GUI elements

OK, this is long overdue, so I'll be brief with the explanation & get down to business asap.

The concept I've been working on for a while is that we build a fresh & high quality collection of gui elements (control animations) which can include all sorts of controls that we'd like to make available to the SDK developer community. Anyone can contribute gui elements to the thread & they can be either custom, new designs or 'modelled' on existing & classic control designs of pots, knobs, sliders, dials, switches, toggles, leds, lcd animations, basically any relevant gui elements.

OK, lets get started >>>

3D generated Knob animations



Custom pointer pot



Moog-style rotary switch pots (similar to the one used on the moog 904C module) in 3 sizes.



Custom variations of the moog-style pointer knob. >>>



more custom knob designs. >>>





As requested by Wayne... a pair of chickenheads.



custom pitch/mod wheel....



another new knob in 2 flavours.




A simple modern knob design >>>



custom slider cap design in 8 colours. STM sized versions available.



modern knob design with illuminated surround.



Behringer BCR-style LED surround in green.




NOTE:- Downloads are not currently available. In the meantime, if anyone wants something in particular.. just ask.

This is gigantic!!!!! Unbelievable!!!!!!!!!!!
Be sure, there will come some nice devices!!!

Martin

Great idea Shroomz! What are the specifications? (size, number of colours, etc...)

Lima, they need to be 32-bit TGA (Targa) files with an alpha channel defining transparency. This allows for shadows to be included in the animation, although this is not always necessary.

Size doesn't matter

You can have any frame count, but it should preferably be an odd number such as 61, 65 etc. It's also best to keep the animation frame size to an odd pixel number like 55x55, 65x65 etc, as that seems to eliminate the common 'wobble' problem.

Anyone can contribute their work to the collection.

Here's an example of how the black ribbed pot with the new lighter shadows would look when placed on a dark background skin with light graphics.

you (or anyone interested in) may consider to set the rendering params to more than one and to more diffuse lightsources to avoid the artificial look - imgine 8 of these in a row

Even better if the angle of the light sources varies with control position on the surface, or the shadow vanishes occasionally.
Shouldn't be too difficult as it's a reusable setup (and just variations) anyway.

cheers, Tom

Deadly knobbage, Shroomz

How 'bout proper chickenheads?

I'll need to research the chickenheads

In the meantime we've made 4 new versions of the ribbed pots. These ones have no shadows.

Download black custom ribbed pots without shadows here

Download grey custom ribbed pots without shadows here

Wow shroomz!!

very cool stuff... this will raise the looking of many upcoming devices... very nice....

RESPECT!

On 2006-09-03 07:11, astroman wrote:
you (or anyone interested in) may consider to set the rendering params to more than one and to more diffuse lightsources to avoid the artificial look - imgine 8 of these in a row

Even better if the angle of the light sources varies with control position on the surface, or the shadow vanishes occasionally.
Shouldn't be too difficult as it's a reusable setup (and just variations) anyway.

cheers, Tom

First of all, good work shroomz, aparently they are beeing used allready!

Second, to comment on astros reply, i have never used DP myself, but i can imagine the performance of the device would be sacrified if you were to render a pot for every position on the finished device. i ASSUME that using one animated knob instead of say, 20 different renders (approx minimax estimation from my memory) will save cycles. can anyone confirm or deny this?

the 'rendering' of the knob is done with an external (preferably 3D) program, resulting in an animation clip (a sequence of bitmaps).

it doesn't matter how complex the design process was, in that context all bitmaps are indeed created equal

the audio performance cannot be affected as the GUI interaction is native CPU code.

if the system is smart, it could use a single 'mastercontrol' per GUI element type and picture the corresponding frame of the animation by a copy of what's at the respective index position.

If it uses an individual sequence for each single element then there's a load penalty (memory), but not much else to expect regarding performance.

cheers, Tom

i just thought it would be more demanding as each step of the animation is a tga file i im not totally wrong. i assumed loading 20 times more of those files (as in my example) would be more demanding. then again im probarly assuming to much

Piddi, loading say 20 times more animation frames into a device would only really alter it's loading time in SFP (loading 20x61 frames as opposed to 1x61 frames for example) This would also put a little dent in native CPU & Ram usage.

