Terrible Trivium · 8:19pm Sep 15th, 2017
I was trying to make an illustration for the last chapter of Returning Home, and Cloudsdale was in it, and... well, I meant to half-ass it by drawing a bunch of bumpy clouds and labeling it "this totally is Cloudsdale" (with discorded Rainbow Dash sitting on top) but then I was like, "Huh, I wonder how they got the inside corners of those clouds to spiral like that. You'd need to use two separate paths to accomplish that, wouldn't you? Oh that reminds me of a trick I wanted to try out, where the path will naturally taper like in the show instead of the gross, blocky end caps that inkscape offers. Huh, those waterfalls are really convincing with those random white streaks on top of the blue. I wonder if I could have inkscape generate those along a rectangular path..." So... I'm not sure how much time I've spent on this exactly, but I'm pretty sure I was working on it pretty continuously for about 3 hours from 11 to 2... then an hour and a half from 3 to 4:30... then 9 and a half hours from 6 to 3:30am... and that's pretty much been my obsession the past week (weeks?).
My old arch nemesis rears its ugly, faceless head... the Terrible Trivium.
It's funny because before I started trying to slap this together I couldn't motivate myself to practice drawing more than once a month. Buuut... the chapter's still kind of stuck in limbo until I can get over the fact that "no no no the cloud city does not have enough buildings" then draw a tiny Canterlot, and a couple of blue eyes. Until I can get past all this stuff without (hopefully) getting lost in trivium too much more, here's a peek at how far I've gotten:
I'd put an image here, but derpicdn's censor blocks my website for some reason.
- see?
Wow, that (Cloudsdale) wasn't copied from the show? It seems to be coming along quite well, at least. Though, oddly, the upper rainbow waterfall appears black to me in the SVG version.
Good luck with the Trivium. And, hey, at least you're getting practice with your visual art skills?
I couldn't figure out how the show people created that rainbow, so I was trying two things: first, make a stripe of one color, bend it into the rainbow shape, then duplicate it once for each other color. Then add a blur. My second idea was to set up a complex gradient that has 2 handles for each color transition: one to start transitioning, and one to stop transitioning. That'd allow for the stripey shape of the rainbow, without all the colors just smearing together. The first way didn't do that weird clipping, by which sometimes orange or purple was absent. The second way, well... that place where the rainbow splashes back up? To get that not just being solid orange, I had to set up a complex mesh gradient... and also learn how to use mesh gradients. Mesh gradients are "new" so your browser can't render them. Developers are like: "It just was made standard 7 years ago! I need at least 4 more years to sit on my butt and do nothing!"
I was pretty much using a screencap to get the basic idea of what to draw where... then my playing with imitating it kind of got away from me. Lots of very specific structures in Cloudsdale, when you really look at it. What are those blue buildings on top, that are different than the ones below? What's that door on the bottom there? Why are some buildings on pillars? What's that one building with the white/dark cloud for a roof? What are those cloud streams on the right, that aren't anywhere else in the city? Why am I even asking these questions because Rosy's an earth pony!
4670002
Ah. :)
Thanks for the elaboration!
edit: Oh, though what was the deficiency with the first way?
4670004
Honestly, I should've gone with the first way. But I did try both, and both gave somewhat acceptable results. Biggest problem with separate shapes for each stripe is that it's infuriatingly difficult in Inkscape to perform the same transformation on several different paths. Simple scaling, rotation, and skew are fine, but try to alter the shape of the rainbow and you're in for a world of hurt. Pretty much what you have to do is delete everything but 1 color, transform that color, then recreate the rest of the colors... and the blur. Which is easier to manage than a mesh gradient with 8 x 3 nodes.
You also can't bend two path segments in unison in Inkscape, so you have to fiddle with the opposite side of a stripe, manually eyeballing it to give it the same transformation as the other side.
4670017
Ah, thanks.