Tutorial: GIMP - Creating Blueprints

Hi Guys,

A very rough draft of the guide requested by several people. It's not brilliantly written but I'll tidy it all up a bit once I get some feedback about how hard/easy it is to follow!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=311634092

I look forward to hopefully seeing some results!

 

Nice one

 

Very inspiring tutorial, thanks!

I don't use GIMP anymore, never could get accustomed to its strange interface.
But your tutorial pointed me in the right direction to kind of replicate it with Photoshop Elements 12.


Now, if only I could remember how I did that ..
I only know it involved one of the Drawing Filters, some magic wand use, some layer masks ...

 

Nice guide. I kinda want to use this kind've thing in my videos, so I might have to have a play with GIMP some time.

Thanks for sharing!

 

Good tutorial. Straight forward and easy. I'll definitely be using it at some point.

It might be a good idea to point out that it'll be near impossible to get a 'traditional engineering style blueprint' unless your reader puts his/her field of view down to minimum.

 

Thank you for the guide

 

Looking good Brenner, I like your font choices and label styles. Stats are a nice touch too. I'm considering a merger or my stats and blueprint page styles on a future ship.

I know what you mean about GIMP, it's not always intuitive to me but then I'm very inexperienced having never used anything other than Paint until a couple of weeks back. Layers are by far the most powerful tool in creating cool images in my opinion, most of my other work for ship releases is basically just semi-transparent layering and being AutoCAD trained that came easily for me. Selection control was what threw me lots in the beginning (having to have an area selected even to freehand in etc).

Still, I like it, and as I have no Photoshop experience nor the money to purchase Photoshop unless I really need/want to, it makes sense for the moment.

If you manage to figure out what you did and put together some instructions you could always make a guide too or I can merge it into the current.

Glad you guys are finding it helpful any way!

 

this is so cool man!

 

So I was messing around earlier... not quite how I want it to look but along the right lines and still quite cool I think...

 

hehe, that looks great mate .. I can see what you were after, and it works really well

 

Photoshop Master Race reporting in!

But I'll never forget you GIMP. You were my first... <3

Nice tutorial!

 

Pretty cool work!

I counter with this:



I'm not sure if I like the effect though.

Putting the entire ship on the blue grid looked great though, I think I'll use that effect for future steam thumbnails.

Also, I think there is something wrong with the green background you recommend:



At "normal" video settings everything looks like it should. But on "high" and "extreme" the entire ship decides to hulk up and turns green.
Even the bridge shown in this pic, deep inside the ship with no way to see outside.

Anyone knows what is going on here? Green lighting I suppose? I would hugely prefer a background that only turns the background green, not everything.

I only managed to unhulk my ship by using some heavy color adjustment.

 

I love that partly-solid one, nicely done! Incidentally, I was going to add a few user-made ones (with credits) to the tutorial if you wouldn't mind me borrowing them?

Not sure about the green-ness.. I don't seem to get that. Skyboxes in general do have weird effects sometimes, though usually it only effects glass. I do occasionally find the purple one I use for my release screenshots leaking a little through a wall here and there but never to that extent. For internal pictures without windows, I just turn off skyboxes for this reason and I guess for outside blueprints it doesn't actually matter as all colour will be removed anyway, as long as the shades are right.

Also I think I've said this before, but +Meklar Points!

 

Sure, go on.

Hmm, might be a issue with my specific graphic hardware then.

 

I gotta be honest, I kinda want to do this now for my KAE ships. I may post up my results on this thread and if I do, Tristavius has my full permission to use as many as he likes. It may be a couple days until I get time to put them together so watch this space.

 

Looking good, Tristavius!

 

Turns out I managed to get something out now:



This is just a quick and dirty version I threw up. When I get more used to GIMP and get some more professional looking fonts etc, I'll redo this one.

 

Very nice! It picked out nice detail on the industrial parts

 

I'll see all your blueprints and raise you a Fighter Schematic in a more engineering style... (click for full resolution)

 

Any chance of a non-steam link, cant view at work

 

Ok, here is a little guide how to do it in Photoshop Elements. Should also work in "real" Photoshop too.
I'm not doing a full guide here, I just try to point out the differences to GIMP.

Basics

1) Create the screenshot, using the green background like Tristavius described.
Open in Photoshop (elements)


2) Select the green parts via the quick selection tool or magic wand, then press DELETE on your keyboard to get rid of the green parts and only keep the relevant parts of the ship.
This will later help you if you want to use a background.

3) Apply Stylize filters > Find Edges.

Note that ships with light armor will come out way better than ones with heavy armor - heavy armor camo can confuse this tool. Some playing around with contrasts and filters before applying the "find edge" Filter can help. This one worked with out further adjustments:

4) Enhance > Convert to Black and White



Creating a background (grid lines)

Create a new layer, place it below the drawing then select the fill bucket. The fill bucket is usually used to fill the entire image with one color, but it can also draw some simple patterns.
Find the right pattern there, and paint it on the new layer:



As you can see, the lines are a bit .. extreme. Lower the opacity of the new layer to something like 20%:



Also, you will have to place another background below the grid lines (in yet another layer).
Here I just used a white background. You can also try a color gradient or maybe a subtle texture.