Note that the shadow direction is barely even visible when the pots are put on a dark background with light graphics like the one in the example above.

Extensive custom variations can be achieved, but they are better done at the request of an actual developer as customized versions of a basic design specifically for a device he's making. For example, modifications to shadow & reflection colours could be made to suit a particular colour of background skin (especially brightly coloured ones), which is a relatively simple process. The whole process of creating designs such as these from start to finish however, is a lengthy & very involved one. Multiple versions from different perspectives (for example) would be an extremely time consuming endeavour when you consider that a new custom or modelled pot animation takes 1-2 days minimum to create. Obviously in some cases at the special request of a developer, I'd be willing to walk the extra mile.

There's more designs on the way this week.

"There's more designs on the way this week."

Run, forest, run........


very nice GUI elements...

I`m waiting for the first nice looking free devices ...

On 2006-09-04 02:22, Shroomz wrote:
...Multiple versions from different perspectives (for example) would be an extremely time consuming endeavour when you consider that a new custom or modelled pot animation takes 1-2 days minimum to create. ...

are your tools a business secret (which I'd of course respect) or can you write about them ?

I assumed that the most time consuming process is the geometric model and it's texture - a day isn't too much indeed.

The 'environment' with the virtual lightsources on the other hand remains rather constant (imho), after you found a setting that's visually appealing.

Then you record one animation sequence of the rotating (or otherwise) moved control.
Shift the control to a different location, record another sequence, shift etc.
(according to my humble 3d experiences)

cheers, Tom

On 2006-09-04 07:15, astroman wrote:
are your tools a business secret (which I'd of course respect) or can you write about them ?

No not a business secret, I can write about them.

The basic tools are just a block of modelling wax, a scalpel, some spraypaint & a throw-away Kodak.

I don't really want to get into the depths of tutorial stuff here, but here's a neat trick for anyone using these pots who wants to get them in a nice straight line on their devices...

When you're at the stage of placing pots or other controls on your device in the SDK, simply make 2 versions of your background skin, the actual skin & a temporary version of it to use for alignment which has visible guides (lines) wherever you're puting a row of controls. Using the version with guides, you can accurately place your controls in nice straight lines then simply swap the background skin for the actual version without the guides. Et voila!

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nice job Shroomz. And I thought I was the only one crazy enough to spend hundreds of hours on the knobs and bits of animation required!

Everyone's lucky there're people like you.
simon
De-Vice'

(pheww, those VU meters for my LeveL-DeviL nearly killed me!).

some more well designed knob for your inspiration...

On 2006-09-05 06:10, Shroomz wrote:

took me a while to figure out why all those shadow designs are kind of annoying - nahh, not because they are from Shroomz' toolkit...

it's simply because one is usually (and fortunately) NOT in the position of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, when his head and eye position is fixed while he gets his Beethoven meets violence treatment

angle and shadow intensity slightly change with (natural) movement of the operator.
A random modulator might cover this, but it's just a sidenote.

More important in the design above (and easily fixable) is the non-moving surface of the knob's head. Makes it kind of a Sherman(?) tank animation

chers, Tom

my humble opinion;

The rotary knobs works perfect on dark backgrounds, as seen in the example. The stepped knob (the ones on the yellow background) works very well, the non-rotaing texture mentioned is not an issue at all, as the "index-knob" (sorry, had no idea what to call it )Clearly states the knobs position.

the only thing i would have done different is adjust the shadow parameters of the rendering to raytraced soft shadows, not these hard ones.

if you do gimmicks, you should do them correctly
if you do them on an outstanding system - they should be outstanding as well
average measures don't apply

cheers, Tom

Here are some simple 2-digit numeric displays

Available in 3 flavours



Here's the downloads >>> red lcd</a> green lcd blue lcd

3-digit(0-127) versions will follow shortly.

