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Postby ALAS » July 23rd, 2007, 3:04 am

this is my current work, it´s almost done. The special thing are curved (or bent?) track and time layers, after a lot of work they run very smooth.

I wanted you to have a look at it before submission...

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Postby SLoB » July 23rd, 2007, 3:29 am

great job on the curved text, i was also going to incorporate that idea into a skin, its harder to do without any help tho, hopefully in time Cliff might be able to support paths or preset curves ;)
wa for example can do curved text but involves a little bit of special fx maki to do it properly

the shape sort of looks like a cross between a pair of sunglasses and a bra ;)

perhaps some sheen/reflection on the metal and possible reflection on the opposite middle section?
try and smoothe the bottom/top sections of the bevel and perhaps put in some white gradient highlights on the edges to help give it more depth

another trick i use to add a little more depth would be to select the outer shape, create a new layer, fill it with black, keep selection and contract 4 pixels, goto gaussian blur and blur a lot until you get a nice even shadow/you might also need to scale it out a little too so that its the outer edge your covering, then select the original layer shape, inverse selection and delete the outer part, this leaves a nice even shadow all round
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Postby KEV-O » July 23rd, 2007, 2:43 pm

awe sweet. I attempted the curved text one time... and gave up.
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Postby pickle » July 23rd, 2007, 4:17 pm

Can't wait to dissect that one & find out how you did curved text!
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Postby ALAS » July 24th, 2007, 7:38 am

at the first attempt i tried to do the anti-aliasing manually, which wasn´t THAT cool. Then I found out how to use photoshop´s aa to get good results. It´s not perfect but works, maybe I´ll post something like a tutorial here sometimes.

... today I found that this really eats CPU-power. Obviously track layers do that anyway (think it´s the update of scrolling) but if you use a lot of them like in that curved text it only works good on fast CPUs...

I wonder what´s more CPU power saving. Lots of seperate layers like in my skin or if Xion manages to do some paths or so which I imagine to be CPU intesive...?!

Cliff, what would you say?


P.S.: also found that it is actually critical for CPU power how many pixels a track layer has
(though I thought any layer is handeled the same, regardless if empty or not...)

this would arise the question: how much costs an empty layer?
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Postby SLoB » July 24th, 2007, 7:48 am

they are handled as rectangles afaik which explains the same cost regardless

another idea?
could be to give single letter layers (proper LETTER keyworded layers that is (not normal text layer)) and make up a string by adjoining those letter layers next to each other, then those could be place in any sort of shape and given an orientation such as vertical/horizontal + tb/bt/rl/lr
bind them with a single id and Xion would see how many letter layers make up a string and use that array to store the text
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Postby ALAS » July 24th, 2007, 8:28 am

didn´t understand it all but i think you are ... wright, haha ;-)
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Postby ALAS » July 24th, 2007, 8:31 am

SLoB Wrote:they are handled as rectangles afaik which explains the same cost regardless



just saw that CPU is more relaxed after i deleted some pixel area in the track layers..
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Postby Cliff Cawley » July 24th, 2007, 12:54 pm

ALAS Wrote:
SLoB Wrote:they are handled as rectangles afaik which explains the same cost regardless



just saw that CPU is more relaxed after i deleted some pixel area in the track layers..


If you could send me a copy of this high CPU skin, I could take a look at it and give you some feedback as to why its using so much. Possibly its a bug in the Xion rendering code.

Xion's rendering works as follows:

When a layer is marked as dirty (such as the track name scrolling), then Xion will calculate a dirty rectangle for that entire layer. It then uses this dirty rectangle to redraw ALL layers underneath that layer, and then above that overlap that dirty rectangle. It doesn't redraw the entire layer though, only what overlaps within the dirty rectangle.

There is a bunch of optimization to split and combine rectangles to eliminate overlap, but since its all in software, having many layers to render is very CPU intensive.

The more individual overlapping layers that are below the dirty layer, the more Xion will have to render.

Therefore it is a good optimization idea as an artist, to flatten and merge multiple layers into one to save on redraw. I.e. if you have a steel surface with many little bolts then instead of leaving the bolts on separate layers, merge them into the steel surface.

Of course there are limitations to doing this. I do hope to have some time soon to investigate using DirectX for hardware acceleration so that skins take almost no time at all to render, even with many layers.

If this is successful, it will ensure that slower CPUs can render the skins at full speed, consuming 0-1% of CPU, if that ;)

Cliff :)
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Postby ALAS » July 24th, 2007, 8:13 pm

sent some psd to you Cliff :-)
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Postby I.R. Brainiac » July 24th, 2007, 9:35 pm

very cool !...I was toying with a similar idea or approching and receding text. :D
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