Diamond Shaped Buttons

[Eldorado]

I just designed a nice new menu for a 3-movie pack that I'm putting together which is shaped as a big diamond, and inside are 4 smaller diamonds that make up the big one, a little hard to explain..

Each of the 4 smaller diamonds are to be a button, problem is in Scenarist and ReelDVD I seem to be able to only make square-rectangle button selections. How do you create buttons that are different shapes such as my diamonds?

I tried creating 4 square selections over each diamond, and they overlap in the middle, and this just does not look good..

[auenf]

ok, im pretty sure you cant create non-rectangular buttons, but using the subpicture and the 4 colours of it nicely you can do it.

make the subpic colour of the top and bottom the same, and the other two a different colour, then you will have to define the highlight and action colours right (ie set all the colours to 0 except the one for the button you are changing).

it sounds a little involved, but in maestro its so easy its not funny ;)

Enf...

[Xesdeeni]

Even though you can create non-rectangular buttons, I think the rectangular bounding regions can't overlap. So you can't do the following: /\
/ \
/\ /\
/ \/ \
\ /\ /
\/ \/
\ /
\/because the bounding regions would overlap. However, I think you can do this: /\
/ \
\ /
\/
/\ /\
/ \ / \
\ / \ /
\/ \/
/\
/ \
\ /
\/because the bounding boxes wouldn't overlap.

Xesdeeni

[Eldorado]

Xesdeeni:
You typed out the design perfect, that's exactly what I made up.. only now I just have 3 buttons, the lower portion of the diamond is just text now, I thought this is a good layout to make an austin powers trilogy dvd.. each triangle has a small pic of a movie poster from each movie..

I did consider splitting the diamonds up, but I have space concerns, and isn't an option now, I'm already hitting the top and bottom borders, there's room on the sides, but not enough.. and if I make them any smaller it wouldn't look right on a tv..


auenf:
That sounds like a good idea, I still don't understand fully how sub-pictures work. I create my photoshop file with a layer for each button, and let ReelDVD do the rest. In this case it created a sub-pic .bmp file, background is white, and the diamonds are black

Can I simply color two of the diamonds say Yellow? Then as you say play around with the select colors in Scenarist? I'll be playing around with this shortly

The way I'm doing this, the display color (eg. not selected) is greyed out, the select color is nothing (displays the button in it's full color), then the action color is whatever.. blue maybe

[slk001]

Only the portions of a SUBPICTURE that are WITHIN a button area (that ugly rectangle - ALL buttons are rectangular) will highlight. And, there is no way to create what you want and completely surround them with the real button - and buttons cannot overlap.

You could do this with "auto actions" and multiple menus (nearly identical, except for the "highlight" color. Your main menu would have four (or, in your case, three) very close rectangular buttons, but they would not overlap.

[Eldorado]

Bah, no way to do it in Scenarist with Sub picture colors.. and finally figured out how they work too! :)

Only option is creating 3 copies of the menu with different high lights on each.. only problem is I haven't figured out yet how to do actions when an arrow key is pressed, I guess that's the next thing I gotta learn..

This seems like a real limitation to button creation, one would think it would be more flexible than just dragging a box around it, maybe something more advance like a free hand tool, or line tool..

[auenf]

uhh, i dont know where you're getting the 'buttons cant overlap' thing from, im pretty sure it doesnt matter, and i have done it too. dvds are meant for tv's, support for mouse hover were added later (some really early dvds have the 'button area' in a completely different place to the 'subpicture highlight'

if you want, try it with the overlapping (maestro lets you) and use a -+rw and see what happens.

Enf...

[slk001]

You're correct - on a TV, there is no problem with buttons overlapping (I was taking an "authoring recommendation" and making it an "authoring law").

How do you get a SUBPICTURE highlight in a different area from the button (I can SIMULATE this with auto actions and different menus, but I can't think of how it can be done "real").