Custom colours and sizes are available on request.

i get your point mate

its just that if the positional knobs top-texture shoud be moving as well it would feel MORE artificial than it allready does. the reason is that there is no frames in-between positions.

Cant wait to see devices with these knobs n stuff on it, theyre awesome!

Thanks to everyone for the comments & good vibes.

A little about aluminium knob caps. There are several factors which can cause a cap's light, shadows & reflections to change:-

1. When you turn a real knob which has an aluminium cap, your fingers create shadows & a reflection of your 2 fingers appears on the cap. This is not applicable here unless virtual fingers are included in the animation, which although funny would obviously be rather stupid.

2. If the pot shaft which a real knob is attached to has a 'wobble' (isn't straight) the knob will obviously wobble too, which causes a slight shimmer on an aluminium cap. This isn't applicable here unless we want a collection of wobbly knob animations. We can however provide such a customization if requested by a developer.

3. There are several external factors which could cause changes in a knob's aluminium cap, such as a bird flying past your studio window for example. Again this factor is not applicable here.

Here's the 3-digit numeric displays



Here's the downloads >>> red lcd</a> green lcd blue lcd

Hey Sharc!
Nice GUI elements! May I use them in my devices?

Martin

Yes, of course you can use them Martin. They're free for anyone to use, just like the other GUI elements posted by my brother Shroomz. Credit isn't necessary either, but if you want to give credit to myself and Shroomz, our design alias is 'pixelbites'. If you'd like a custom version, this is also no problem. Just send me a private message with your requirements.

Sorry for the interuption, we've got a temporary ISP problem. We should be back online later today & when we are, we'll put this gui elements collection into overdrive!!

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brotha'man shroomz..... AMAZING!!!

but, i didn't have the time to try my sdk

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give us the body of shroomz

holy shit.... where will this end.

These chickenheads look even nicer than the others.....

wowwwwwwwww!

Its a shame that the devices don`t jump at us that fast like your knobs ....


well done. keep up the good work.

The knobs with the 9 different coloured caps posted just before the chickenheads need level adjustments & made more glossy. Just noticed that thismorning, so we'll sort them sometime today. The chickenheads might need level adjustments too, so I'll look at that.

In the meantime, here's a custom pitch/mod wheel. The preview shows it as a pitch wheel, but it can also be used as a matching mod wheel. >>>

Masterful stuff

Fantastic stuff Shroomz! You're strong with the graphics!!!

very cool.

I've had people who might contribute here asking privately for some specifics about the lighting configuration used for these controls. Instead of going into too much detail here, I'll try to find the time to post a very basic gui element tutorial thread which outlines the methods & tricks used here.

In the meantime, I should explain that I've been using the same 3ds project for all of these controls. The project has several strategicaly placed omni lights. To retain their positions & settings & keep some consistancy throughout the collection I just load up the same project each time, delete the knob or whatever it was modelling & then build my new model in it's place (in the same central location)

Anyone who wants to contribute to the collection is welcome to use my 3ds project as a starting point, which will mean that all controls we build have the same light sources & lighting settings. Anyone not well versed in max however, should be aware that material editor attributes, settings & maps are very very important in terms of a surfaces' reaction to light, shadows & reflections etc (not to mention colour).

Other important things to note are:-

1. To cut down render times & get proper alpha channel inclusion in the animations, we're no longer including background shadows, so there should be NO background 'plane' or 'surface' beneath your model (for customized versions with background shadows in the alpha channel, please ask via PM)

2. Rotation motion should be done in 3d. The knobs here are rotating 300 degrees in total across 65 frames (150 deg' left & right of center) Straight key-in & key out tangents should be used to keep a consistant speed, otherwise (with default settings) your animation will speed up at the start & slow down at the end, which you don't want.

3. When rendering your final animation, the minimum size you can get away with is 320x240, but 640x480 is advisable if you want decent results. This way your animation frames will be relatively high resolution before you begin the process of editing & sizing down in 2d.

4. If you're using ph0t0sh0p, learn how the action scripts & batch processing work if you don't already know them, as they are essential for this type of work.