Edit: I just found a better alternative to using the fill tool in pattern mode.
Use Layer > New Fill Layer and select the correct pattern there. The greatest advantage of this way is that you can scale the pattern. It also saves some clicks.

Adding Text

Adding Text in Photoshop is really trivial, just use the big "T" in the tools menu.
Drawing all the little lines from text to the model is slightly more complicated, I use the "Pen" tool and hold shift to draw straight lines.
I think the full Photoshop also has a path tool for drawing bezier curves and stuff like that, but I can't find in Photoshop Elements.

 

Just made a blueprint of my fighter...

 

So then... I made this:

 

Excellent Brenner - mind if I merge that into the main steam guide (with full credit of course)?

DanDuncombe and paswert - both looking awesome! Again, mind if I add to the guide (with credit) under the user made examples?

Krovennan and Brenner, yours are being added today

 

Additional trick I've just figured out...

Most of my ships are largely pure white with black and purple markings. The white blocks have very little texture to them as most of the detail is hidden. Thus if you want some areas of your craft to have very fairly flat textures, paint them either very light white or very dark black. Middle ground colours will show all the details of the plating and so forth. Use this to your advantage to creates areas of contrast and so on. I think this is most evident on the Avalon where the black and purples areas really stand out from the rest due to the texturing.

 

Finally...

Is anyone interested in information/tutorials on the cut-aways, deckplans, specification sheets and just the general presentation of screenshots which I've used on my crafts?

 

Of course you can, go ahead! (I forgot to add labels to mine )

 

So I tought this was pretty cool and made something like this: Not the best, but still. Really loved the tutorial, because I just love blueprints

 

Don't get to comfy with that blueprint Tristavius, because guess who figured out how 3rd party Fonts work?

I'm working on a more professional looking version of the Buzzard's blueprint in my spare time, and hoping to have it up soon, maybe even tomorrow if I can find the time (and can regain the ability to move my head). Of course, you still get to use them in your tutorials or whatever however you please, so watch this space.

 

Sure, make it so!

Also, here is one final trick. If you want to keep some solid parts on your blueprint, maybe for underlining a especially interesting / important part of your ship or just as an artistic effect, like I did here ...

.. here is the guide how to do that in Photoshop (Express).

1. Get the exact same greenbox screenshot you used for making your blueprint again - I hope you have stored the original image before turning it in a blueprint Always keep the original file when photo shopping, just in case.

2. Get rid of the green background again. Use the Quick Selection Tool or Magic Wand to select the green background then hit the delete key. Or better yet, use the "magic eraser". You find that one by clicking on the standard eraser, then selecting the "magic eraser" in the options of that tool.

3. I had the problem that my ship also turned a bit green. Should you have the same problem, you can fix it by using "Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation" tool. You can turn down the saturation of only greens down to zero to fix the problem.

4. Copy the solid ship over to the blueprint image now (via CTRL + C and CTRL + V)

5. The solid ship gets placed over the blueprint, as a new layer. Move the solid ship exactly over the blueprint. In case you rescaled the blueprint, just rescale the solid ship too. When you are done, the solid ship should have exactly the same position and size and cover up the blueprint perfectly.
It should look like that:



The blueprint is not visible anymore - except for some finer parts like the antenna because I accidentally deleted them while removing the green in the solid version. Didn't matter for the image though.

6. Now comes the real trick. Make a so called "layer mask" for the layer with the solid ship int it. You can create a layer mask with "Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All".
A layer mask is basically a black & white sublayer that determines which part of the layer is shown and which one is hidden.
- Black hides the layer
- White shows the layer
- Gray .. shows the layer with a lowered opacity. Probably not useful for this tutorial, just use black & white here.

Since you created a "Hide All mask", the solid ship is gone:



Now the fun part: painting parts of the solid ship back in.
Select the layer mask in the Layer menu by clicking on it (its the black rectangle right of the solid ship layer).

Then select white as foreground color and pick the brush tool.
By randomly painting around in the layer mask I got this:



Thats because the layer mask looks like this:



Of course I painted much more carefully for my real pic.
It is possible to paint around in the layer mask while viewing a different layer - I viewed the blueprint and carefully filled out some of the blocks to get the effect shown in the first pic.

If you make an error while painting or if you want to hide a part again, no problem - just paint it black again in the layer mask. The cool thing about layer masks is that they are completely non destructive. You could achieve the same effect by using the eraser tool on the solid ship layer. But if you make a mistake there and doing a "undo" isn't viable anymore, you are screwed. With a layer mask, you can paint back and forth as often as you like.


Also, you don't have to use the brush tool if you don't want too - any other method that adds white color to the layer mask works too. For example, using a rectangular selection then filling it with white color via the fill tool. Even copying other images into the layer mask than cranking up the contrast all way up works, whatever.


I'm just a beginner in Photoshop but even I get that layer masks are probably one the most awesome tools in Photoshop. I have seen Youtube tutorials showing people doing crazy stuff with layer masks. For example, adding light sources to light up parts of dull photos, pretending there were spot lights somewhere.
Also, all sorts of destruction-less hiding of photo parts (just like in this tutorial)

Layer masks aren't exclusive to Photoshop, it seems GIMP supports them too:
https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Layer_Masks/

I'm 100% sure one can replicate my tutorial using GIMP - the interface is different of course, but I think all the tools are available in GIMP too.