A TrueBrilliance UniverseR. Shamms Mortier	After you've played with the paint programs on non-Amiga platforms, you begin to realize that there are a couple of paint programs on the Amiga that have just as wide a professional scope as any others. Certainly one of these is Play Incorporated's TrueBrilliance. TrueBrilliance and Brilliance are a pair of paint programs that are packaged together. Brilliance addresses the non-AGA modes, and True-Brilliance incorporates them. We are going to refer to True Brilliance in this article because we'll be working on an Amiga 4000 system, an AGA environment. So if you have an AGA machine and TrueBrilliance, work along. If not, we hope you enjoy the tutorial anyway, and that you will have the opportunity to get an AGA machine (an Amiga 4000 or a 1200) of your very own in the near future,.. and that you purchase a copy of TrueBrilliance to take advantage of a great paint program.Beginning	Where does the creative spark come from? How is it possible to sit down facing a blank canvas, a large stone, a piano, a mound of clay, or a blank computer screen and manifest the start that will develop into something from nothing? The philosophers call it "creation ex nihilo", and they can't explain it either. I've been a practicing artist in many mediums for about forty years, and it still amazes me. I think though that it is at least fostered if not invited by two specific enterprises. One, the most important, is discipline. Every artist that has lasted past her/his teens realizes it. You just have to be available to the creative spirit everyday, even when you don't care to be there. The second valuable ingredient in manifesting your creative destiny has got to do with what we might call  the call of the moment. We might describe this as being separated into two parts, reflections you desire to make about your experience in the world (what you love, what you value, what excites you) and the availability of tools that you feel you need to explore. Tools of exploration is where an artist's "medium" fits in, what creative environment is an absolute turn on. For many of us, computer graphics has become just that environment, a world that is so potentially expansive that we are drawn into it time and time again.	In some sense, I have always found that the nature of the tool shapes part of the quality of the exploration. That's why people purchase new musical instruments rather than staying with the lesser quality ones they learned on. The tool is not everything, as the millions of drum sets permanently tucked away in closets will attest to, but under the right discipline it can support the motivation needed for constant practice and learning. On the computer, for instance, it was the continual frustration with tools (software and hardware) that just couldn't do things that creative people wanted to explore that caused customer feedback and drove the research and development of what was once considered impossible. That is still true today, evidenced in software by the continual struggle developers go through to upgrade their wares. TrueBrilliance is the result of many person-years of work, and is what it is because Play listened to the needs of the prospective audience for their product, and then set about to create a creative environment that pushed the envelope even further, giving users access to tools that they didn't even knew they needed. The result of all of this is an electronic painting environment that makes creative discipline easy, and that opens the doors to the world of creativity very wide.Space, the alluring frontier	Science fiction topics seem to dominate the creative realms that computer graphic artists and animators flock to most readily. Why is that? I think it's the call of the unknown, the undefined, and the perhaps possible. Space is like a dreamworld. There just might be a neighboring planet tucked behind some star where the beings and their way of living is so different from our own as to make our lives potentially more exciting,.. if only we could just meet. There also might be beings whose nature is so different from anything that we might conjecture that our common revulsion of each others existence might foster fight and flight mechanisms, leading to the kind of conflicts spoken of in our most revered mythology. For all of those reasons and more, we are mesmerized by pictures and movies that show us cosmic visions, which is exactly what we are going to create here.	Let's begin by  creating a field of stars as a backdrop for our world. We don't have to worry about being astronomically correct, because our world is going to be placed at a far distance from Earth, a place never before seen by human eyes. Space is big enough to encompass all of the realities we can conjecture.	Let's start with a dark Blue-red backdrop (I dislike using black as a color for the void). Set the RGB sliders in the palette area to 56, 0, 79. (note: if you're doing this while reading it and don't know where the palette area is, read the TrueBrilliance manual before proceeding). Now hit the space bar to turn off the menu, and use the paint bucket to fill the screen with the purple color. Now hit the "j" key to bring up a separate work area screen.	We're going to populate the sky with stars, but instead of just spraying ordinary pixels as a way of generating them, we're going to give at least some of them a more defined look. Bring up the gradient menu, and select "clear" to erase the default colors there. Move the slider so that you can see the first pot in the palette, and choose the color light blue from the palette above the sliders. Now click on the first "dot" above the slider. Move to the end of the slider area by moving the slider right, and repeat the procedure targeting the last dot in the view, but this time click on a red color. Click on the word "show" to see the full extent of the gradient you've created. You should see a dithered range of colors, moving from light blue on the left to red on the right, with beautiful violets in between. Turn off the gradient requester.	