Current skin questions...
 

I've been working on this skin for a while now (very slowly) and have posted quetions on it before, but I've hit a bit of a rut. I realized that using a homeade steel texture, that I'll need to skin all the window virtually simultaniously. But, my question is how to get the mini-browser and playlist's tiling feature to look right with this texture...anybody got any ideas? Any comments on the main are welcome as well, although no feature work yet, it's just layed out and bordered...thanx!

hmm, actually most of what I see right now is you're going to run into a problem with the text areas on the main with the gradient unless you're planning on putting a plain colored area on top of it, same with where the frequency numbers are since the background in the numbers and in the text has to be consistent; you can shade top to bottom but not right to left.

For the repeating areas - easiest is to make a bar or area on top of the brushed part that CAN be repeated and have the ends of it in the non-repeating areas. It's that or try to make it match up which can be painstaking for textures, might want to see if anyone else who does a lot with MS Paint has any suggestions ^_~

dimichan cover almost everything

your might wanna dump all the flashy blue and go with a solid color cause just think, the playlist CANT look like that, and also the EQ bars, you can keep the blue, but just not like that cause if you do you gonna have a hell of a time getting anything to look right and in the end youll see.


so yeah go solid

I make all my skins with MSPaint, and I would have to say that a good idea would be to extend the metal to where the song title will be, and make a plain bg in there. Another thing is, it is almost impossible to make a good gradient in the EQ, unless it is top to bottom, so you will run into problems there.Maybe a bit with transparencies might be a good idea in the EQ, to avoid messing up the gradient. The PL window will be hard to skin, especially since gradients are impossible. But it is possible to do things like pick a middle are color from the gradient, and use that in the PL window.

For the tiling, you could switch from a diagonal to a side-to-side gradient for the metal texture, and that would make skinning the tiles a lot easier.

If you haven't already, I suggest using Jellby's Skinner's Atlas, because it will make things a lot easier.

And if you want the link, look in my sig :D

Thanx for the tips guys! What I've been thinking is that I'll use a sort of green light beem going from slot to slot in the metal texture for the scrolling text...any ideas for a light beem effect? I was going to use a gradient going for 200green to a lighter green and then to transparent, but it's such a small area, it didn't look very good...I may have to make the posbar slots a bit bigger for the effect...I dunno yet...

As for the tiling, I think I'll go from the texture to a solid color with some sort of obstructions and tile that...what do you think? I'll post a pic when I get it skinned...

Again, thanx for all the help!!!

If you are using photoshop, you can get a quick green beam by selecting the paintbrush, then a soft brush (size 9, for example), and painting with the shift key pressed (you'll get a straight horizontal line). As for the posbar, you can have a thinner posbar (and slider) if you crop the posbar.bmp file.

Thanx jellby! I didn't think of the airbrush:confused: I'll try this and let ya know how it worked!

I wouldn't use the airbrush but the paintbrush to get a uniform ray.