Color Picture Button

[merlin001]

Is there a way to have a multicolor picture (a cartoon rabbit's head) as a button on a menu in Scenarist?

Thanks!
~ David (merlin_at_merlinsrealm_dot_net)

[guns1inger]

Sub-pictures are generally either on or off, single colour, no gradient. If you wan't more colours then you are looking at what is called in some circles a switched menu. This is where you have the same menu screen with two states - one with bunny head, one without, for example. As you move down the menu, you need to auto activate a hidden button to force a new menu to load with the bunny head in the right place. If you have 5 buttons, you will have 5 menus. This comes at a cost - longer to develop, audio isn't continuous, player dependent pause.

While this tutorial is for DVD Lab Pro, it illustrates the concept of the switched menu. You just need to translate it into scenarist.

[adam]

Any subpicture can have up to 4 colors, so assuming that's enough for a bunny head there's no need for switched menus. Just make your button image in any photo editing software with different colors for each part, and then simply map those colors as needed in Scenarist. I don't really know any other way to explain it. If you know how to make a button with one color than you just do the same for all the rest of the colors.

guns1inger, I disagree I don't think I've ever seen a commercial subpicture with just a single color. They usually have a border to make it stand out or map a color to transparent to keep the edges from appearing blocky.

[guns1inger]

I'll go home and look, but I can't remember ever seeing a sub-picture that didn't look blocky and badly aliased around the edges. I cannot recall seeing a multi-coloured subpicture. If you have some examples, let me know.

[merlin001]

This is what I'm trying to work with.



~ David

[adam]

Take a look at just about any movie with a button over video feature (Matrix, Daredevil, Hellboy, Spiderman,) and the subpicture that pops up will have at least 2 colors mapped. Off the top of my head, the buttons on the My Big Fat Greek Wedding have a nice ornate 3 color button that makes use of all 4 color mappings (background is mapped to transparent, button has two shades of blue and black outline). Its very smooth looking. I'll post a pic in a bit.

Seriously, I'd have a hard time finding a DVD whose menus didn't have at least 2 colors. You usually can't tell until you look at the raw bmp for it, then you can see that there is at least an outline.

I make buttons with 3 and 4 colors in them all the time.

Here's an example taken from Spider-Man's button over video feature. The top one is the subpic and the bottom is how it appears on screen. So you can see how every color on the subpic is just mapped to a particular color to create the final image.

[adam]

This is what I'm trying to work with.



~ David

Too many colors in that. If you are working with bmps then really you can only have 3 colors in the image because you've got to set the background color to transparent. If you have a photo editor that works in layers, like Photoshop, then you can save just the buttons as a layer with no background color, so this lets you use all four colors just for the button. But even still, you've got to simplify that image to get it to 4 colors.

It is actually possible to have many more than 4 colors by using multiple buttons all leading to the same feature, but its kinda complicated to do and even harder to explain and I suppose its possible that it wouldn't show up right on all players. If you were going to bother doing this you probably might as well just use switched menus.

[merlin001]

I found another way. If I make the rabbit as part of the background and make the buttons as squares that are the same color as the background, then I can actually make the square disappear when that button is selected, thus making the rabbit appear as the button.

~ David