u-he

Ghostwave · Post by **Ghostwave** » Fri Mar 29, 2013 10:33 pm

Hi,

Here is a little Easter present from me.
A few months ago, I got Zebra and I wanted to recolor the basic skin to make some of the modules more distinctive, like in the Unempty Dark Horse skin.

Here is the result: Crossbreed for Zebra.

Most of the work was recoloring and I also used EvilDragon's modifications to the text colors. I hope he won't mind me using them as he's credited here and in the ReadMe file.

This was tested in Zebra 2.5.4 on Windows.

You can download the skin here.

Have fun with it and feel free to comment.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 5:35 am

No worries about using my modifications to text colors at all.

I see you picked up some ideas from this Howie's GUI suggestion for Zeebs:

Too bad that skin doesn't exist yet.

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 8:00 am

Wait and see...

I've put an incredible amount of work into the user interface editor. There's a various palettes now that make editing almost as easy as in any graphics package.

Panes have alphablending modes now, and each pane can have a set of "Surfaces" that act like layers in Photoshop. They're called that because I've used the word Layer already for switchable panels. There's a range of filter objects that act on such Surfaces, including brightness & contrast, HSV adjustments, gamma correction, Gaussian blur, shadows, bevel & emboss, and noises. Additionally, colour objects can be gradients now. The overall usage isn't as straight forward as in Photoshop, but it retains certain important aspects. For instance, Surfaces and Panes will cache whatever is rendered onto them, so that drawing is fast and economic.

To finish things up, there's also a rudimentary 3D-renderer now that can provide for proper lighting and shadows. So far only spheres have been implemented as primitives, but I'm going to add beveled extrudes for the built-in shape objects. Latter are important because they're all that's needed to render panel backgrounds and knobs in Diva-style interfaces.

Why?

Simple: We don't need to bundle gazillions of graphics anymore. As a designer I don't need to switch between 3 applications anymore. When the ui is resized, there are no blurred backgrounds or blurred text labels anymore.

At some point, a u-he gui will quickly be rendered the first time a UI is opened or resized. At the moment, Bazille renders within a second on a current Macbook Pro. The result can either be cached on the harddrive, or maybe we just save complex graphics (mainly 3D-rendered knobs) in our own format (smaller and loads faster than PNG). PNG will still be supported, and a converter is part of the editor.

In shot: We'll soon have outstanding tools to do custom gui skinning

- Urs

Now, let me just figure out how to render those bloody cables...

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:44 am

That sounds awesome, Urs! Just make sure all keyboard shortcuts work on PC

And I hope a manual is going to happen, too. Or perhaps even video tutorials?

Howard · Post by **Howard** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 12:19 pm

EvilDragon wrote:I hope a manual is going to happen, too. Or perhaps even video tutorials?

Both of those, "fairly soon".

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 12:27 pm

Howie, you're golden!

chardin · Post by **chardin** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 3:05 pm

Is the new user interface editor for Zebra 2.5 or Zebra 3.0?

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 3:13 pm

chardin wrote:Is the new user interface editor for Zebra 2.5 or Zebra 3.0?

It's going to be inside everything we release from, say, May or June.

Ghostwave · Post by **Ghostwave** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 3:38 pm

Urs wrote:
chardin wrote:Is the new user interface editor for Zebra 2.5 or Zebra 3.0?
It's going to be inside everything we release from, say, May or June.

That's great news. 2013, another fantastic year for u-he!

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 5:37 pm

Urs, is the new GUI editor thing going to influence all the currently made skins somehow? Would I have to redo my orange Zebra? :/

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 6:35 pm

EvilDragon wrote:Urs, is the new GUI editor thing going to influence all the currently made skins somehow? Would I have to redo my orange Zebra? :/

Nope, no worries - it's fully backwards compatible. Just additional objects and properties.

Ch00rD · Post by **Ch00rD** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 7:14 pm

Urs wrote:
EvilDragon wrote:Urs, is the new GUI editor thing going to influence all the currently made skins somehow? Would I have to redo my orange Zebra? :/
Nope, no worries - it's fully backwards compatible. Just additional objects and properties.

Awesome news. I've been messing with making skins too, and there is quite a bit of tedious work involved - I'd love to see how much easier things are going to become. Yet another reason to look forward to the upcoming releases.

Re: drawing cables: don't forget to add anti-aliasing and low pass filters to cable / window movement.

TomTwohy · Post by **TomTwohy** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 9:01 pm

I applaud this move to a vector-based USER EDITABLE graphic interface.

The idea of making an interface for Zebra (and other U-he products) appeals to me greatly.

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:50 pm

TomTwohy wrote:I applaud this move to a vector-based USER EDITABLE graphic interface.

The idea of making an interface for Zebra (and other U-he products) appeals to me greatly.

Do *NOT* understimate the geekness of the editor - it's there already if you activate it, and it has become much, much worse!

When I hear Clemens or Sascha curse like "AAAAARGHNNGNNNRKMPF" then it's usually when they try to add a knob somehwere.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sun Mar 31, 2013 8:39 am

Oh haha!

Well why not making it easier somehow

u-he

KVR Audio

Crossbreed, a simple GUI skin for Zebra 2.5