Now choose a filled circle from TB's tools palette (click twice on the circle to do this). Now go to the last tool on the bottom right of the menu, right before the magnifying glass, and click on it with the RMB (right mouse button). This is the effects and options area. We want to choose the last box on the bottom, the one that reads "Radial", because we are going to design our stars to have radial appearances with the gradient colors we chose. Exit this menu, place the filled circle cross-hairs somewhere on the screen, and make a radial filled circle about 1/4" or so across. We want to store this element for later use, so grab the scissors and cut it out using the LMB and positioning the cross-hairs as need to outline the object. Click again on the scissors with the RMB to access the brush storage area. TB can store up to eight brushes here. Using the LMB, place the star in the first available storage area. Go back to the screen and with the first "star" still clinging to your mouse movements, Right Click on the icon on the right of the scissors, bringing up the brush options menu. We want to resize our star to half, creating another star object. Do this now, using the "halve" button. Go back and store this brush in the storage area. Do it again after creating another star at half of this stars value. Now we have three separate star sizes to paint with, and all three should be seen residing in the brush selector areas that is accessed by using the RMB over the scissors icon.	We're going to stay on the scratch screen for a moment so that you have enough time to experiment before committing yourself to finished artwork. Choose the Airbrush tool. If you left click on it repeatedly, you'll see that it has three options represented by: lines, dots, and what appears to be a falling stream of particles. Choose the dot option. The small star should still be attached to your cursor. Move to the screen and do a test spray. Notice the dense appearance of the star objects as they group in the spray. Use the RMB to access the airbrush tool. Select the resizable dot and expand the area of coverage to just about the whole screen. This moves the sprayed elements apart. Go back and test your airbrush. When you feel you have some control over your actions, move to the finish screen (j key) and lay down a pattern. Since TB has multiple undo levels, you can always erase your efforts until you're satisfied. We will use a lot of the smaller "stars", some of the medium sized ones, and just a few of the larger ones. When you're ready, follow the structure as I just outlined it and, using the standard painting tool to paint the non-small stars, structure a finished star composition. (Refer to Figure 5 as one possible example). 	If you look at your painting at this point, Everthing is of equal brightness. When we put other elements in the picture, we will have no sense that there is any depth unless we do something about that. So let's blur out the image at this point. Choose the filled rectangle, and access the effects options menu and the "smooth" option. Cover the whole picture with the filled rectangle. The smaller stars get dimmer as you smooth them, and the larger ones loose their jagged edges. Now, just to add a little spice, paint down areas of single pixel stars anywhere you desire. Refer to Figure 6 as an example.	Now we'll add a planet looming in the sky and a moon, using diverse effects in TrueBrilliance. For the planet, we'll use the filled circle tool and a new gradient range of colors. Choose colors that are interesting to you. These will form the "bands" in the planet's atmosphere. Choose the filled circle and then the "Spherical" option in the effects menu. Paint the planet down on the bottom of the picture, so that part of it disappears at the bottom of the screen. Set the center of the spherical fill (determined when you see the line extending from the circle's center) near the top left edge of the circle so the bands will wrap around the sphere nicely. See Figure 7. 	Now for our "Moon". We'll use a filled circle again, but this time we'll paint it inside with irregular areas. Use whatever tools you like to do this. Place the Moon in the sky above the left edge of the planet. I like to do this on the scratch screen so I can experiment, and when satisfies I bring the image to the finished painting to place it where I want it. By the way, here's how to create 3D looking craters. Choose the filled circle tool and use a varied dark to light gradient. Draw a circle and place the gradient point at the upper left of the circle. Now draw another circle inside that one, with the point of the gradient fill placed at the bottom right. This produces neat looking crater objects on a surface. See my moon in Figure 8. Cut the moon out with the scissors tool, resize it as you like, and place it in the sky on the finished painting. You may want to add some shadowing for effect by choosing "darken" from the effects menu. See Figure 9. Just for effect I added a shadow on the planet, and fuzzed it out a bit.	Now let's imagine that we're looking at all of this while standing on another moon, a craggy surface with its own architecture. We'll use the filled freehand tool with its own gradient of colors. I'm going to use a range of browns and tans, and I'm going to set the dither in the gradient palette about 3/4 of the way up. This will give us a graininess in our closeup terrain. Remember, you lose graininess at a distance, but using it for closer elements gives you the perception of a 3D scene. Play around here until you get something interesting. After I created the basic terrain, I used the smear effect and shadows (darken) to give more depth and realism to the scene.	As a final touch. I used the gradient and polygonal tools to add  the remnants of a forgotten structure, reminiscent of a lost race of beings. I wanted to leave the viewer with the sense of being lost in wonder to wander into the painting further. Additional blurring effects and  smearing was added until the painting appeared finished to me. As an afterthought, I moved the painting into Nova Designs excellent "ImageFX" software to add the flares in the sky.	Enjoy! See you next time in ROMulan space.		Captions-Fig. 1. The TBrilliance Palette requester settings.Fig. 2. The effects and options area in TrueBrilliance allows you to select various painting options.Fig. 3. TrueBrilliance allows you to store graphic brushes in a storage area that can hold up to eight of them.Fig. 4. The brush alteration menu in TrueBrilliance.Fig. 5. Here's the beginning look of our star field.Fig. 6. The altered star field.Fig. 7. The Planet rises.Fig. 8. The cratered moon ready to be placed in the scene. Fig. 9. The moon is now in place in the starry sky.Fig. 10. The next step in the scene' creation with the foreground added. Notice that I've put a few craters in too.Fig. 11. The finished painting.