How do you like this Albino3 Skin

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Actually this is just the result of what i call the 'preliminary work', i.e. finding the exact margins and positions etcetera. Therefore there are absolutely no frills, i.e. no gradients, no shadows, no lighting effects, nothing of the sort. However once i stuck on the new knobs i thought it looks pretty nice the way it is so im thinking of leaving it like that. Let me know what you think.

PS: As is pretty much always the case, ive had no control over item positions, and unfortunately some of the readouts are sorta all over the place so its impossible to perfectly align them with the corresponding control. This will be a problem in any case though, (and already is with the factory skin), just thought id mention it in case anyone wonders.

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I like it :tu: Will there be some side panels or is this not possible?
cheers

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Less red, please!

But how are you going to distribute it, as the UI is embedded in the dll? Leave the res hacking to us?

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Gosh wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:19 pm I like it :tu: Will there be some side panels or is this not possible?
cheers
While it is technically possible to change the UI size, it is not possible to move the items around in order to arrange them differently. Depending on the animation type, some of them can be extended toward the right (as i did with e.g. the Mod selectors so they can have more text on them), while others can be extended toward the bottom. But thats about all you can do in this case because the positional image-start-coordinates are where they are, which means unless you had access to the UI definition file theres nothing that can be done.

Aside from that, what is also possible is to make the whole UI window larger because the plugin uses the dimensions of the background images to determine the plugin-window-size. This makes it possible to quasi-enlarge the UI in such a way that the portion where the Layers panel is will always be visible, i.e. the switching will not cause the UI to resize, which as i noticed can be a good thing with some hosts like VSTHost and REAPER, which will leave scrollbars in the window when the UI resizes back to its smaller size. (Whereas other hosts dont resize at all and mess everything up when you try. LMMS comes to mind.) But thats the limit of the usefulness of this too, because like i said, in order to be able to make use of a much bigger UI you would need to be able to make the items themselves larger and also be able to distribute (i.e. reposition) them across the larger UI to actually make use of the larger window size. And that i cant do.

So to answer your question; what you see on the screenshot is the biggest possible size and the only possible layout since i have no control over item sizes and their positions on the UI.

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perfumer wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:41 pm Less red, please!

But how are you going to distribute it, as the UI is embedded in the dll? Leave the res hacking to us?
Its an Albino, remember? :D White and Red are mandatory!

As always, when i release this you will get an Images.res which can be installed with a few clicks.

It only takes seconds with ResHacker but you can of course also use your preferred PE resource editor as long as it supports the .res format.

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Love what you did with buttons and seeing layers always, not a fan of the font used. :)

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EvilDragon wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 4:19 pm Love what you did with buttons and seeing layers always, not a fan of the font used. :)
Tastes differ, always will. Personally im super glad i finally found a font that looks like that (its one of the less-famous Windows fonts named 'Utsaah') because it looks relatively clean and sharp even at that small size, plus it has good kerning (see how nicely the A and the Y are together in DECAY) and no odd-looking chars like the 'fat-belly' uppercase S of Arial Bold. But yeah, i know how it is, one mans nice is another mans nah. :D

As to the Layers panel, you will still have to switch because the plugin uses 2 different BG images, one for Layers panel enabled and another for Layers panel disabled. So if you decide to use a fullsize image for both BGs (and i will make this optional so the original MO can be used as well) the UI no longer resizes when you enable/disable the Layers panel, but switching is still required since the Layers/Close button not only switches backgrounds but also toggles visibility of the items displayed on the Layers panel.

(BTW, this thing is layered like a frickin onion. 122 individual images, 118 of them used, and many of them stacked on top of each other in a way that makes your head spin trying to find out what goes on top (or beneath) of what. Never seen anything like it.)

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Gosh wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:19 pm I like it :tu: Will there be some side panels or is this not possible?
cheers
It just occured to me that you didnt mean sidepanels the way i thought you meant, but simply something like wooden panels at the sides?

If thats what you meant then thats unfortunately a no because there is no more room for something like that.

