Custom Shaped Mana/Health bars
 

Hi all I'm a returning wow player and UI enthusiastic looking to try and see if an idea of mine is possible. I plan to use mostly light weight add-ons for the majority of things, except for my character's health and mana/rage/energy bar. After looking into various HUDs and complied UI setups, and raid frames I've yet to find any mod that will allow me to have any kind of shape beyond a bar or sphere for mana or health. Below is a quick gif sample I whipped up in photoshop illustrating my concept:



As you can see I want to be frame like at the bottom of my screen to be part of a graphic I'm planning to make for my UI, Does anyone know of a mod that will allow to me have custom bars like this or how hard it would be to code one?

I'd personally say your best bet would be oUF however it'd require some knowledge in LUA coding and perhaps others too.

I'm no wizz at it myself but you might want to check out oUF_orbs from RothUI as he uses circular orbs for health bars.

You can achieve this with Stuf, as well.

All you need is to use your custom texture as the statusbar graphic.

Easily doable in PitBull4. In fact, I've done something very similar before. However, since then, I've learned that the minimap isn't really a good centerpiece and that my player frame should be closer to the center of my screen.

That's for all the suggestions
 

I'll look into Stuf and pitbull for achieving this and I'll consider not have the map in the center :)

I agree that the map doesn't make a good center. I use my battle ground map in the center of my unit frames when I pvp otherwise my omen is there.

You could change that minimap into the portrait frame. Want me to make some textures for ya?

Thanks for Addon suggestions, I've decided to make the circle a class themed art piece for now. I'm working slowly on deciding and creating the basic shape the UI and what to do for graphics since I have a few different characters :)

As for the the Custom shaped health and resource bars I'll be sure to follow your advice seerah. On a related question is it possible for a UI's art to change dependent on spec/stance? More for personal curiosity than something I'm actually considering pursuing, I'm rather new to LUA coding ^ ^;

Same with the possibility of having a few little animations? I know the WoW has support for spinning and moving elements based on events in it's LUA code. :)

My main is a druid, death knight as a second, planning on making a shaman and warrior for cataclysm if it helps :)

How can u make non square shapes frames in Pitbull?

See my link over on UI screenshot thread... I've done a ton of non-square shaped unitframes over the years. My most recent one being the "funkiest"

My recent screenshot

My suggestion if you are doing this, start with the status bars or some graphic you really like for the background. Then build from there. You can make just about anything into a status bars. And there are alot of very very talented authors around here that have created some very creative and very useful ui or just unit frames to give you ideas.

Update
 

Thought I'd through out an update, I'm progressing on my custom textures for my UI, learning to use kgPanels for setting up the art part of it, but I need abit of help with the status bar shape, for now I've settled on using Stuf as my frames, is there anyway to add it without overwriting one of the already default bar texture/shapes? :)

Edit: Nevermind I found the shared media addon :)