graphics

What programs do you use to create graphic images?

Background: I am working as a freelance web-developer. Now, lately this has meant that I have to design a lot of graphic images, logos etc for the the websites I create. So, are there any good resources to learn these things? And, what softwares should I ideally be learning? I have always heard about Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photosho...

Center text output from Graphics.DrawString()

I'm using the .NETCF (Windows Mobile) Graphics class and the DrawString() method to render a single character to the screen. The problem is that I can't seem to get it centered properly. No matter what I set for the Y coordinate of the location of the string render, it always comes out lower than that and the larger the text size the g...

Equidistant points across Bezier curves

Currently, I'm attempting to make multiple beziers have equidistant points. I'm currently using cubic interpolation to find the points, but because the way beziers work some areas are more dense than others and proving gross for texture mapping because of the variable distance. Is there a way to find points on a bezier by distance rath...

Drawing Library for Ruby

I am trying to code a flowchart generator for a language using Ruby. I wanted to know if there were any libraries that I could use to draw various shapes for the various flowchart elements and write out text to those shapes. I would really prefer not having to write code for drawing basic shapes, if I can help it. If someone could po...

Alpha blending colors in .NET Compact Framwork 2.0

In the Full .NET framework you can use the Color.FromArgb() method to create a new color with alpha blending, like this: Color blended = Color.FromArgb(alpha, color); or Color blended = Color.FromArgb(alpha, red, green , blue); However in the Compact Framework (2.0 specifically), neither of those prototypes are valid, you only get:...

.Net drawing clipping bug

gdi+ DrawLines function has a clipping bug that can be reproduced by running the following c# code. When running the code two line paths appear that should be identical, because both of them are inside the clipping region, but when the clipping region is set one of the line segment is not drawn. protected override void OnPaint(PaintEv...

Entity diagrams in ASP.NET MVC

What's the best way/tool to display nice diagrams with entity relationships in ASP MVC views? I.e. servers and and applications, or servers with other servers. Are there any third party tools out there that can do this? I've been searching around things like Telerik, but it's really hard to google for this! ...

In a DDS file can you detect textures with 0/1 alpha bits?

In my engine I have a need to be able to detect DXT1 textures that have texels with 0 alpha (e.g. a cutout for a window frame). This is easy for textures I compress myself, but I'm not sure about textures that are already compressed. Is there an easy way to tell from the header whether a DDS image contains alpha? ...

Suggested gaming platform to learn - Direct X (C++), Open GL or XNA

My nephew is an aspiring game developer. I have taught him a bit of C/C++, and suggested he learn that for a start. Once he has come to grips with that, which game/graphics API's do people suggest he learn? I would think DirectX would be current industry standard, but with more games looking to go X-platform then maybe Open-GL would be...

Is OpenGL dead?

I recently found out that OpenGL 3.0 was released a week ago. I glanced through the specification and read through some of the forum posts on the Khronos message board, and... I'm devastated. Not only did they not release the promised object model, but they deprecated most of the functionality that, IMHO, made OpenGL great, in favor of a...

Simple Frameworks for Displaying Bitmaps and Handling Button Presses

We have a set of applications that basically display a bunch of bitmaps and text, then allow user to press "buttons" (certain bitmaps) that cause actions to occur. We currently have these implemented using DirectX and a bunch of code to place the bitmaps and handle the button-presses. But we'd like to have the following features: por...

What could prevent OpenGL glDrawPixels from working on some video cards?

The following code writes no data to the back buffer on Intel integrated video cards,for example, on a MacBook. On ATI cards, such as in the iMac, it draws to the back buffer. The width and height are correct (and 800x600 buffer) and m_PixelBuffer is correctly filled with 0xAA00AA00. My best guess so far is that there is something amiss...

Version Control for Graphics

Say a development team includes (or makes use of) graphic artists who create all the images that go into a product. Such things include icons, bitmaps, window backgrounds, button images, animations, etc. Obviously, everything needed to build a piece of software should be under some form of version control. Should the graphics people u...

Advice on how to be graphically creative

I've always felt that my graphic design skills have lacked, but I do have a desire to improve them. Even though I'm not the worlds worst artist, it's discouraging to see the results from a professional designer, who can do an amazing mockup from a simple spec in just a few hours. I always wonder how they came up with their design and m...

What Are High-Pass and Low-Pass Filters?

Graphics and audio editing and processing software often contain functions called "High-Pass Filter" and "Low-Pass Filter". Exactly what do these do, and what are the algorithms for implementing them? ...

How to convert .ICO to .PNG?

What tool can I use to convert a .ICO file to a .PNG file? ...

Where can I get free Vista style developer graphics?

What is the best source of free Vista style graphics for application development? I want 32x32 and 16x16 that I can use in a Winforms application. ...

How to find a normal vector pointing directly from virtual world to screen in Java3D?

I think it can be done by applying the transformation matrix of the scenegraph to z-normal (0, 0, 1), but it doesn't work. My code goes like this: Vector3f toScreenVector = new Vector3f(0, 0, 1); Transform3D t3d = new Transform3D(); tg.getTransform(t3d); //tg is Transform Group of all objects in a scene t3d.transform(toScreenVector); ...

How can I draw a curve that varies in thickness along its path?

I'm capturing data from a tablet using Java (JPen library rocks) and would like to be able to paint a penstroke in a more natural way. Currently I'm drawing the pen stroke as straight line segments each with a different Stroke thickness. There has to be something in Java's Graphics Library that lets me to this more efficiently. Righ...

Design crowd sourcing

I'm looking to get a logo designed, but all my designer friends/colleagues are pretty busy. Since I've never done it before, I thought it would be interesting to crowd source the design. Does anyone know of any good design crowd sourcing sites? ...