(I already tried because i would have liked that myself but it didnt look good with such narrow strips so i scrapped it. (The dark grey frame around the screenshot is not part of the UI, it ends where the brighter grey ends.))

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Nice job! I love this - excited for when it's ready. I was using Albino last week.

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I think it looks great! Good work. :)
EnergyXT3 - LMMS - FL Studio | Roland SH201 - Waldorf Rocket | SoundCloud - Bandcamp

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ENV1 wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 6:06 pm
Gosh wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:19 pm I like it :tu: Will there be some side panels or is this not possible?
cheers
It just occured to me that you didnt mean sidepanels the way i thought you meant, but simply something like wooden panels at the sides?

If thats what you meant then thats unfortunately a no because there is no more room for something like that.

(I already tried because i would have liked that myself but it didnt look good with such narrow strips so i scrapped it. (The dark grey frame around the screenshot is not part of the UI, it ends where the brighter grey ends.))
yes, that was what I meant. thanks for the information. I still like it (even without wooden side panels) :)

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ENV1 wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:58 pm
perfumer wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:41 pm Less red, please!

But how are you going to distribute it, as the UI is embedded in the dll? Leave the res hacking to us?
Its an Albino, remember? :D White and Red are mandatory!
It's irritating. I have eye issues and A3 is the number 1 most irritating UI ever - for me. Can't look at that thing! Dial down the saturation, please!

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dont like the red, or the tri point knobs, but like the overall style

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Thanks for the responses, always good to hear what others think.

Let me just say a few things so you understand why some things are the way they are.

Regarding the knobs; the original 'factory' knobs are delta-shaped too, its just not as obvious as it is with my set. And since in this case i didnt want to deviate too much from the factory UI i made them triangular as well, however i will be happy to provide the .knob file so anyone can make whatever changes they want. (For instance to have more 'standard' looking round knobs, all you would have to do is disable the 'Triangle' layer and save the strip. But of course technically you can use any knobs you want, i.e. you could even make a completely new set from scratch if youd like that better. No problem at all.)


As to the red, let me explain why i chose exactly that color and not some other color. The thing is, im a big fan of consistency. For instance as far as item positioning is concerned i like to work on what is probably best described as a 'matrix grid', where all items of the same type should ideally have the same sizes and distances from other items unless it is absolutely impossible due to not having access to the UI definition file. (As is unfortunately the case most of the time.) Take knob labels for instance. Ideally they should all be the exact same distance from the knobs and at the same time be flush horizontally. If thats not possible i first try to find a workaround, (see for instance Pitch and Velo in the Envelopes panel), and only if an acceptable workaround isnt possible either i will deviate from the grid because i wont have any other choice.

And its the same with colors too. In Albino3, the only readout whose color cannot be changed is the waveform display. So while the readout text could be set to either red, light red or white, (switchable on the backpanel), the waveform display is always RGB 240/0/25, which means this has to be the first 'reference color' for all the other red items. (I.e. the strokes, the plus/minus glyphs, the arrow glyphs, etcetera.) But there is more. Since the brightest parts of the textual readouts (when set to red) have a somewhat different color than the waveform display (RGB 255/40/48), we have second reference color to take into account. So to make all the reds look halfways equal next to each other i decided to go with RGB 230/0/0 because optically it was the best compromise with respect to the 2 reference colors.

So long story short, the red wasnt just picked at random. Its simply the result of the attempt to make all the reds look the same as much as possible in order to achieve optical consistency. If it wasnt for the fact that the color of the waveform display cannot be changed at all, many different skins would be possible, including dark ones with totally different colors like blue instead of red since the textual readouts can be changed to white. (Of course without the white/red theme it wouldnt be 'Albino' anymore, but anyway.)

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A master at work. Incredible.

I tried having a go at this one. Didn't get very far at all.

I like what you have done so far. That's enough. Great work.

Anything else you can come up with is good.

This is a real odd ball job. It's not one, it's not the other.

You'll never make anyone happy with it.

What you have done so far is great.

Anything on top is a bonus.

This is great work, hard won. From one of the few that tried to 'crack' this skin and do something better.

Serious kudos to you ENV1.

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