Subscribe Feed (RSS)Custom Highlight Masks
September 24th, 2008 by Rob Strobbe | Filed under Tutorials.Finishing Touches
Right now, your buttons are probably the wrong size and in the wrong place. Let’s take care of that. First, we need to be able to see the highlights. Luckily, DVD Architect makes this easy using workspace overlays. Go to View > Workspace Overlays > Show Button Masks. Like magic, you should now see your entire highlight mask displayed with your original black / shades-of-gray shapes using the default highlight color. Select the sizing tool and use it to select, size, and position each button over its highlight. Remember, the highlight must be entirely within the dotted boundaries of the button; and the buttons should not overlap with one another.
Figure 8: Buttons positioned
Last of all, you’ll probably want to adjust the highlight color. The default color is yellow, which is usually not what anyone wants. Click an empty area of your menu in order to bring up the Menu Page Properties window and select the General tab. At the bottom of the settings list, there are three highlight settings for which you can assign a color set:
- Selected button colors – for when a button has focus.
- Activated button colors – for when the viewer has “clicked” a button.
- Inactive button colors – for all other buttons.
In most cases, you can leave Inactive button colors at the default of None. This means that any button that does not have focus (and therefore also is not being “clicked” at the time) will have no highlight. Make note of the values for the other two settings if you are not satisfied with the current highlight colors. Then select the Color Sets tab and edit the color sets that were indicated. For highlights, the most important settings are fill color (which makes up the bulk of the highlight) and anti-alias color (which is applied to areas of your mask that are less than 100% opaque).
Finally, click the Preview button or hit F9 to see the result of your hard work. Use the remote on the right to move from button to button and be sure that your highlights all look as you want. Click and hold each button to see its Activated color. If anything’s not quite right, click the Close button and adjust your menu as needed.
Figure 9: DVD Architect preview
And, of course, experiment. This was a very basic custom highlight mask project, and much more interesting designs can be had by playing around with some of the settings. Hint: Try using combinations of red, green, and blue in your highlight mask image and changing the Mask mapping setting for your button highlights to Color Intensity.
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.