Custom Dials/Dialtops

[nacnac]

Is there anything that canbe used to create custom dials that dosent requre adobe anything?

[Jackalope]

I'm curious about this too. I'd like to make some but I'm not going to spend a couple hundred to do it. hehe

[nacnac]

lol! I know what you mean. ive tried to download a demo, but they're like 150 megabytes and don't print!?

[Puuka]

But you can do a screen capture ([Alt] [Print Screen]) and paste to a graphics program

[Drashia]

try Ado... um...

check out URLmaker's site, very good stuff going on there. I highly recomended

(I don't have it offhand, check you his profile in members or go to ... something HC in the forums section)

[urlmaker]

check out URLmaker's site, very good stuff going on there. I highly recomended

Hey, thanks! You can check out the new Forum "Project HC" and go to the Online Dial Maker. HOWEVER. The silver bullet is not quite there yet (but I am soooo close). The dial althought it prefills and is very close, doesn't print at the right size yet. So I infated it to a capturable dial. I would recommend that you check out JASC.com. They make a product that is almost as feature rich as Photoshop called Paint Shop Pro (no this isn't an ad, I just use it). Even more so in some respects. You can download a trial version that last for 60 days or more. I am not sure about the products cost as I purchased it a long time ago. (it was real cheap back then). It does everything you need to do a great dial.

The thing with any graphics program is it takes a novice some time to get used to the environment. (I still don't use a quarter of the features and I am a web developer)

[panther_king]

The problem I have had with making dials is not making the diel itself, but having it print at good enough a quality at such a small size that you can read it

[urlmaker]

panther_king, I had the exact same problem at first. I was REALLY frustrated that I couldn't capture my vector dials and have them print out with any level of quality that the vector did. (if you are curious why vectors print at such high quality, it uses a different process, images use little squares to make up an image, vectors use lines so the post script printer driver comes into play, at least this is how I understand it) That is when I discovered that little field in the RESIZE function of both Photoshop and Paintshop pro: RESOLUTION. I know it sounds simple, I always thought if I bumped my printer resolution to 600 dpi I was printing top quality. Well that would have been true but my image sizes default to a 72 pixels per inch resolution when you create or paste an image. Well, that is easy to fix. Either when you create the new image or when you resize change the number in resolution to 1000 pixels per inch. It is just a number and it won't "break anything" to set it even higher, the ONLY cost you pay for this is file size, it jumps up from a couple of kilobytes per file to many megabytes per file. WHO CARES. I don't even save the images because it is so easy now to make the dials. Although I am thinking about making a whole sheet of dials so that I can stop wasting sticker paper with one image per page. I detail the process for optimizing your capture in the dial maker help file. If it is too technical let me know and I will try to put together a graphic tutorial. I know I would have liked one about 6 months ago...

[yogsoloth]

urlmaker - your site is great; any way to do dial tops?......also, back to the original topic - does anyone know of any cheap or freeware to read ai files?

[Panther Cult]

Well, I'm pretty new to this, but in answer to the question about doing custom dial tops, I had pretty good success mocking up dial tops on Photosuite.

The process got a little long, but I scanned in a few dials, I saved images of each letter of the alphabet and each numeral, all of the various symbols for movement, range, AV, DV, Damage, etc. And then just plopped in the values I wanted in the spots I wanted and mashed together my images.

For numbering I just numbered my customs c01...

Then I printed on sticker paper (used a nice quality color printer, not my own unfortunately) and then cut out the hole for the stats to show threw and slapped them on the dial. Do they look perfect, certainly not. But they work pretty well for my purposes of display and fun gaming.

Someday when I get my camera fixed I'll post some pics.

[ironman51]

i have paint shop pro 7, how can i use that for making dials?

[T-RO]

Everything can be found online if you look hard enough... :grin:

You can use a download program like Getright that resumes a D/L if you get disconnected to download large files.

Failing that find someone that has the program and would be willing to share for a reasonable exchange.

Too bad my computer is really old so I cant even run my Photoshop 6 on it. :laugh: