Advanced Overlay feature discussion

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trevor
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Advanced Overlay feature discussion

Post by trevor »

There have been a couple requests for the ability to have more advanced overlays, specifically having overlays that have color and translucency outside of the actual token (think drop shadow).

The reason this wasn't initially supported is because I wanted to discourage using translucency in tokens. Java 5 can't accelerate translucent images, so the fewer you have the better.

However, the added prettyness of the translucency might be compelling enough to at least make it an option for those that want to use it.

The existing system of using the image to dictate how the overlay works is not sufficient to provide this functionality. That is, there has to be two distinct indicators for translucency, one for true alpha, the other to say what is "see through" on the final image.

The existing functionality will stay the same, but I'd like to add in the ability of "advanced overlays" that will support this.

The only way I can think of to support this is to add in the concept of a mask. I'd like to get some of you graphic oriented people's opinion.

The idea is that you would create a separate image of the same size as the overlay. This mask would then indicate what part of the overlay should contain the image. For example, all white pixels would indicate pulling in the image pixels under the overlay. In this way you would be able to create very elaborate overlays without having to deal with the 255, 0, 255 messiness, by specifying only what part of the overlay includes pixels from the source image.

The ugly part is that you have to deal with two images. One thought on that is to support a very simple interface for adding masks directly in TokenTool. Not the biggest fan of this because there are lots of programs that do that already, and that you can't just share the overlay with others.

So what I was thinking was to create a .overlay file format, which would be a zip file that contains a image and mask file (most likely named image.png and mask.png, or any supported image format), which could be dropped into the Overlay Manager dialog. With this format you could then upload the token to the gallery to share with others (although have to come up with a way to make it thumbnailable. Hmmm.

So, what do you all think ?
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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Vry
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Post by Vry »

What I’d like to see, but would probably too cumbersome for most would be a system of four “layers.”

Final Mask (Black and white image. White=Visible, Black = Transparent)
Overlay + (Mask or Native Transparency)
Image + (Mask or Native Transparency)
Underlay (No transparency needed)

Image

As shown above, this method can be used to make some fairly complex tokens, including those borderless tokens some have wanted for a while now.

It'd also be nice if the masks could be generated in the tool with drawing tools, but that'd be getting very complicated.

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drswoboda
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Post by drswoboda »

It would be very nice to have some advanced masking ability in Token Tool, such as suggested by Vry.

Full support of Alpha channels (.tga, .png, .tif, .psd, etc) and or native Photoshop layers would be very cool. Some of what Vry talks about is very simular to clipping layers in PS. Pre-multiplication will be an issue, with either straight or premultiplied alphas. I'm a compositing guy, so Alpha Channels is second nature to me, but voodoo to others.

I trust you'll figure out some good options.
-David

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brisingre
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Post by brisingre »

I really like Vry's idea. THis shouldn't be too hard, I don't think. I t doesn't sound to comlex. My only edition would be that these layers shouldn't all be required, so that the old way still works. I would put in a little overlay editor in the overlay management screen where you could put images into the three layers that aren't the image and save that as a .ovr file or something that tokentool could read, and also edit these files.
Chaotic Neutral means never having to say you're sorry.

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

brisingre wrote:I really like Vry's idea. THis shouldn't be too hard, I don't think. I t doesn't sound to comlex. My only edition would be that these layers shouldn't all be required, so that the old way still works. I would put in a little overlay editor in the overlay management screen where you could put images into the three layers that aren't the image and save that as a .ovr file or something that tokentool could read, and also edit these files.
My thoughts exactly :)
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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