Creating your own UI Art from Scratch?

[Aryae]

Hello!

I've recently decided to finally set up my UI, as I've been putting off due to the amount of work mine would mostly likely take.

Long story short didnt like the result and now I find myself wanting to create my own UI Texture. After researching for nearly 5 hours, I've seen other posts explaining how but they dont quite answer my question, so I'm just going post in hopes for a answer!

Is it possible, using PhotoShop, to create a texture that Spans the ENTIRE Screen of WoW. Meaning, not just the lower portion, but the upper part to.
A good example of what I want to sort of re-create is attached. Using Btex or KgPanels would be great, but Im willing to use another addon if needed.

If anyone could tell me how to do this, it would be greatly appreciated!

[Seerah]

Yes, but you may need to scale your frame to be that large (since, iirc, the max size for dimensions is 1024).

[Aryae]

How exactly would I go about doing that though? I was hoping there was certain size I could enter on PhotoShop after clicking "New" and then just create the art I want, make it accesible through KgPanels/Btex and there it is.

If there is already a guide or exlaination to this I apologize, I've been looking at forums all day with no luck.

[Seerah]

There are plenty of guides around various places. Have you seen this one yet?

http://forums.wowace.com/showthread.php?t=15439

[Aryae]

Yes I have. My problem is though, I dont know if that would actually give me a full screen UI editing area, or just the basic bottom part. I tried experimenting with different sizes but none of them seemed to work.

[Xinhuan]

Originally Posted by Aryae Yes I have. My problem is though, I dont know if that would actually give me a full screen UI editing area, or just the basic bottom part. I tried experimenting with different sizes but none of them seemed to work.

The problem here is that you are assuming that a larger sized texture will automatically translate to a larger image in WoW. This is not the case.

What happens in WoW is that an addon specifies a rectangular region on screen to contain a texture, then specifies the filename to load the texture into this rectangular region. In other words, the texture from the file is always resized to the specified rectangular region.

In case you didn't understand that, I'll try to explain it again:

- The size of the texture as created in Photoshop doesn't matter. [Ok it does, in that the dimensions have to be a power of 2 up to 1024.]
- The addon is the one controlling the size of the image in WoW.

So if you have a larger texture, WoW would be able to display it more sharply or scale it up to a larger rectangular area without losing detail.

Therefore, there is no "size of texture" that will fill up the whole screen - addon code would be required to get the width and height of the screen (which would depend on the resolution and aspect ratio of the player's settings) and set a rectangular region to be that size. As you can expect, this causes issues with players that want to get their art pixel perfect - it doesn't work.

If a person wants something exactly 100x200, he would need to create it first in Photoshop at 100x200, then resize it to the next highest power of 2 for both dimensions which is 128x256 or even higher (yes this stretches the image without keeping aspect ratio), then make this 128x256 as best as possible. In game, code specifies it to be 100x200, and the 128x256 is then scaled down to fit, and it would look best. Even then, 100x200 in wow code doesn't translate to 100x200 pixels on screen. The user may scale up the size of the entire UI (via the UIScale slider in game) and also the user is quite capable of resizing his wow window to any width and height (in window mode) and the entire UI will resize (get squashed or stretched) to fit.

[Maul]

If a person wants something exactly 100x200, he would need to create it first in Photoshop at 100x200, then resize it to the next highest power of 2 for both dimensions which is 128x256 or even higher (yes this stretches the image without keeping aspect ratio), then make this 128x256 as best as possible. In game, code specifies it to be 100x200, and the 128x256 is then scaled down to fit, and it would look best. Even then, 100x200 in wow code doesn't translate to 100x200 pixels on screen. The user may scale up the size of the entire UI (via the UIScale slider in game) and also the user is quite capable of resizing his wow window to any width and height (in window mode) and the entire UI will resize (get squashed or stretched) to fit. Today 12:04 AM

Or, they create the 100x200 texture then increase the canvas size to the appropriate power of 2 size 128x256 and then use :SetTexCoord() to trim off the excess in game. Or merely make an alpha channel that makes the excess area transparent. There are several ways to go about it.

And generally, when wanting to display very large textures you break them down into several texture images and stitch them together by using multiple texture objects in the addon if you do not want to stretch one image across say a 1920x1080 field.

[Aryae]

Ah ok then, that makes more sense. So I'd have to make it in sections. I played around a bit more with Kgpanels, as Im still getting used that Addon, and I think I know exactly what you both mean. I was hoping that I could just find the correct combination of powers of 2, enter the dimensions, create the art and there you go: A Custom Interface Texture for the entire screen. But Blizz never wants to make easy do they? I figured it wouldnt be so simple, So I guess all I can do is research what I can and play with PhotoShop/KgPanels till I get what i want.

Thank you to all who replied you've been a huge help!

[Seerah]

You *can* make it all one texture, though, if you want to. That was in the first reply.

Look here: http://www.wowinterface.com/download...Cataclysm.html

[darkiran]

Breaking a larger texture into smaller slices is exactly what I did with mine. I designed it around my games resolution and when done I pasted it into 256x512 slices and stitched them back together using kgPanels

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...o.php?id=20531

Btw. I'd love feedback on my graphics. Looking to see if I need to fix anything or alter it to make it better.

[zork]

Textures in WoW must be multipliers of 8. Thus: 16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048

Biggest texture you can currently make is 2048x2048 (since 4.02 afaik)

[Doondoon]

Hey sorry for bringing this up again, but i would like to add a question to this, since as stated above the max texture size is now 2048 does this mean you can design a whole UI background in 1 single texture then scale it to 1980x1080 or whatever?

Technically could i not open photoshop, paste in a screenshot of wow and make textures over the areas i want graphic then import to the game everything will be correct (while still keeping the 2048 size)? after removing the screenshot layer ofcourse.

[Nyctrennis]

Yeah, that will work, so long as you have a power of two on both sides and you properly set up your alpha layer in Photoshop.

[Doondoon]

Nice thanks for your reply, i was trying to make them individually but when you have to stretch them they dont look anywhere near as good.

so am i right in saying, you could have a texture that was say 2 x 2048 or 1024 x 2 it can be any combination as long as they are multipliers of 8.

[jeffy162]

Yes, but as Nyctrennis stated the proper terminology is that the dimensions must be a power of two. IE: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048. That's pixels per measurement, by the way.

And, yeah, please do make sure you have your alpha channel set up properly. If you need a panel that is, say, 120 x 500, you still need to make the actual panel 128 x 512 with everything around the 120 x 500 actual artwork being transparent.