Here’s a quick tutorial on creating a glossy looking orb in Inkscape:
http://designcast.wordpress.com/2007/12 ... -inkscape/



Although the purpose behind creating it was to use as icon background, the result seems pretty universal and can be used in interfaces, web design, what have you. I started creating this one believing I will need to push Inkscape to the limit to get the kind of soft gradients and blurs required, but was thoroughly impressed with how easily it stood up to the task.

I would also like to point out here that I’m using a development version of Inkscape 0.46. I’m also trying out a different approach and using video-sharing site DailyMotion to host the video, so please let me know if you prefer this one to the hosted SWF solutions I’ve used before.

I have a simple request, add sound to this or talk to us. I miss that .

hash wrote:I have a simple request, add sound to this or talk to us. I miss that .

Actually I've been trying to avoid narration for the videos. Many reasons - the place where I record these is usually pretty noisy, the videos have been pretty small and self-explanatory, but more importantly I'm not very comfortable recording my voice yet. Anyways, will try and do that for the next video.

Ah, you can't sound any worse than I do. I have recorded over 30 screencasts and I still think that I sound stupid. I say go for it. Your viewers will appreciate it.

Its a great looking orb, but Im not sure I followed through all the steps completely. Could you just list the layers of the final orb with short description?

Is it:

1. vertical linear gradient
2. blurred clipped stroke for inner shadow
3. top shine - deformed circle
4. inner glow - blurred top shine

You seem to have more steps than that?

Here's a list of objects, starting from bottom up:
1. Circle with a blue gradient from dark to light (top to bottom)
2. Circle with a dark blue with 70% opacity at top and 0% at bottom
3. A smaller circle towards the top of the main circle, with 70% opaque white to 0% opaque white at bottom
4. Copy of the small circle, moved towards the bottom of original circle, flat light blue fill and a blur value of 36
5. Copy of the original (bottom-most) circle with a 10 pt dark blue outline, with a blur value of 36; clipped mask the size of the original circle
6. Copy of original circle with 6 pt dark blue outline, with no fill, blur value of 12; clipped as above
7. Copy of the first small circle (no. 3 above) with a slight blur

Hope this helps. I will try and add audio in the next tutorials; hopefully that'll make it simpler to understand.

Thanks for the nice tutorial. It would be useful if one can download/save the flash tutorial. Can you host it somewhere where we can download the tutorial?

mas wrote:Thanks for the nice tutorial. It would be useful if one can download/save the flash tutorial. Can you host it somewhere where we can download the tutorial?

There are lots of tools and websites out there which will let you download videos from video sharing sites. Try http://www.zamzar.com. Enter the URL of the video (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3r63s ... scape_tech), select the format you want the video in and they will send you an email with the download link.