I'll go into more detail in a tutorial thread where we can discuss all this in detail & help one-another when stuck. In the meantime, if anyone has questions or needs help making gui elements, please send me a PM & I'll try to help.

you earn my highest respect for your professional work and explanations.

add some 3D faders and 3D buttons and you have done a complete suite of GUI designing tools for scope DP...

Really I want a Scope 15 kit + SDK.

A synth with these graphics would look like hell good. I think even better than CWs stock synths...

And while the sound stays the same, I just makes much more fun to play with nice looking tools...

BTW:I have a 1000pages 3DS-Max book at home and never really read it...

But its a powerful tool. I know

puuuuh, i remember the times i used bryce 3d... this was a pain in the a... think/hope it's a lot easier today. however, thanx to shroomz for his great work!

There is a very well developed application that is open source and free to use and i'm switching from cinema 4d to it, because it is lighter than any other 3d application, it is cross platform and it runs very fast on linux, so, i'm using a linux based network for my 3d jobs .

here is the link http://blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html

Micron

Re: Gimp and Blender, I've tried both of these out over the past few months. I've actually still got Gimp installed here on the Net machine. They're certainly both capable bits of software and for most people wanting to dabble with some graphics they'll usually do the job. That said, IMO there's really no comparison between Gimp and CS2. The way I see it, I've spent lots of money on music hardware and software for my hobby and as a professional designer I didn't mind doing the same with graphics software. Don't get me wrong though. If you're after the free alternative, you won't get much better than Blender and Gimp.

You can use whatever software suits your needs & pocket, but the saying 'you get what you pay for' does apply to design software. Having thoroughly checked them out I really don't like the apps in general or the workflow in either blender or gimp. They're 3rd rate to be honest & definately not even close to comparable with max or PS. Very few design studios in the world would use the free, open source tools, simply because they aren't good enough.

I liked the 'idea' of both blender & gimp being free, thinking they could maybe get us away from expensive upgrades every 2/3 years. Unfortunately, having given them a shot out of interest, they just don't cut it. With a lot of time spent learning they're workings, I'm sure some half decent results are possible, but I've yet to see any decent gui elements made with blender & or gimp.

Respect...

You've made a great start Stardust & it would be great if you keep going & contribute your work here. Just one thing: Your preview should preferably be representative of what the actual knob animations look like. All the design previews posted on this thread are 'actual' size with the only difference being that we've put them on a background. I think it's nice if 'what you see is what you get', as that way people aren't mislead in any way.

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beautifull!!!

cheers,
jan

the first Shroomboyz release cannot be far...
don't leave out a phantasy set with a forest theme, like owls turning heads, red dwarfs showing up and of course mushrooms as knobs

cheers, tom (kidding)

Shroomboyz

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wow Shroomz,

every day when I am looking into this thread, you pull out even more cool sh**!

The graphics and your free work for this community def. rockz!!!!

Your designs look even much better than most CW standard ones.

Thanks a lot, but the best is still to come I assure you

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Wow, these knobs would be great with seperated inner circle and ring. So in MOVEknott one could set values and show movement with one knob. Maybe I will build a smaller version, which uses such feature. Problem in this version would be the amount of graphical movement on screen (which is actually quite heavy for my slow computer with the visualisation-panel on). So I'll keep my 'big' version seperated and with faders, which should be less graphic-power-eating...

Martin

Martin, I understand what you're getting at functionally, but do you mean you would like these illuminated surrounds separate to use with the existing black MOVknott knobs or would you like these knobs & surrounds separated? Either way, it's no problem & I'll send you the customized versions off-list so that you have 'unique' & exclusive versions for your device. I think it would be interesting to see the results of your idea, as it would be very unique.

Unfortunately, it would be tomorrow sometime before I could send the new work. Let me know either way & if you have a colour preference or want all 3 colour variations.

Great idea btw !!!

