KnobMan/SkinMan Examples

[xoxos]

probably blender

POVray is probably great for animating gui elements. there's oc no gui and not a lot of options for doing fancy stuff, like diffuse light. if all you want to do are basic solids and you type, POV's your baby

being text, povray is math friendly - http://www.dimensions-math.org/ (a good 2 hours to blow)

w/o using a modeler/being an intuitive bezier patcher, you may only get as good as me :p

[duncanparsons]

w/o using a modeler/being an intuitive bezier patcher, you may only get as good as me :p

rurik, that's ace!

[aciddose]

i've recently been updating the graphics for my free effects plugins. one thing i've noticed is that there is absolutely no good looking rocker switch or slide switch in any vst that i've ever seen without it being modeled in 3d and rendered directly to bitmap - in other words, it seems in order to make them look good the require a variable perspective.

http://xhip.cjb.net/effects/releases/ad_gate.png
http://xhip.cjb.net/effects/releases/ad_gate.dll

the slide switch i have here is obviously as simple as it gets, a grey rectangle inside a grey rectangle. i could go the route of using some lines perpendicular to the axis of the switch on the handle as is the usual case but it would be quite a lot of fiddling to get the perspective effect correct without some kind of example to work from.

i think the knobs are quite ok and would be hard to beat without using variable 3d perspective.

so what are your thoughts on slide and rocker switches?

is it really all that hard to do this:

http://media.digikey.com/photos/CW%20In ... SERIES.jpg

the elements i guess are:
inner gradient
inner rim gradient
black "hole" border around inner switch
inside flat outer gradient
sloped outer edge gradients
outer rim gradients

i'll have to do this myself, but i just wanted to bring it up that nobody seems to have used this type of element so far.

i haven't actually seen any of these done well either:

http://media.digikey.com/photos/Tyco%20 ... 00PC04.jpg

[antto]

the slide-switch thing.. using MS Paint and pencil tool (only the audio and MIDI jacks was done in vector graphics because of the round shape and shininess..)

i've also done some of these

http://media.digikey.com/photos/CW%20In ... SERIES.jpg

type of switches again with only the pencil tool

[aciddose]

it looks ok at small sizes like that, but what about when you want larger sizes like 32x16 ? at that point you need some real shading.

if only we could just do pixel graphics and have everything 12x6 pixels in size it wouldn't be an issue at all. we're using resolutions like 1920x1600 now commonly and blur is no longer an issue with dvi/hdmi and high quality lcd panels. so you can't get away with poor quality shading - the pixel-to-pixel quality is 100%, and you can't get away with using less pixels because they show up as 5mm wide on the screen.

to be considered top notch graphically you need to look better than photographic - like hdr.

we're even regularly facing the 8-bit-channel limit where any reasonably soft gradient becomes stripped like crazy. that can be delt with by dither quite easily, but the fact it must be considered is quite insane compared to what we did graphically 15 years ago.

[WOK]

i've recently been updating the graphics for my free effects plugins. one thing i've noticed is that there is absolutely no good looking rocker switch or slide switch in any vst that i've ever seen without it being modeled in 3d and rendered directly to bitmap - in other words, it seems in order to make them look good the require a variable perspective.

(Knobman, but not my work)

[aciddose]

ah, i've seen those yes. they're about half-way there and might be better with some tweaking but i really don't think they'd sit next to my knobs, for example. that's the main problem i'm facing. everything needs to blend together in the same style and with the same lighting. i'll be doing this and i'll post the results i get, i was just mentioning it because it doesn't seem to have been considered in much depth and they're quite useful controls.

[WOK]

http://media.digikey.com/photos/CW%20In ... SERIES.jpg

[aciddose]

i notice knobman doesn't have gamma-correction. is it that i'm just not finding it, or does it lack this as a feature?

doing all blending in float gamma adjusted mode and then converting back to linear when rendering should produce much better results for a lot of the anti-aliased portions.

[WOK]

i notice knobman doesn't have gamma-correction. is it that i'm just not finding it, or does it lack this as a feature?
doing all blending in float gamma adjusted mode and then converting back to linear when rendering should produce much better results for a lot of the anti-aliased portions.

