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Creating, sizing and positioning custom flasher images for reflections, highlights and other custom effects by dark.
Note: This is for angle dependant tables only and should typically be used for "lighting mods" of tables.
You can see these types of effects used in Javier1515's Last Action Hero table which I helped do the lighting on.
Artistic experience with Photoshop is a plus for this, and this tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge of image editing software and also assumes you know how to use flashers already.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In this tutorial I'll be using Super Mario Mushroom world by edizzle. - Thanks edizzle.
Step 1:
Take a screen shot of the table you are working on preferably from your cab, using high resolution and correct aspect ratio.
2: Determine the lighting effect you want to add to the appropriate flasher and take some time to think about how that
flasher's light would hit the surrounding objects. Observe videos of the table and try to see how lighting effects table
objects.
3. Make a new layer on top of your screen shot of the table. Begin painting airbrush lighting effects. Try to look at the
surfaces the light will hit and think of them in terms of three dimensions and how light will bounce, reflect and wrap around
objects. Use multiple layers and various degrees of opacity to achieve the look you desire. In this example I will be
making the left orange flasher on the back wall have its light hit the yellow ramp on the left, the koopa plastic in the
middle and the wire ramp cover to the right of the flasher.
4. Add in basic highlights using a soft diffused brush, use tools like blur, motion blur and smudge to make the highlights
more spread out. Lower opacity on your brush as you paint highlights further away from the light source. Use eraser tool
with a large brush with low opacity and slowly erase parts of the highlight that are further away from the light source to
give it a shaded look. It's never a bad idea to split up your work in to lots of layers in case you aren't happy with
something you won't lose your previous work. Since this yellow ramp has a high gloss I'll be making the highlight less diffused.
Once you are satisfied with the shapes and over all look of your highlights, start to merge the layers and turn the
layer visibility on/off to observe how your lighting is hitting objects.
5. Once you are happy with how the lights look and you are ready to try them on the actual table, we need to prepare the
image for use on the table. In order to make it easy to size and line up the image to match the table we will now make
guide lines that will help pin point positioning on the table. Create a new layer on top of all previous layers and mark
out specific areas that will help you line up your image. This makes it easy to accurately ensure our flasher highlights
land where we painted them, it can be very difficult otherwise since our highlights should be mostly transparent.
6. Now let's prepare to make our image transparent and remove the background. Make a new layer above the background layer
and fill it with 100% black. This layer will act as a visual aid to make sure we don't crop any gradient areas while
keeping the cropped area as small as possible. If we accidently crop too small this could cause harsh lines in our
highlights. The black layer makes it very easy for us to see our highlights.
7. Once we have the highlights cropped, we disable visibility on the black layer and save the image as a .png for
transparency. Now we import it into our table and start sizing and positioning the flasher image using the red guidelines
to help us. It can also be helpful to temporarily disable "additive blend" to make the image more visible and disable
blending while we work on it.
8. When begining to size up your flasher image a good place to start is by seeing what the image size of your image is,
you want to keep this aproximate aspect ratio when sizing up. You will need to adjust the size and position until your
flasher image lines up nicely. You can see with additive alpha blend off, the image is static and discoloured. (Below image is on actual table and not the screen shot)
9. Once you have it lined up, re-enable additive alpha blend, then go back in to your image software and disable the
red highlight layer and re-save the image. Re-import into the table and have a look at how you highlights look with flasher
blending, fading in and fading out. Now that you have it sized and positioned if you want to make any further adjustments
you can re-edit the image and reimport so long as you keep the same image size. One thing you may notice is your flasher
image doesn't land on top of all the objects in the scene, you may need to adjust the Z height value to be higher than
the objects it lands on in order for it to be on top. As a result you will have to place the image lower in the vp editor.
You may figure out some techniques or tricks of your own along the way, this is just a basic over look of how I went about making some unique lighting effects that are really only limited by your ability to paint. I hope to see these techniques used by more table authors for their lighting mods in future and hope that it can benefit VP tables over all aesthetics and perhaps inspire some new ideas on what can be done with VP flashers.
