Tuesday, September 4, 2007

How to turn Blender-rendered images into working SynthEdit knobs

(follow these tips if you don't want or can't use KnobCreator)

Following to the post made earlier , here's how to finish the images from Blender (or any other images) into SynthEdit knobs .

Open the last rendered image ( in my case 0064.png) with the Gimp 2, hit 'ctrl+l' to open the "Layers" dialog. Select the other pictures (0001.png to 0063.png) and drag drop them in the "Layers" dialog.

Select the part you want to render as a rotating knob and choose Image > Slice so only the knob remains . Now choose Image > Canvas size and multiply the height to the number of steps your knob rotates .

Choose the move tool and select layer 1 in the "Layers" dialog, then click in the main window where we will move the layers one under/above the other. (This should be done by a script but I'm not capable of Perl coding to write script-fu for this purpose. With the shortcuts and a bit of patience I get myself through this for every knob or couple of knobs that are horizontally aligned. )

Use '-' and '+' to zoom in/out so you get a view over the strip with the little square image on top.
'Page up' and 'Page down' are shortcuts for selecting the previous/next layer.
The navigation keyboard buttons are for moving the layer, when 'shift' is hold down, the moves go with larger steps.

Now spread the layers over the strip, it's a repetitive job in this sequence :
'page down' > 'shift+down arrow' > 'page down' > 'shift+down arrow' > etc. (repeat 64 times)

Tip: It's faster to spread them first from a very zoomed out view and do the detailed finishing on a larger view.

When the knobs are one under the other, step 1 on top, the image is ready and can be saved as .png or .bmp to be used in SynthEdit.

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