How do you make WindowBlinds...
Sunday, March 2, 2003 by joetheblow | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk
How do you make Windowblinds skins support colour changes? I am treying to design one and I am not sure how to make it have color costumization support.
Help Please thanks.
Help Please thanks.
Styl-X Design
Reply #2 Sunday, March 2, 2003 5:53 AM
Reply #2 Sunday, March 2, 2003 5:53 AM
ehm.... sorry. BUT you always can multiple themes like red, blue, green, and put them togheter in the zip 
DavidK
Reply #3 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:00 AM
Reply #3 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:00 AM
You need to make a mask for each piece you want re-colored. It's covered here in the UIS2 Reference document: http://www.windowblinds.net/skinning/
Look at a skin like treetog's CopperDeckII which has masks to see how it works.
Here's the instructions from the link above (this was for WB2 and it might have more capabilities now):
WindowBlinds 2.0 allows users to change the color of skins. A skin author, however, may not want the entire skin's color changed. Instead, they may only want certain aspects of a skin changed. For instance, you might want your blue title bar to be able to be colored but not have your tray border. So how do you do this?
The answer is you create a mask image. A mask image is typically a grayscale image in which white areas are areas you want the colors changed and black areas being ones you don't want changed (with intermediate colors being in between). If you are an expert on colors, you can get fancier and supply a 24bit mask image and come up with some really strange blendings (for instance, if you want only the the reds blended into your skins of a chosen color, you would supply an image with a color mask of 255,0,0 ). We only recommend that for die hards. A gray scale image is the most intuitive way of creating a mask in this instance.
To create a mask, you simply take one of your existing bitmaps, turn it to a grayscale and make the areas you want changeable white and those you don't want changed black.
Then in the UIS file you add an attribute to any section that has an image with the word mask at the tend.
So if it says:
image = yourskin\left.bmp
You add:
imagemask=yourskin\leftmask.bmp
or
Checkbutton=yourskin\checkbutton.bmp
The mask would be:
Checkbuttonmask=yourskin\checkbuttonmask.bmp
The next step is to add a [ColoursMask] section which is identical to your [Colours] section except that instead of it saying:
[Colours]
ActiveBorder=215 215 215
Look at a skin like treetog's CopperDeckII which has masks to see how it works.
Here's the instructions from the link above (this was for WB2 and it might have more capabilities now):
WindowBlinds 2.0 allows users to change the color of skins. A skin author, however, may not want the entire skin's color changed. Instead, they may only want certain aspects of a skin changed. For instance, you might want your blue title bar to be able to be colored but not have your tray border. So how do you do this?
The answer is you create a mask image. A mask image is typically a grayscale image in which white areas are areas you want the colors changed and black areas being ones you don't want changed (with intermediate colors being in between). If you are an expert on colors, you can get fancier and supply a 24bit mask image and come up with some really strange blendings (for instance, if you want only the the reds blended into your skins of a chosen color, you would supply an image with a color mask of 255,0,0 ). We only recommend that for die hards. A gray scale image is the most intuitive way of creating a mask in this instance.
To create a mask, you simply take one of your existing bitmaps, turn it to a grayscale and make the areas you want changeable white and those you don't want changed black.
Then in the UIS file you add an attribute to any section that has an image with the word mask at the tend.
So if it says:
image = yourskin\left.bmp
You add:
imagemask=yourskin\leftmask.bmp
or
Checkbutton=yourskin\checkbutton.bmp
The mask would be:
Checkbuttonmask=yourskin\checkbuttonmask.bmp
The next step is to add a [ColoursMask] section which is identical to your [Colours] section except that instead of it saying:
[Colours]
ActiveBorder=215 215 215
DavidK
Reply #4 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:04 AM
Reply #4 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:04 AM
sorry, that got cut off.
Here's the rest:
The next step is to add a [ColoursMask] section which is identical to your [Colours] section except that instead of it saying:
[Colours]
ActiveBorder=215 215 215
The new section is:
[ColoursMask]
ActiveBorder = 0 to 255.
0 means don't touch it. 255 means completely blend it. 1..254 are various shades inbetween.
Here's the rest:
The next step is to add a [ColoursMask] section which is identical to your [Colours] section except that instead of it saying:
[Colours]
ActiveBorder=215 215 215
The new section is:
[ColoursMask]
ActiveBorder = 0 to 255.
0 means don't touch it. 255 means completely blend it. 1..254 are various shades inbetween.
voo
Reply #5 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:45 AM
Reply #5 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:45 AM
voo looks at DavidK wonders when he is coming up with another design 
Delicious
Reply #6 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:59 AM
Reply #6 Sunday, March 2, 2003 6:59 AM
Masks work best during Halloween.
Sorry couldn't pass that up
Sorry couldn't pass that up
MarkMcQ
Reply #7 Sunday, March 2, 2003 8:45 AM
Reply #7 Sunday, March 2, 2003 8:45 AM
If you get stuck, Joe, SkinStudio has the ability to create masks that will recolour some of the skin areas.
Haven't used it though, so I don't know how successful it is.
Haven't used it though, so I don't know how successful it is.
joetheblow
Reply #8 Sunday, March 2, 2003 9:00 PM
Reply #8 Sunday, March 2, 2003 9:00 PM
ahhh ha! I thought it had something to do with masks but I couldn't figure it out. Then the funny thing is that I have masks in my skin but Windoblinds didn't see it. Now I know I have to change the code for it to know the skin has it.
I have this skin you see, and I wanted different flavors of it and one is supposed to change to any color you want. NOW I CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN!!! Thanks Davidk.
(the funny thing is that I am not much of a fan of or recoloring skins or sub skins but I see a use for it every now and again)
Any chance you will be making some more windowblind skins???? I need more inspiration.
I have this skin you see, and I wanted different flavors of it and one is supposed to change to any color you want. NOW I CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN!!! Thanks Davidk.
(the funny thing is that I am not much of a fan of or recoloring skins or sub skins but I see a use for it every now and again)
Any chance you will be making some more windowblind skins???? I need more inspiration.
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Reply #1 Sunday, March 2, 2003 5:51 AM
anything I would say would be nothing more than foolish because of lacking the correct answer !!
good luck with it though