Hope you found this tutorial useful.
-Dark
Note: This is for angle dependant tables only and should typically be used for "lighting mods" of tables.
You can see these types of effects used in Javier1515's Last Action Hero table which I helped do the lighting on.
Artistic experience with Photoshop is a plus for this, and this tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge of image editing software and also assumes you know how to use flashers already.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In this tutorial I'll be using Super Mario Mushroom world by edizzle. - Thanks edizzle.
Step 1:
Take a screen shot of the table you are working on preferably from your cab, using high resolution and correct aspect ratio.
2: Determine the lighting effect you want to add to the appropriate flasher and take some time to think about how that
flasher's light would hit the surrounding objects. Observe videos of the table and try to see how lighting effects table
objects.
3. Make a new layer on top of your screen shot of the table. Begin painting airbrush lighting effects. Try to look at the
surfaces the light will hit and think of them in terms of three dimensions and how light will bounce, reflect and wrap around
objects. Use multiple layers and various degrees of opacity to achieve the look you desire. In this example I will be
making the left orange flasher on the back wall have its light hit the yellow ramp on the left, the koopa plastic in the
middle and the wire ramp cover to the right of the flasher.
4. Add in basic highlights using a soft diffused brush, use tools like blur, motion blur and smudge to make the highlights
more spread out. Lower opacity on your brush as you paint highlights further away from the light source. Use eraser tool
with a large brush with low opacity and slowly erase parts of the highlight that are further away from the light source to
give it a shaded look. It's never a bad idea to split up your work in to lots of layers in case you aren't happy with
something you won't lose your previous work. Since this yellow ramp has a high gloss I'll be making the highlight less diffused.
Once you are satisfied with the shapes and over all look of your highlights, start to merge the layers and turn the
layer visibility on/off to observe how your lighting is hitting objects.
5. Once you are happy with how the lights look and you are ready to try them on the actual table, we need to prepare the
image for use on the table. In order to make it easy to size and line up the image to match the table we will now make
guide lines that will help pin point positioning on the table. Create a new layer on top of all previous layers and mark
out specific areas that will help you line up your image. This makes it easy to accurately ensure our flasher highlights
land where we painted them, it can be very difficult otherwise since our highlights should be mostly transparent.
6. Now let's prepare to make our image transparent and remove the background. Make a new layer above the background layer
and fill it with 100% black. This layer will act as a visual aid to make sure we don't crop any gradient areas while
keeping the cropped area as small as possible. If we accidently crop too small this could cause harsh lines in our
highlights. The black layer makes it very easy for us to see our highlights.
7. Once we have the highlights cropped, we disable visibility on the black layer and save the image as a .png for
transparency. Now we import it into our table and start sizing and positioning the flasher image using the red guidelines
to help us. It can also be helpful to temporarily disable "additive blend" to make the image more visible and disable
blending while we work on it.
8. When begining to size up your flasher image a good place to start is by seeing what the image size of your image is,
you want to keep this aproximate aspect ratio when sizing up. You will need to adjust the size and position until your
flasher image lines up nicely. You can see with additive alpha blend off, the image is static and discoloured. (Below image is on actual table and not the screen shot)
9. Once you have it lined up, re-enable additive alpha blend, then go back in to your image software and disable the
red highlight layer and re-save the image. Re-import into the table and have a look at how you highlights look with flasher
blending, fading in and fading out. Now that you have it sized and positioned if you want to make any further adjustments
you can re-edit the image and reimport so long as you keep the same image size. One thing you may notice is your flasher
image doesn't land on top of all the objects in the scene, you may need to adjust the Z height value to be higher than
the objects it lands on in order for it to be on top. As a result you will have to place the image lower in the vp editor.
You may figure out some techniques or tricks of your own along the way, this is just a basic over look of how I went about making some unique lighting effects that are really only limited by your ability to paint. I hope to see these techniques used by more table authors for their lighting mods in future and hope that it can benefit VP tables over all aesthetics and perhaps inspire some new ideas on what can be done with VP flashers.
Hope you found this tutorial useful.
-Dark
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