Phergus wrote:I didn't realize that this knowledge had gotten lost somewhere along the way. If you search way back early on in some of Dorpond's posts you would find discussion of door images and properly orienting the door imagery within a square box such that rotating them maintained alignment. I think there used to be a sticky post on this somewhere but maybe not. It's been years.
Just to clarify, because I get the impression you still think we are referring to a different issue and I don't want anyone reading this thread misunderstanding the problem. We were not having issues with doors
"rotating" properly. That was never the problem.
It's always been understood that the objects need to be squared in order to rotate along the correct axis.
The issue has to do specifically with
"aligning" double doors and using the animated door macro from the BoT. We can get the doors to rotate all day long just fine. However, double doors will not appear to be aligned properly when closed if the original png graphic is not squared.
If I was to set up your Door, Wooden 2" in your above example to animate as a double door using the BoT macro, neither of your doors would align correctly when closed. You don't have them as squared png files. What I was doing (apparently bad) was to take the door like your "Door, Wooden 2" and resize it within MT as a medium or large sized object in order to make it squared. As a double door, that's bad and the two doors won't align. Sure, they rotate perfectly. They swing open as expected. But when they are closed, they don't appear perfectly lined up.
The solution is to resize the bounding box (or canvas area) in Photoshop to be squared and then bring them into MT. We should not rely on the MT resizing object feature to create medium or large sized squared doors. That's bad. Although, if the original graphic is a squared png file, then resizing to medium or large will still work just fine.
Phergus wrote:I don't use oversized images for my doors or other decor objects. They are only as big as they need to be though they may be 2x or 3x map resolution. Objects with huge transparent areas around them make it hard or impossible to make use of the Note fields on objects to convey info to the players.
I prefer having my objects higher resolution than my maps and size them down within MT so that when you zoom in on the MT map, they don't degrade their quality. This is completely different from making a large bounding box and as you point out, having a big bounding box around the graphic accomplishes nothing except getting in your way. But, you have to have a large bounding box around the door graphic if you want to avoid the issue we are discussing in this thread. No other graphics will have this problem unless you are using the animated double door macro.
Still, as you point out, the door object will get in the way of the other graphics when it has a large bounding box. To deal with this, I always keep all of my moveable objects (in game objects that might physically be moved) on the object layer (chairs, crates, barrels, handheld objects, etc, etc). Objects that probably won't be moved (rugs, tables, beds) go on the background layer. So I put my door graphics on the background layer since I use the BoT switches (placed on the Token layer) to open them. If there is still a static object near the door object that I might want to access but can't if the door's large bounding box covers it, then I make sure the door object is "moved to back" so it is behind other objects.
So, my graphics are all sized like in your example. Except for my animated doors. They have a large squared bounding box in order for the BoT to function properly when animating them. If you are not using the BoT animated door macro, specifically the double door macro, then none of my comments in this thread are relevant. Your posts are still helpful to remind users how to create a door graphic and have it properly rotate, but that is a separate beast than what I was trying to problem solve.