I have just recently recieved my SDK CD-ROM and am so busy working and trying to learn Solaris/ProWave Modulars, and comprehend all of my new rehersal cues, I doubt I will get to this anytime soon. It is good to know that you made these, as I thought I was going to have to learn 3d rendering and graphics software. It is exactly what I want to do with my projects. Playing live requires me to stay away from the LCD while performing, and this will help as I need to glance over at times, but the black and gray colors are not easily seen which sucks. I am hoping to customise all of my projects with these, and my upcoming DAS / Ultimate Ears FOH / Monitor DAW, and the SFP drum submixing DAW. Your recordings, as well as your graphics works is deeply appreciated. This forum makes paying the 1500 USD 4 SFP Professional cards a sound purchase. I could have never snagged the dance gig I'm doing with my archaic hardware touring rig, and that's a fact jack!!

Incense And Peppermints,

Sent you those surrounds separated Martin. You'll notice there's transparency in place of the knobs & also a new red version. Let me know if they're what you wanted. It's worth mentioning that if you want to streamline the file sizes of any of these knob animations, even just for your own machine, you can easily chop the 65 frame animations down to 33 frame versions by simply deleting every second frame left & right of center. You may have already done this with the tiny little knobs you've put on MOVknott.

I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to put all the downloads on this thread in a password protected location in an attempt to keep the designs in-house for SFP devs. I know it could still be hacked, but not by just anyone. What do you think?

go for it...
you have done work that one can trade for many suppers. thanks for providing the developers with some nice graphics!

Shroomz,
You and Brotha' Man Sharc have spent valuable time with your work, and agree it should be protected, and possibly liscensed if any developers profit from it's use. I hope the latter for you, as I'm sure you know what I'm banking on. These are a godsend for live players, and just down right bitchin' for any dark mysterious studio which will add custom LCD options. For instance, it is a must for me to have magenta as my special when using 1000 watt PAR lamps sweating the top off of my head. I had a unique piano teacher from the St.Louis Symphony as a child through my early teens, as Hendrix guitar licks were more fun than Chopin, I became a rocker and discovered blow jobs. But when I was 5 till 14, every manuscript I practiced from had these little avatars of a pair of eyeglasses using the color magenta. It was for every imperfection from wrong speeds, to wrong notes and dynamics, that these little reminders lessened every year as I performed at monthly recitals and auditions for music theory and composition classes, which were free if you placed well. For some reason the color of the gels in the 1000 watt lamps just makes me feel safe and unafaid , or it serves as a reminder for my years of study which I am eternally grateful for. But some people are unaware of the effect that colors can have on your productivity / comfort. I will choose the yellow neon for my stuff, as it will show up nicely with a black background. I think your productivity level is on a roll here with this GUI. The boring days of placing a picture of a dead ananlog synth, or vintage compressor on the LCD is long gone my friend. They are of no value to me onstage, as I couldn't read them in all the lights back in the late '70's and this hasn't changed, till now that is. I can't believe that Creamware and other third party developers will continue to build and not consider their use. Since Solaris was a virtual synth in it's conception, it was only logical to emulate a hardware control surface. Just imagine John Bowen re-doing it's GUI in the dark, while tripping on mushrooms and coffee! Inspiring 'eh?


Long Live The Queen,





_________________
Jimmy V.

hi shroomz

maybe you should just attach them to a creative commons licence, which in short would allow users to use them freely on free devices, but making them pay on comercial devs be it everything from Scope and vst devs to other interfaces?

http://creativecommons.org/


maybe a nice way to make a name (even if thats not your main intention it might be nice

An excellant idea. This is a no lawyer fee approach to a limited partnership agreement. I seem to despise paying lawyers their high fees for my adolescant antics, when I could be buying more DSP's, or Jaeger.

I'll look into that too piddi, but I do think we should try to keep these gui elements in-house & exclusive for use on Scope devices. Unfortunately I couldn't get our ftp client to password protect files or folders on sharc's pwp & since his space is running out, we need to look at hiring server space asap. In the meantime I have another idea for password protection, which I'll sort out today.

