glow effect in the blending properties mixed with the brightness and contrast tool allowed me to create a larger star field, while keeping the stars visible. I also added a large amount of lens flairs of varying brightnesses to accentuate some of the larger stars. For me the hardest part was creating the dust clouds, they contain a large range of colours at different points, so to do this I created a brush revolving around the filter render clouds and a lot of feathering of the edges. With the brush I created along with some of the ones given to me, I created larger clouds made up of smaller ones on different layers. I could then add a gradient overlay to each of them at a fair low opacity to give them their colours.

For some of the more details parts, such as the spiral galaxies, I used the same noise effect as I did with the stars but in a vertical and horizontal pattern, using the spiral blur to create a circular disk. I used a mixture of effects and adjustments to keep the edges clear and crisp. I then trimmed the edges and over 5 layers duplicated the layers while shrinking and lowering the opacity for each layer; this creates the effect of a denser middle. I then used a large brush with soft edges to create a glowing globe in the middle as well as adding a slight outer glow to it in a slightly blue hue. Depending on where I positioned the galaxy, I used the distort tool to give the galaxy a more 3D effect.

After positioning all the different aspects of the backgrounds on one .psd, I began to integrate them. Softening edges and adding in lighting effects to make the image run smoothly from one section to another; here are a few from my first try: