This might seem a little strange, but I'm in need of some graphic design help for a new nation-wide marketing campaign designed to benefit the non-profit community. I've got samples similar to the image I need, but my expertise is in business matters and strategy, not graphic design. I'm hoping that one of the many talented people on here would be willing to produce an image which could be displayed properly on a 5" x 8" sign. If you're interested or know someone who might be, please let me know.

Advertising is against the forums rules per-se...but since this is non-profit and may have an indirect benefit to BOTF2, I think we can allow this one instance.

Could you give people more info about exactly what it is that you want though, Ritter? It'll help ensure that you get help with the specific skills that you need. Making models requires different skills to making background images, for example.

Sure. I specifically didn't say a whole lot because I didn't want to sound like a commercial and risk offending anyone. Basically, I need some background art - the sun rising over the Earth. After trying to cobble it together myself (since I don't want to unknowlingly use something which is already copyrighted and get bitten later on), I concluded that my strengths lie elsewhere and thought I would ask for help from people who are more talented in that area. Once it's finished, the image will be incorporated into the print media used for awareness campaign materials. I found some images which are similar to what I'm looking for online, so I'll post them since a picture is worth a thousand words.

Also, just to be clear, if I'm in any way overstepping my bounds, please let me know. I don't want to put anyone off, and I don't want to come off as if I'm using the site to do recruiting or cost cutting. To be honest, the thought occurred to me as I was trying to put this together myself that someone from the site could probably get it done a lot faster and a lot better than I can, so I figured I'd ask.

I'm not exactly a master of arts in that area but I learned "gimping" by this space art tutorial (in german) which gives you basically a nice and realistic earth planet: http://wiki.gimpforum.de/wiki/Spaceart_-_Erde_und_Mond . If you then add a new transparent layer to that earth image and use the "Filters"->"Light and shadow" (in german version of gimp, don't know how it's called in english)->"Supernova" and play around a bit with the colors (use bright white or light blue) and rays, then you should get something like those images up there. If you then google for some logo tutorials in either gimp or photoshop, you should be done in no-time .

Hey, Mal, thanks for the tips and link, and ultimately this is what I've come up with as a base to add various different pieces onto.


Considering that I've never done anything remotely like this before, I'd say it turned out nice enough, although I'd welcome any thoughts or suggestions anyone has on how to make it cleaner.

(By the way, does "no-time" equal about 4 or 5 hours normally? )

I'll post mine soon.

in terms of botf2-development, yes

Since I'm native german, I guess I have a little advantage there reading the tutorial. You need to have gimp 2.2 or 2.3 (2.4 seems not to work too well with the scripts) and have an exact look at all those layers generated by the planet-render script and how you shuffle them around and determine their layer mode.

I made a bit different shadow (more appropriate for our in-game planets, yours need different), here's what I got (you needn't make it look that overtly shiny, just play around with the layer modes and switch one or two layers completely off to see the difference;you can make it look as crispy as in the pic above):

Ooh nice pic Ritter! The Earth looks a little...bulgy though. It might be my monitor, but the top of America seems to be sticking out slightly, making the planet "less round". Nice pic overall though.

Scifi-Meshes is a great place to get feedback on your images, but i'm having trouble accessing the site at the mo for some reason. Keep checking out that link because it's a HUGE community and you'll get tons of tips, guides, and feedback on making images there.

Trekmeshes is another great place to get feedback on your images but they are obviously more Trek model-focused than overall image focused etc. They LOVE images of models with decent backgrounds though, so it might be good to show off the near-complete image (ie when a station model etc has been added) to them to get tips on finalising it.

MoE's right. At trekmeshes.ch they even got a specific 3D earth model to use. But I must admit, I wouldn't be able to do anything serious with it cause I don't have any 3D program besides blender..

The version discrepancy makes a couple of things make sense now since I just downloaded version 2.4. I actually kept running into problems with the images being just slightly off, or the Earth coming out shaped more like a cylinder than a sphere.

You know, MoE's comment about the northwestern tip of North America did bring up a question that I kept running into, but I might have just answered my own question. Still, it can't hurt to ask. When I was taking a section of the Earth to use, I had to set anchors and adjust the lines connecting them to pull out the image (which, being rounded, meant a tiny amount of detail in a couple of places got cut out). The idea came from a separate tutorial claiming to teach how to make a background transparent. When I think about it, I could probably build everything in one image and simply take a section of the final, but in case that doesn't pan out do you have any good suggestions on how to do the anchor trick around a circle?

