next »

[renderhjs]

I just released version 1.50
AIR file 1.50 download link



major changes:

• Sprite packer supports now also animated GIF and SWF (AS1,AS2,AS3) files and splits them into individual frames along with the other frames to be packed.
  
• sprite packer supports iOs _2x convention option to export packed sprite sheets in standard and retina _2x files (uiToolkit for Unity supports this for example).
  
• Flickr upload supports private uploading now (see settings) and custom tags for each uploaded shoeBox picture.
  
• Bitmap font plugin added. This tool comes with a CSS export option as well as the famous fnt file for Unity, Cocos 2d Starling or other frameworks. A HTML bitmap font demo is also part of the documentation sample page.
  
• Added initial help screen to explain the basic controls. It shows only on every major version update, you can show it again by right clicking next to a tool in the shoeBox main area.
• Extract sprites detects automatically transparency. Meaning if a file doesn't have an alpha channel it uses the first color in the upper left corner as transparency masking color.
  

I'll be creating a few YouTube videos soon to demonstrate some of the new enhancements and tools.

[Evan McClane]

Awesome, definitely gonna be using the Bitmap font tool a lot.  Just a heads up, though, your link is broken, you've got http// instead of http://.

[renderhjs]

fixed

[renderhjs]

2 new video tutorials for ShoeBox on YouTube:

Short overview of the flickr Tool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Df6WAJbxPY



I use the flickr tool everyday at work. If you have a pro account at flickr (e.g. you pay a yearly fee) make sure you check the pro account setting in the settings. Also if you use this at work or NDA stuff make sure you set the public URL setting in the settings to false, otherwise your uploaded pictures will be visible to the entire world.


Creating a Bitmap Font
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arzk8h4lc1I



I use right now this feature for a Unity project at work to get PS designed UI's 100% carried over to the Unity build. Usually I use it for bold or style driven fonts like scores, counters etc. that come with some 3d or metal like textures.

I'll be adding more videos in the next few days

[Moczan]

The tools are great, I usually only use Anim2Sheet because we are making 2D game, but it became an essential tool in my daily production. Thanks a lot!

[renderhjs]

The tools are great, I usually only use Anim2Sheet because we are making 2D game, but it became an essential tool in my daily production. Thanks a lot!

If you have some feedback on that one I'd appreciate it a lot. The Pack Sprites now supports animated files (SWF or GIF) as well but unlike the Anim2Sheet it packs the frames wherever it fits best.

Here is an example of an animated SWF file that I dropped on the Ani2Sheet tool and on the new Pack Sprites tool. The reason why it has less frames in the Pack Sprites tool is that the pack sprites tool merges frames that are identical. Meaning it just re-uses the space in the texture for another frame id of your original animation, so no loss of data.

[ANtY]

How to run this application, I downloaded newest Adobe Air and try to run it with Adobe Flash Player but it's just a white window :/

[Moczan]

How to run this application, I downloaded newest Adobe Air and try to run it with Adobe Flash Player but it's just a white window :/

You need to install it, your system may save it as a archive file and try to open it in 7zip or WinRar, you have to explicitly change the extension to .air and use the AIR installer (at least, that's what happened when I downloaded it).

And about Anim2Sheet I only use it to crop alpha and create frame strips from .gifs, works wonderful. I sent you a bug report through e-mail some time ago about the SpritePacker cropping alpha even if the option was disabled, but I no longer need to use it, so I didn't have a chance to test it yet.

[ANtY]

How to run this application, I downloaded newest Adobe Air and try to run it with Adobe Flash Player but it's just a white window :/

You need to install it, your system may save it as a archive file and try to open it in 7zip or WinRar, you have to explicitly change the extension to .air and use the AIR installer (at least, that's what happened when I downloaded it).

It worked, thanks very much

[renderhjs]

yes I heard that once before, it seems to happen if you use IE for surfing the web. Found a IE issue on that. For now use a different browser or rename after IE automatically named it to zip, will look what I can do on my server to chance the mime preferences on that for all the IE users.

[verticalvertex]

Great work. The spritetools are amazing.

[ANtY]

yes I heard that once before, it seems to happen if you use IE for surfing the web. Found a IE issue on that. For now use a different browser or rename after IE automatically named it to zip, will look what I can do on my server to chance the mime preferences on that for all the IE users.

I use Opera :p

And yes, I renamed it so it's not a problem.

[renderhjs]

Update
ShoeBox_1.60_public.air

some fixes I addressed

• replaced the GIF parsing library to fix the issues people had with some GIF files
• Fixed a stupid error on the CutOut Sprites tool, it should now proper detect all blobs (before it used to skip some on complex sheets).
  
• packing: id name overlay so you can see (if fitting size wise) which id is assigned to which sprite even on animated sprites like GIF or SWF frames
  

Not in this update yet but...
I also have been working on a new tool that tries to mask a image automatically by providing a separate background only image or assuming  a solid background color.

It uses a difference blend to make out the pixels that make out the object we want to extract. On a second pass (not yet done) I want to increase the saturation on aliasing or transparent pixels to get rid of the sampled background pixels.

Here is another example, some of the white textures on the car itself are transparent like the background which is a side effect of this process, but it should provide a nice precise starting mask.



Another nice example with rather unexpected results at first (this one is missing a checker background image in the last result)



I see this as something useful for extracting alpha channels out of merged image data (like the Windows and OSX clipboard data) as well as photography and other source materials.

[rogerlevy]

Does this tool have a commandline interface so that I can integrate it into my own custom tool, to say, pack a folder of images into an atlas?

[renderhjs]

Does this tool have a commandline interface so that I can integrate it into my own custom tool, to say, pack a folder of images into an atlas?

I am looking into that currently as this is very feasible with AIR. One way I could imagine this is another button within the settings page for every tool (right click).

With the current settings it would then create under windows a lnk (shortcut), *.bat (command line) or alike file with the correct arguments and current settings passed on. All that needs to be changed then is the location of the source or target file.