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Working on Basic 3D Effect Shapes

VG.net Alien Artifact

What is it? Who knows, but Visual Studio .NET never looked like that before. We are working on some basic 3D effect Shapes for VG.net users. I will be posting some tips on gel ellipses, gel rectangles, solid ellipses, and solid rectangles soon.... all vector graphics, of course.

4 Comments

  • Yup. Many Avalon developers inside MS have already stated that we should be prepared for a tidal wave of misused gradients in the first generation Avalon apps. :)

  • Avalon does not even have the type of gradients we need to build the screen above. Specifically, it is missing path gradients and bell-curve gradients. Bell curve specifies the interpolation between gradients. Without these I could not have created the object above.



    Gradients as building blocks by themselves are hard to use; you are both correct. However, if you give a person pre-built building blocks, they have a much better chance of success. In the image above I resued a previously built SolidRectangle component in 8 places: the body of the whole object, the 3 buttons on the left, the indented region on the right (I added an Indented property to the SolidRectangle), and the back part of the three LEDs in that indented area.



    The LED's themselves are actually another building block called GelRectangle, built similarly to SolidRectangle. Because they are so small they appear as circles.



    In addition to these objects, shadows were added. We need to add them to the other building blocks so they do not have to be added separately.



    So you see, it is not so hard if someone does part of the work for you. Let's hope MS gets on the ball and adds at least the features in GDI+ rendering to Avalon. Without that, many things, such as these building blocks, will be extremely painful to construct.

  • who cares about the technical details ... the image is beautiful!

  • But you will be able to create your own graphical components like this -- just drag and drop from the toolbox! At the end of this series on 3D effects I will provide a dll you can use to create the object above, without knowing anything more than how to align visually. All the complicated code will be in the dll.

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