Ok, the downloads are as they were, but all of the zip archives are now password protected. Not completely secure, but better than being freely available to anyone who stumbles in here from google. I should've done this sooner.

There's too many developers here to send private messages to you all, so anyone who needs the password is more than welcome to PM me for it.

i still think u should do a rights management thig about them, just in case. not neccecarily CC but Something ... a zip pass aint worth that much really

Done

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looks sweet!

I've removed the animated gifs & replaced them with still shots. It was done mainly because the bandwidth required to view this thread was getting too heavy & was rediculously slow when I checked it out on my parents 56k connection. It's much faster now.

another nice design....

I don't care if is merely a JPG... I want one!!!
(DAS has right: the interface is all )

absolutely fantastic!

Shroomz,

the slider caps are fantastic
what program do you use?
I know nothing......
can you help me
I am looking for a (step by step) site or tutorial where they explain how you make buttons, sliders and knobs
And how you get them working in a GUI

Thanks

Euler

Hi & welcome to planetZ!!!

When I have the time I'll maybe try to write some tutorials, but I'm too busy at the moment.

regards,
Shroomz

The problem with creating a tutorial is that it would take a considerable amount of time to produce and in the end some key areas of the tutorial would be very program specific. For learning how to model and animate your own GUI elements, I would recommend that you use the tutorials supplied for whatever piece of 3d software you're using.

Then it's just a case of rendering the animated scene with each animation frame set to be saved as a TGA. If you're 3d software allows for it, set each render to produce an alpha channel for transparency, otherwise you'll have the tedious task of masking individual frames in a 2d app.

You then load the TGA files into you're 2d app (photoshop, gimp, etc) and crop and resize them to their finished size.

Shroomz, Stardust, Sharc,

Thanks for your reply
I will continue my search

Forgot to ask!

I would like to download some of your TGA+'s
For that I need a password
Who can authorize me?

Kind Regards

Euler

Hi,

the only people who get the password for these graphics are those known here on Z who are actively developing with the Scope sdk & releasing devices here on the forum.

For the moment, new PlanetZ members such as yourself & others who've asked me via PM are unknown to us, so unfortunately until you begin releasing some devices for Scope you can't use the graphics.

Sorry if this seems too harsh, but we wish the gui elements here to be used by SFP developers & not be used on other platforms.

I hope all those who already have the password will appreciate & respect this point of view by not giving out the password to anyone we don't know to be actively developing & releasing devices for Scope.

Thanks

Shroomz,

Perfectly clear

At the moment busy with Blender (good choice?)

Next step, trying to copy your sliders caps for fun

Step by step. It will probably take a while

Greetings Euler

For anyone who doesn't realise it, the behringer-style surround below is JUST a surround & is supposed to have a behringer-style knob placed on top of it, otherwise it won't look right. I did a red version of these just after doing the green ones which only MCCYRANO & Olive at DAS have at the moment. The red one is perhaps a little too close to behringers' design for legal reasons, but If anyone else wants the red version or the password for the gui element downloads, just send me a PM instead of posting here please. Thanks.

At the moment busy with Blender (good choice?)

DJmicron reports Blender working well on his linux-based render farm. If you're not already familiar with the workflow in max or maya, blender might suit your needs. I'm not a fan of blender, but I think that's because I'm already familiar with the workflow in max and only spent a week working with Blender before returning to the comfort of what I know.

Next step, trying to copy your sliders caps for fun

Step by step. It will probably take a while

Well, that's an odd way of having fun from my perspective (pardon the pun), but each to their own.

My advise would be to model real life slider caps rather than my 3d modelled designs which you only see represented here in 2d, but of course nobody can tell you what & what not to do with your time.

Why don't we (by 'we', I mean anyone willing to contribute) just release our gui elements as 'modules' (mdls) specifically for sdk users.

No, I'm still on a security trip & want these graphics only used on Scope, so although packing the animations as modules would render them less flexible, they'd also be more 'specifically' for Scope in the 'mdl' format.

I'll leave the existing animation archives as they are, but future gui element releases (from us anyway) might be packed as modules for the above reason.