| Breath weapons for city-demolishing kaiju should be devastating in form and appearance. I'm going to share one of my techniques, given to me by Son Goharotto. | |
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Start with a background.
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Take a picture of a kaiju [pictured here is Kaneko-Goji] and place it on a layer above the background. |
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Using the brush tool, select a large brush and draw a large circle over the mouth on a seperate layer. Then select a smaller brush and draw the rest of the ray. I use a brush with some heavy feathering on it. You want a larger brush for the mouth to make it look like an explosion of energy. |
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Then choose a lighter color, and draw a center core to the beam. |
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Use Photoshop's Distort-Glass tool. This does a great job in creating ripples to the beam attack. But right now it still doesn't have much direction to it. |
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Use the Motion Filter and set it at about 10 pixels. Make sure it follows the direction of the beam. If you set it too high, then you lose the shape and contrast of the beam. I duplicated the layer and moved it to the layer behind the kaiju. Then I set the top beam weapon layer to Screen. That allows the picture of the kaiju to show through the beam attack, while the texture of the original beam shows through below. |
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After that, I applied a Lens Flare to the kaiju layer around his mouth. To make it brighter around the point of origin. Then on the background I applied an Omni Lighting Effect. This makes it look like the beam is lighting up everything. That's it! Make sure you consider proportion when drawing the beam weapon. |