This tutorial is meant to show you how to draw holes in asteroids. Basically it is a tutorial on how to play with gradient fills so you can make holes that seem like they are actually sinking into an object(such as an asteroid). This tutorial was written in Flash MX 2004 Professional(Flash 7) so if you have Flash 7 or a later version, you can grab the source file Here and follow along.
The finished product will look like this:
First lets open up a regular flash document of 550 in width and 400 in height. Now use the rectangle tool to draw a rectangle with no outline and have the fill color be white for now. Next, use the selection tool and drag the outlines of the rectangle until it gets to be the shape of a asteroid.
Next, we want to use the fill tool to fill the asteroid up with a gradient we want, for the purposes of this tutorial, I will use a radial purple gradient.
Next, we want to used the full gradient tool to adjust the gradient, so click on that and click in the middle of the gradient and a circle will appear. The circle controls where the focal point of the light is in the gradient and the size of the gradient spread. For the purposes of the tutorial, lets adjust to light point of the gradient fill to the upper right of the asteroid.
Now lock the layer that this drawing is on(you can lock a layer by clicking on the lock column in the layer of the timeline). Create another layer above this layer to draw the holes. This way if you need to re-do the holes, you will not mess up the original asteroid.
Now draw using a circle tool in the asteroid a smaller circle, using the same gradient. This gradient will in effect, be the rim of our hole. For the smaller circle you just drew, also adjust the lighting point to the lower left by using the fill transform tool.
Now, draw another smaller circle using the same gradient and also adjust the gradient light point to be in the lower left of this circle.
Now, drag the smaller hole into the middle of the bigger hole and you will get a nice-looking asteroid hole!
The mixing of putting the light source of our main asteroid shape to the upper right and putting the light source of the holes to the lower left, gives the feeling that the smaller gradient are sinking into the larger gradient. Putting a smaller hole on top of a larger one gives the "rim" effect. This can not only apply to drawing asteroids but drawing other things as well.
You can repeat this as many times as you want to make as many craters as you want on you asteroid. Of course because of the gradient in the main asteroid, you will have to adjust your asteroid hole gradients lighter or darker accordingly. Thats it for this tutorial!
