CGTalk - Stained Glass tutorial needed

Jinbrown

11-29-2004, 10:01 AM

Hi,

Below is a stained glass practice piece I began a long time ago. It's far from finished, but all of the elements are there to demonstrate the techniques. The process is fairly simple even if it does take time and some patience.

http://www.tutoralley.com/ubb/jins_images/path_stainedglswndw_wip.jpg

Here's how it was done:

The leading is made using the Pen tool and Oval Shape tool.

On one straight branch of the leading, lower left, I've used Efects > Surface Control > Apply Surface Texture and adjusted the Softness and Amount sliders to give it a 3D look. It looks as if I also picked a brown Pattern and adjusted the Reflection slider to the right, though I may have changed the Pen line to brown before using Apply Surface Texture. Either way, I like the slightly brown look better than plain black or dark grey (even if it isn't so true to real stained glass windows).

NOTE: Before you begin your stained glass window, do some testing with various colors when you draw a line with the Pen tool then use Apply Surface Texture. If you choose an suitable Pattern, then move the Reflection slider to the right, you'll see the colors of the Pattern reflected on the rounded line. If you don't want to use a Pattern and adjust the Reflection slider, it'll probably be best not to use black for your Pen lines and, instead, use a light color so the Apply Surface Texture lighting will show when you adjust the Softness and Amount sliders.

The top, milky glass was done by filling a selection with an image, probably with Fill Opacity turned down a bit, since it looks lighter than I remember the image being. Then I used Effects > Focus > Glass Distortion, Using: Paper, Map: Refraction, and adjusted the Softness and Amount sliders (maybe the Variance slider too) until I got the desired effect.

The oval blue glass was made by just filling an oval selection with color. I didn't apply Glass Distortion with this one because I wanted it to be completely clear.

Last, with the selection active, I applied the Bevel World Plugin to each individual glass section one at a time and fiddled with the sliders until the bevel looked right to me.

You could work the way I did, in sections or I suppose you could do all the black line work in one piece, use Select > Auto Select > Using Image Luminance, and save the selection to use later when making the glass.

The problem with doing the selection that way is that it's a lot of individual selections all tied together so when you try to fill with color, they all get filled at once. Personally, I'd prefer working more slowly, on one section at a time.

NOTES: Be sure to make your original Pen and/or Oval or Square Shape lines fat enough so you can raise them with Apply Surface Texture and the 3D look will show. Mine are almost too narrow but I didn't want them any fatter as it would spoil the delicate look of this small window. Also, you'll need to put an image behind the window while you work in order to make sure the glass will look either transparent like my blue oval glass or partially opaque like the two milky white sections of glass at the top. Otherwise, without the image behind my window, the oval blue glass against my white Canvas appears as if it's opaque.

There are probably a zillion ways to approach this project using non Painter filters but I kind of like using Painter for stained glass window making. It just feels more "hand crafted" than relying on downloaded snap-your-fingers-and-it's-done filters.