I've been looking over some of the rotating functions and WOW! I just started taking functions and I dont even know what the heck a matrice even is. How ever I do know the cos() and other things dealing with geometry.
This topic has too deal with designing a lib that would generate the 4 directional criss cross icons using the 4 straight icons in the dmi file.
Figure 1
A - Rotating the z-axis would be the current turning function we have now. basically taking the flat icon and turning it CW 90.
B - Rotating the y-axis would turn the icon to the left or right.
C - Rotating the x-axis would make the icon do flips.
Figure 2
As you can see in Figure 2 what I plan on doing. Taking the North Directional icon and turning it CCW 45 degrees. Then taking the East Directional icon and turning it CW 45 degrees. Bolth turns will take place on the y-axis only. Then taking the production of bolth and adding them together to make the new NorthEast Directional icon.
Problems)
1. I haven't tested this and don't know if it will work.
2. I'm not good enough with functions to pull somthing off like this to test it any way.
So some one else try it.
Good luck feedback come on down!
ID:265241
 Oct 16 2003, 2:18 pm
|
|
In 2D terms, this would be squashing the image horizontally...
...and this would be squashing the image vertically.
I'm afraid it wouldn't work quite as well as one would hope it would. (I'm assuming you mean rotating them in the other directions, because otherwise you'd have broken the icon in half.) If BYOND had stretching functionality necessary for this, there would be two problems -- one, the object would be pancake-like, and two, it would require a substantial amount of retouching, almost to the point of redrawing it entirely, to get the object's two very different sides to look properly seamless with one another.
You can always make drawing eight-directional icons if you set yourself up by drafting the image. Draw the object's front from a frontal perspective. Then line it up beside it and draw the object from a side perspective. Next, line it up above it and draw the object from a top-down perspective.
Using that basic model, you can then pick any given point on that model and use its X, Y, and Z coordinates to redraw the image from any other perspective.
Of course, it's far easier to get a 3D renderer to do the redrawing. Of course, that's also far more expensive, and requires a ton of effort to actually learn how to use them. (I have yet to find a single editor that makes creation of three dimensional objects easy. And that doesn't make any sense; it doesn't take much effort to make a polygon out of paper and stick it onto a bunch of toothpicks, so why is it so difficult to do the same thing in a computer?)
BYOND lacks any stretching functionality for icons at this point.
Skill with trigonometry isn't the deciding factor here -- knowledge of geometry and three-dimensional space is. =)