I think it doesn't. The dissolve/diffuse sometimes could be "softer". Also when using the .png in Synthedit there is the problem, that Synthedit uses "background premultiplied" png, while Knobman exports the standard format.

[mystran]

i notice knobman doesn't have gamma-correction. is it that i'm just not finding it, or does it lack this as a feature?

doing all blending in float gamma adjusted mode and then converting back to linear when rendering should produce much better results for a lot of the anti-aliased portions.

Last time I checked it didn't really even do proper sub-pixel positioning so you could just as well design at higher resolution and scale down... though then we hit the problem that most image processing apps won't do the scaling in gamma-linear color space either.

[aciddose]

Also when using the .png in Synthedit there is the problem, that Synthedit uses "background premultiplied" png, while Knobman exports the standard format.

which is fairly silly since a single button could just trigger a multiply of the entire bitmap during export to solve that.

i hadn't tried using it much before, but now that i have it definitely seems too limited for what i'm doing. my own code produces much better results. it seems useful for working out basic ideas quickly, though. it's a lot more light-weight than something like photoshop.

[WOK]

i hadn't tried using it much before, but now that i have it definitely seems too limited for what i'm doing. my own code produces much better results. it seems useful for working out basic ideas quickly, though. it's a lot more light-weight than something like photoshop.

Well, Photoshop is a litter higher priced, I think
Also, the learning curve is a little steeper.
Doing animated knobs with scaling or numbers for me is quick in Knobman. Also there is the ability for lossless resizing.
There are some things to improve, but it does a quite good job.
All my GUIs where made with knobman/skinman.

[xoxos]

aciddose, POVray is something you'd really appreciate, especially with c++. it is NOT going to be a steep learning curve for you, the occasional tap of the "?scene" button to ref syntax is likey to be it.

ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Old-Ver ... icial-3.5/

3.6 was a little bit buggy, i haven't tried 3.62 or 3.7 yet. 3.5 is s.o.l.i.d., doc is very clear, with good walkthrus.

here:


(wha..? then YOU try going thru your code looking for a concise, clear example! )

Code: Select all

#include "colors.inc"
#include "textures.inc"
#include "woods.inc"

camera{
        location<-5,3,-8>look_at<0,0,0>}

background{color rgb 1} 

light_source{<-10,50,0>
        color rgb .9
        area_light <-15,100,-15>,<15,100,15>,5,5
        circular
}

#declare headtex = texture{pigment{color rgb .8}
        normal{
                dents .5
                scale .7
        }
        finish {ambient 0.7
                diffuse .3
                specular 0.05
                phong 0.02
                phong_size 0.03
                reflection 0
                roughness 0.2
        }
} 

#declare springtex = texture{
        pigment{color rgb .5}
        finish {ambient 0.7
                diffuse .5
                specular 0.05
                phong 0.02
                phong_size 0.03
                reflection .4
                roughness 0.2
        }
}

#declare blocktex = texture{pigment{color rgb .9}
    normal {
      wrinkles 1.9
      turbulence 0.9
      scale .02
      accuracy .4
    }
        finish {ambient 0.7
                diffuse .5
                specular 0.05
                phong 0.02
                phong_size 0.03
                reflection .0
                roughness 0.5
        }
} 

#declare head=intersection{
        sphere{<0,.5,0>,1}
        box{<-1,.5,-1>,<1,2,1> inverse}
        texture{headtex}
}
object{head}

#declare spring=blob{
        threshold .2
        #declare i=0;
        #while(i <=1)
        sphere{<.7,.5 + i*2,0>,.1 .9 rotate y*(i*1777)}   
        #declare i = i + .001;
        #end
        texture{springtex}
}

object{spring}

box{<-1,-2.5,-1>,<1,-.5,1> texture{blocktex}}

notice Constructive Solid Geometry in 'head' (sphere - box = half sphere) - easy to make lots of shapes..


duncan - you becha!

[WOK]

9 object layers in Knobman, 40 min work