The Logo Creator v5.0 Manual

Documentation for Version 3 of the eCover Creator 3-D Module
This is an updated version of the previously named "eCover Creator" from Laughingbird Software.

------------------- NEW FEATURES: -------------------

----------------------- Models are editable:

You can click on a model to select it. A selection highlight will appear along with a 'three axis' arrow and a toolbar for options.
Deselect an object by clicking outside of the object.
You can mousedrag the axis to move, rotate or scale along the axis you first clicked on. which action is active depends on which tool is selected in the topright toolbar. (Move, Rotate and Scale).
Rollover the buttons for a tooltip. Alternatively you can hold one of the hotkeys pressed to temporarely change the active tool (M=move, R=rotate, S=scale)
There are two more buttons. One to Reset All (the little home icon) reset all changes (except the texture map mode). The model will be positioned in the center with a scale of 1 and a rotation of 0.
The last button is to undo the last step. at the moment there is an undo queue of 20 steps. (that can be whatever you find appropriate, it is only a single transform which gets saved theorethically we can have some 100,000s... :-)

---------------------- Right click on any face which you want to change and choose an image from the upcoming menuYou can fit width, fit height and fit exactly. The last one distorts the image a bit if the ratio of the 3-D face it is mapped on is different than the ratio of the model.

There are two other new functions in this menu:

•Scale the model to fit the texture.
This changes the scale of the model to fit the ratio of the texture.

• Choose new texture.
This brings up a file selection dialog to select a bitmap file to use as new texture. This bitmap will get copied into to textures folder "TempGraphics" (located inside The Web Graphics Creator > eCover Creator folder).

If the file is bigger than 250 KB it will be sampled down using the engine in The eCover Creator so that it doesn't take up too much space. The so used texture will be used only for the model you clicked on and replaces any other custom texture which were there before.

-------------------- Publish to shockwave !!
You can now publish a shockwave file to your own website. The same engine which is used in the ecover creator is shockwave safe now and can be used to only play back a file. The features to design a model are disabled in "playback mode", that is: changing textures and transforming the model. there is no export and print option in "playback mode" either.

How does it work ? From the right mouse menu, select "Publish this model...".
A Folder Selection Dialog will pop up. Select the folder you want to publish to. All required files to play the movie back in a webbrowser will be copied to the chosen location.

There is a html template file which gets copied to the location also: "tlc_3D_modul.html". This is a template which embeds the dcr "fullscreen" -> filling the browser window 100%. This template can be used to play the dcr in an own window. The user can change "tlc_3D_modul" as he likes so that he has another template.

------------------- Auto Animate feature.
There is now an auto animate feature, which can be enabled and disabled from the right mouse context menu in "environment"

While this feature does not make much sense in "authoring" mode, it may be nice in "playback" mode after publishing (when you publish this as a shockwave file for others to see).

What it does is simply going from one saved "screenshot" to the next. So you can determine the animation positions with the saved "screenshots". The built in screenshots (front, back, top, right, left) can be overwritten, by simply using the same name.

The existing screenshot with the same name will be removed from the list and a new one with the same name will be added at the end of the menu. That way the user can also control the ordering. Also, you can open the file "Position_Presets.txt" and reorder, rename or delete single lines. Either in their "authoring" folder or in the publish folder for the published movie.

------------------- Environment settings (preference settings)
There are some settings, which have no graphical interface in the application, but may be useful in publish mode.

They can be changed in the new file "environmentSettings.xml" for publishing (for authoring the values are stored in the preferences folder in the file "tlc_3D_prefs_V2.xml")

<show_ModelChooser>1</show_ModelChooser> => show or hide the icon for the model chooser at the lower right corner (playback mode only, in authoring it can't be hidden, doesn't make much sense either) this is especially useful, when you have only one model and do not need the chooser menu.

<show_AA_option>1</show_AA_option> => show or hide the icon for AntiAliasing. This may not be desirable, since the AA function is highly dependant on the ghardware and in some cases doesn't work correctly and in some cases even may crash the browser, if the window is too large... so we've simply left the choice to the user via this setting.

<lights> => settings for the lights. this shouldn't really be needed to change, but one never knows...

<light_2> is the light which "casts" the faked shadow. the rotation vector changes the shadow direction (but in most cases, it will be worse as before or not work at all, so it is advisable to leave it as it is)

< light_3> is the spot light. for the positiuon and the rotation vectors as the same as already said for light_2 is true, the color and the spotAngle maybe helpful though.

In the prefs file there is another pref setting: <gLanguage>... most strings in the app go through my own translation system. so it is easily feasable to expose this setting in "environmentSettings.xml" too. currently I maintain only english and german. a setting of 0 will use german for the strings a setting of 1 english (in the current version this is set to 1, regardless what the preferences file reads). I can make that multilingual with minimal effort. I can make that system with minimal effort, that it "reads" the strings in from external files in a folder (just like INM makes it with impressario) and so users can add their own language set or override the built in strings. -> new feature for to do list -> multilingual support

The other settings of the preference file (or "environmentSettings.xml" in case of "playback version") are self explanatory and take a value of 1 or 0 to switch the corresponding setting.

------------------- KNOWN ISSUES: -------------------

Sometimes the scaling of the model along the axis goes into the opposite direction as you would think, when dragging. I'll try to fix that but I can't promise, as this was very tricky to get to work as it is now and may become worse again