How to put Tux into a glass ball

[Vince42]

First I wanted to draw Tux myself, but got a little bit stuck; luckily found a good vector graphics template, which I were able to import into Affinity Designer. Now I would like to rebuild the "Tux in a glass ball" like on my avatar. Is there some kind of tutorial on how to create a glass ball around an existing object?

 

I know that my current "glass ball tux" looks different from the original - but I hope that the new version would look even shinier than my old one.

tux.afdesign

[catlover]

This video might be of use to you.

 

 

 

 

 

[Vince42]

I will try that one out as well, thank you.

Preferrably I would like to construct a bubble / ball in Designer myself and not use some image.

[Alfred]

Cover Tux with a solid grey circle, choose the Transparency Tool ('wineglass') and apply a radial transparency. By default the fill will remain opaque in the centre and become transparent towards the outside edge; click on the 'Reverse gradient' button on the context toolbar, and then drag the midpoint control towards the edge of the circle so that the fill is only opaque near the edge.

 

In the screenshot below I've made the fill red instead of grey to let you see the effect more clearly, but you will obviously need to add some highlights if you want to make it look shiny.

 

[firstdefence]

Im sure this could be done better with more tweaking and refinement.

Tux in a globe.afdesign

 

Added a few more catch lights.

 

[Vince42]

58 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Im sure this could be done better with more tweaking and refinement.

Tux in a globe.afdesign

Added a few more catch lights.

 

Dude, this is awesome! You made my day! A million kudos for you! 

Could you please elaborate a bit on how you did that? I would love to understand that.

[Uncle Mez]

@Vince42 Simply check if @firstdefence savez the project with it's history. 

If yes then you duplicate the project and learn from there. 

If no, then maybe a macro (created by first defense)  of building a glass should help you automate this but also learn. 

One way or another, you will receive needed help

[firstdefence]

17 hours ago, Vince42 said:

 

Dude, this is awesome! You made my day! A million kudos for you! 

Could you please elaborate a bit on how you did that? I would love to understand that.

Every element is either a drawn shape or boolean creation mainly using the intersect option in the geometry set, so once all of the shapes were created transparency was added. All the shapes had a white fill (255, 255, 255) Then it was just a matter of getting the transparency to look right. Using the crescent tool really helps as there are quite a few crescents in the image.

 

1. I started by creating a background square 1350px x 1350px and colouring it a blue (21, 121, 242) and locking the layer. There are a few reasons for blue.
   1. Blue is a nice colour to go with yellow so helps tux's feet and beak pop.
   2. Glass effects look good against blue.
   3. I like blue lol! 
2. Make an Ellipse big enough for Tux to fit into so in this instance 1350px x 1350px, I filled it with white, the reason for filling with white is once transparency is applied it looks like glass would, you can tint it with a very pale blue to get a nicer effect, or if you went with a red background you could use a very subtle pink on some of the shapes, or another way is to just mix it up and add whatever colours you'd like to see, life is rarely a single colour so your image might want to reflect that.
3. I duplicated the ellipse a few times as I was going to be using boolean (Intersect) to create a few shapes, in particular the brolly shapes.
4. I also used the Crescent shape quite a few times. The trick to making a glass ball look like a glass ball is the curves have to flow right.
5. The flashes of highlight were created by creating an oval shape, making it a curve and using the centre nodes to bend it up (Imagine squishing blutack) 
6. 

This file has history saved with it so you can scroll back through the history panel. As you will see its a case of tweaking and making changes, undoing changes and altering things to try and get the right aesthetics: Example globe creation.afdesign

 

 

[Alfred]

53 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

I started by creating a background square 1350px x 1350px and colouring it a blue (21, 121, 242) and locking the layer. There are a few reasons for blue.

1. Blue is a nice colour to go with yellow so helps tux's feet and beak pop.
2. Glass effects look good against blue.
3. I like blue lol

 

Blue would have been my preferred choice, too, but since I used red in my example to make it stand out from the greys in the Tux image I decided it was better without a background colour.

 

[firstdefence]

8 hours ago, Alfred said:

 

Blue would have been my preferred choice, too, but since I used red in my example to make it stand out from the greys in the Tux image I decided it was better without a background colour.

 

yeah nice touch shows an effective way of creating a bubble.