I don't use any anchors. If you are in the "Filters"->"Render"->"Render on object" menu, then you can spin the sphere around until north america is in front view. do this with the x,y and z values. after that it should be perfect sphere much like in my picture.

you might wanna ask troy2000 if he lends you his file without the ship: http://www.trekmeshes.ch/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=327

Little does anyone know, we're secretly building the Enterprise-D since I've always wanted my own starship, so it'd work perfectly.

Fortunately, I used your tips and Gimp to put together a really nice image, now I just need to wait for the digital camera on order to come in so that I can finish the image with some personalized detail. Thanks for all your help, and of course I'll try to offer help once my schedule clears up a bit if you ever need it.

hover by my house once you finished it

cool project!

hm, there's something indeed that confuses me a bit for some time now..maybe you know something about it or are able to find out information on this subject.
Does anyone know if any LCARS-style (I'm referring to the ones in our games as fed design) is per-se copyrighted by Michael Okuda, the original creator of LCARS and thus Paramount? From what I understand of copyrights, one can only copyright the actual incarnation of an idea, but not the idea itself, i.e. though we're looking similar to the LCARS style (in fact imitating it), we should be safe doing so. But then, what's the point of having such copyrights (hm, the difference between trademark and copyright might also play a role here) when everyone can re-build it?

Just wondering if we need to alter the LCARS-style a bit (instead of vertical black lines, we make angular ones for example ).

Sorry I took so long to respond, but the first wave of brochures and canisters are being distributed as we speak, and I'm negotiating a deal between three national companies which could - IF done right - be worth several million dollars, so I've been pretty busy.

Wow, I'm not sure if you could have picked a more difficult topic or not. I'm not an attorney myself, let me say that, but I have worked with intellectual property attorneys and studied some basic law (all within the US, so I don't know how applicable this will be). My basic understanding is pretty much this:

1) Trademark applies to specific company logos, names, etc. so that shouldn't be an issue for you in this case. You'd be dealing with the copyrighted artistic style.

2) You can go here http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebre ... PAGE=First to search the US copyright office's listing of material copyrights. I did a quick search for Michael Okuda and found a few results, but it could also be registered under Paramount or any other number of subsidiaries or individuals. Some playing around might help you find if there's a specific copyright. (If you want to spend a little bit of money, you can probably have an intellectual property attorney do the search for you fairly easily. It shouldn't even take them a full hour to do such a search, and they probably can have just their assistant charge you much less per hour to do the actual search.)

3) After a certain period of time, even copyrighted material (especially cultural pieces like art, movies, and music) enters the public domain. At that point, it's considered to be too wide spread throughout the culture to be separated out for legal protection. I'm pretty sure that, at this point in time, you could use a Casablanca "maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon" remake dressed exactly like the movie without fear of legal action since it's so culturally well-known.

4) A lot of the problems which occur with copyrighted material is that the laws themselves were basically formed well before current technology was invented, so there are definite gaps. Depending on the judge's interpretation, the same material can be deemed copyright infringing or a simple expression of creativity which happens to have coincidental similarities to or was inspired by something else. For example, you watch Stargate and think the idea of parasites infecting and controlling humans is potential great drama, so you write a movie/TV show with alien worms infecting people and using advanced technology to convince the simple humans to worship them. Ideas basically can't be copyrighted so much as incarnations of those ideas. If we take this idea and develop a show around it, we would be legally safe in most cases.

What I'd really suggest, if you want to be as legally safe as possible, is to use the LCARS style as an innovative idea and work on developing your own incarnation of that idea or distinctly different enough evolution of that concept. I'm guessing that you want this for the game under development? To be safe, I'd suggest focusing on a completely new design, going to the base concept of the LCARS design (Why was it made? What was its point? How was it supposed to make interaction easier?) for your official release and letting people develop their own modified version.

thank you for your help here. Yes, it is about a game under development, in fact bote itself , since we currently de-trek it and make trek a total-conversion-mod to be a bit safer on the legal side of everything.

so I was wondering about the LCARS, and I think, with some alterations, we can safely keep it when we refrain from using the word LCARS as a word in the graphics (like done many times in the series and movies) and change the shapes and gaps a bit. should be feasible .

btw. sounds great what you're doin! several millions..ugh, certainly a bit above my league. I hope you got all your bases covered so that it ain't too risky or anything .