Subscribe Feed (RSS)Custom Highlight Masks
September 24th, 2008 by Rob Strobbe | Filed under Tutorials.Adding the Buttons
Now you’ll add the actual buttons — the rectangular “hotspots” I mentioned earlier. If you’re new to using custom highlight masks (but not new to DVD Architect), then the buttons you’re used to creating have had all sorts of individual images associated with them — thumbnails, frames, and probably text — even if you didn’t realize it. These buttons will have none of that because everything you need to visually represent your buttons is already there in the background. What you want to use here are empty buttons.
There are two ways to create empty buttons. You can simply go to Insert > Empty button for as many times as you need (one for each item on your menu) or you can add buttons in the usual ways and then editing them. One caveat of starting with empty buttons is that linking one to a submenu (which I’m using in the example) can get a bit complicated, so we’ll start with the old fashioned way. If you feel comfortable starting from scratch with empty buttons, skip ahead.
For this project, I’m going to have a video, a scene selection menu for that video, and a setup menu. So, I’ve dragged a video onto the menu and placed its button near the “Play” text on my background; I’ve inserted a scene selection menu (and its default button) based on the video, and placed it near the “Scenes” text; and I inserted a sub-menu which will act as a Setup menu, and placed that near the “Setup” text. We don’t really have to do anything with the video or these sub-menus — they’re just for example.
Figure 7: The real buttons
So, now we have three buttons that (hopefully) correctly point to the items they should but also have some settings we don’t want. Choose the selection tool from the toolbar to the left of the menu and select your buttons by clicking and dragging around all of them at once. All of the settings we want to change are on the Media tab of the Button Properties window. The settings you want to change and the values to use are:
- Button Style: Image Only
- Thumbnail Media: None
- Thumbnail Mask: None
- Frame Media: None
- Frame Mask: None
As long as you’re in the Button Properties window, select the Highlight tab and change the Style setting to Custom. You can leave the other setting on this tab alone.
Your buttons are almost ready.
Tags: DVD Architect, highlight, mask, menu
hey nice tutorial!
I used some fingerprint brushes from deviantart as a highlight mask and it is awesome!
So few good architect tutorials around don’t know why..
keep up the good work
greetings from germany
Thanks, Matt! That’s a great idea to use brushes for creating highlight masks, especially something as unique as fingerprints.
Good question regarding DVD Architect tutorials. There aren’t many around, and most of the ones that I’ve found are pretty basic — “how to use DVD Architect” … period. I know of people who’ve done some pretty special things with it — I guess they just don’t write tutorials.
This blog is a great find! To echo Matt, DVDA tutorials are hard to find.
Your tutorial is good teaching: coherent and easy to follow. The screenshots also really help.
One forum that I visited had so many flashing advertisements that it was hard to focus. I’m not going back there! This is a nice, clean page with pleasant colors. The advertising that does exist is “quiet”. Great job!!
Thanks, Jon — your comments are much appreciated!
I will be changing the design (and organization) of the site soon as well as — fingers crossed — adding some new tutorials finally. But I promise it will still have a clean look and the advertising will be unobtrusive.
Thanks for visiting. I’m glad you find the site useful.