Teksonik wrote:Yes that's the
style of skin I was lusting after for Orion version 8. That photo-realistic style would take Orion way beyond the competition in my opinion. Unfortunately doesn't look like it's possible................unless Rich hires the GUI designer from D-16.
It's not possible at all, no matter who Rich hires. Look at it, the knobs on the left have a different perspective to those in the middle or on the right, so each knob has been created individually. How would that work in an expanding mixer UI? Even the buttons have different perspective in different parts of the UI, so every individual element has it's own graphic, it seems. It would require Rich or Jouni to throw out the current skinning system and code an entirely new one. Once that was done, it would then require an order of magnitude more work than it does currently to create it all and you'd end up with 100Mb or more worth of graphic files in memory as you work, instead of the 9 or 10Mb that the current skinning system requires. It would probably require the current skinnable Orion to be ditched in favour of a hard-wired UI, which means whatever we ended up with is what we'd all have to use. I think I'd rather keep the current flexibility.
It looks absolutely awesome but it's simply not a look that is possible with Orion at the moment. It's also really huge [does a soft-synth need full-size keys?] and I can't imagine working with it myself. I'll take a functional UI over a pretty one every time. The happy medium of course, is a bit of both, which is what I hope to achieve with the new Orion skin. FYI, I am awaiting Jouni now, Rich tells me he is working on the fixes I need but no-one's seen or heard from him for ages AFAIK.
suneel wrote:i think its not so hard as it seems to have it in orion. you can easily have it in orion, since the mixer and synth background is an image. i think a good skinner can do it
See above.
btw in the shitior image, look at the source mixer area. the text at the center is too small to read. all text must be clear and legible. even arturia synths have tiny texts. its not acceptable to have such small text.
It's actually the same size as the text elsewhere, it's just packed too closely together in that particular area. That's the problem with apishly following a hardware look, you get the good and the bad.
Teksonik wrote:Negative. What makes it realistic is the surface and textures. I have faith that Przenek could pull it off to some degree for a Host as well. He no doubt possesses the proper skills with perspective to layout a gui for Orion, toolbars mixer etc. Not likely to happen but one can wish............
The subtlety of the texture is less than I've achieved in the mixer mock-ups you've all seen [~89% brightness at the top and ~77% at the bottom, vs ~76% to ~72% for my mixer mock-up], so it's nothing particular clever or special. But it's just one aspect, the perspective helps a lot to make it look more convincing to the eye. Even the shadow angles change from one side to the other, as though lit from somewhere above the centre of the instrument, which again would require every knob to be created individually.
I'm sure he's used the same global illumination techniques I have, but right now they are useless, because Orion doesn't support transparency around knobs. So you need to imagine every knob on Shiotor being surrounded by a square of colour that is a bit darker than the surrounding texture at the top or a bit lighter on knobs down lower. If you were lucky, you might get one row of knobs that blend in OK but the rest would look like they had been pasted in from other images. It would completely ruin the whole thing but it's the best Orion skinners have to work with ATM.
That's why the instruments in my Surface skin have all their knobs placed in cut-out channels. I would love to be able to place them directly on the gradient surface of the background, but it simply won't work.
Then there is cost to take into consideration. For a single instrument it would be close to 100 hours work, I reckon. For Orion, it would translate into more like 500-600. At my current hourly rate [and I work cheap] it would cost Rich more than a new car if he had to pay someone to do it for him. Doing it for yourself is one thing, because you get something you are happy with from the get-go and you don't have to pay yourself directly, but having to pay someone else to do it gets very expensive, very quickly. I've already put 20 or 30 billable hours into the new Orion skin and there is nothing at all to show for it yet. Would you be willing to pay a $50 premium on your next upgrade so that Rich could hire someone to do a skin like this? And would you be happy to wait another 6 months while all the skinning code was rewritten to accommodate it? Then, having paid your $50 premium and waited another 6 months, would you be happy to put up with it, no matter how it turned out? because I think that's pretty much what you'd be looking at to achieve this kind of look.
Oh, and here's a little test - move your browser/image window over to one side of your monitor, then look at it from the other side. All of a sudden the cool perspective works against you and it looks all wrong. It's a fragile illusion, easily shattered.
by ufo » Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:03 am 
