Short: Visual Eng. - README Author: marko.seppanen@wwnet.fi (Marko Seppänen) Uploader: marko.seppanen@wwnet.fi (Marko Seppänen) Type: gfx/edit WHAT IS THIS? Did you know that you can make your favorite graphics program do things, which you thought weren't even possible for it? Do you know what Arexx is? It's very powerful computer language integrated to operation system. Every self-respecting software title have this port built in. Don't..! You don't have to know anything about Arexx, so don't ask that question of yours. ;) I started to develop these scripts, because I needed them myself. They have helped my life a lot while creating webpage graphics. Logos, textures, some cool effects for still pictures, rippling water gifanims... No problem! Takes only couple of seconds with my user-friendly scripts. You are going to love these! And by the way.. no other software on Amiga-platform lets you output such a beautiful pixels out of your mind with so little pain. Don't think these as some macros. These are interacting scripts. These scripts are very useful and needful for anybody, who is creating/modifying graphics. Web-gfx may bring your mind a thought about dirty low-quality Jpegs and lowcolored Gifs. Wrong! All image processing is done in 24 bit and you can render them to any amount of colors you want and save them in any format you like (ofcourse limited to libraries of SViewII). All scripts can be used for batch processing. They all accept arguments, so you can either just run the script from IE and adjust values from requester popping up. Or you can call it from Shell by giving it some values. Then there won't be any annoying requesters popping up everytime script is run. SCRIPT-INFO Visual Anim You are doing a webpage-gfx and it needs a rippling water to a bottom of the page. Ok, you've horizontally tileable 2-color wave looking like pic. You load the pic to your image processing program. If it has Ripple-effect, it's able to do rippling waves out of static pic. Adjust ripple-options as you like, but most important thing there is the Phase-option. By dividing phase (max 360 degrees) by a number, which means frames of outputted animation, you'll get next step of phase for next animation frame. More frames, more size. For 8 frames, you would need to do this 8 times and then comes saving and rendering and if animation is used on dithered page on lowspec machine, it would flicker and look very bad. That's because all frames should have same palette. Still thinking, you could handle this simple process? Don't worry, THAT is the reason, why I've made Visual Anim-script. You only tell how many frames you want and adjust the style of rippling effect. This script isn't limited just to Ripple-effect.. Visual Border Pictures can steal the show, if you use Visual Border to make page look more alive. All you have to do is to load a picture and then choose effect and v'ola! Visual Card Maybe you'd like to construct a picture, where pictures are spread like cards on cards. Visual Card let's you place pictures on pictures and rotate them. Visual Gradient Webpages which have lots of text, could look much better, if there would be some visual improvement, like texturebar on the left/right-side. You can also use Visual Gradient to mix pictures together. Visual Logo When I'm doing a website for company, it helps a lot when all I've to do is to think names for logos and subtitles and then choose an effect, that looks good for that page. Visual Puzzle This script will create you a random puzzle from picture. There's corner pieces, edge pieces and the rest. Script is actually quite smart. Before piece is placed, checking is made, so it really fits to it's place. Visual Surface Picture is a picture is a picture and when picture is painted on a surface like concrete, it looks like picture is painted on a surface like concrete using Visual Surface. Visual Texture Bored of your old textures? Let Visual Texture use some special tricks for enchancing the look and feel of those original textures. Visual Texture 2 This script will apply one of over 150 carefully selected effects to a tileable texture. Those were the main scripts. Then there's many other scripts, which sometimes are helpful and sometimes needful: AddSpace for example is very useful, when picture needs some extra space around. Shadow will make different kind shadows for pictures and logos. Gaussian Feather and Gaussian Edge simulate antialias-effect.. etc.. etc.. all scripts are available at Aminet and at Visual Engineer's website REQUIREMENTS Visual Engineering is collection of graphics related Arexx-scripts for Image Engineer. Image Engineer is very fast image manipulation software, which uses BGUI for it's user interface. Image Engineer needs SuperView II -libraries for loading and saving different kinds of pictureformats. Image Engineer and SuperView II both are very fast to install, so why not giving a try? Aminet/gfx/edit/ImEngV3.41#?.lha Aminet/gfx/show/SvII-#?.lha Make sure you have RX-command in Sys:Rexxc/ In normal WorkBench-install it should be there. My scripts use some external files, like custom convolves, palettes, brushes, alphas... those are stored to VE-Extras.lha If you allready had version SviewII, then make sure you have gif-object for it (Libs:svobjects/GIF.svobject). If not, you need ILBM-versions of files in IE:Alpha/ VE-Alpha.lha WORD ABOUT INSTALLATION & STARTUP All script archives create two dirs; Notes and Arexx. In Notes-dir there might be important information related to this script and Arexx-dir is the place for script itself. This way you can always extract my scripts straight to IE's dir and Notes' wouldn't be deleted after one read. When Image Engineer is up and running, then first thing you should do is to select "Arexx Window" from Project-menu. Then you can easily launch all scripts. Later you should assign some hotkeys. To make things more confortable to use, every adjustment is saved to a configfile. They are stored in IE:Prefs/. For example Visual Anim's main window-config is saved to file called "visualanim.cfg" and animeffect Ripple's window settings are stored to "visualanimripple.cfg". Gaussian Edge -script for example saves it's settings to "vegaussianedge.cfg". Understood? Good. Just wanted say this, because in the beginning I changed the order of buttons, cyclemenus, checkboxes... till I found the well working GUI. Configfiles are values and characters, which requester returned to script after you pressed Ok. So, if there are any problems with some script, then you should try to delete configfile of the script and try again. CONTACT If you would like to register or you have a suggestion for an effect or you have found a bug, send me some mail to this email address: marko.seppanen@wwnet.fi VISUAL ENGINEERING - graphical examples & more HTTP://wwnet.fi/users/smarko/visual/ ============================= Archive contents ============================= Original Packed Ratio Date Time Name -------- ------- ----- --------- -------- ------------- 7275 3406 53.1% 15-Jul-99 21:18:28 +VisualEngineering.notes -------- ------- ----- --------- -------- 7275 3406 53.1% 18-Jul-99 20:25:12 1 files