The Logos
 

The new Marine Aquarium Time 2 allows you to create your own logos or download logos created by others and make them appear on the crystal. I have produced the first batch of logos for Marine Aquarium Time 2 which you can see some of below. It's nice having 18 logos cycling in the Aquarium. :)

There are 2 methods to create logos:

Easy Method
Create a black-and-white BMP image up to 1500x1500 and import it into Aquarium by opening the Settings panel of Marine Aquarium Time 2 and clicking Import Logo under the Clock tab.

MAT2 then resizes this logo down to the right size for the crystal, adds an emboss effect, and displays it on the crystal. You may load only one logo into MAT2 using this technique and the quality is somewhat limited.

http://feldoncentral.com/Sachs/malogo/TerramorphBMP.jpg  http://feldoncentral.com/Sachs/malog...importlogo.gif


Advanced Method
Create a 256 x 256 24-bit PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file using a program such as Photoshop or PaintShopPro and save it into the
c:\Program Files\SereneScreen\Marine Aquarium Time\ folder.

http://feldoncentral.com/Sachs/malogo/web/placelogo.gif

http://feldoncentral.com/Sachs/malogo/Logos01.jpg


[Marine Aquarium Time 2 logo creation guide].

[Download Logos for Marine Aquarium Time 2].

[Get Marine Aquarium Time 2].

the differences between two method is just different image type files being loeded into MAL, and the size. well, can we have multiple logo in the setting and cycles among of them?

EDIT: Opps, I show read the other thread first before asking this stupid question, sorry!

Ok, here's my first logo... It has an alpha channel that blends aound the edges and it's grey scale...

Will the grey scale be ok? Will the image turn out how I'm hoping it will? The flag logo you made makes it seems that way...

Edit: Or will I have to do something more like this if I want any kind of greyscale effect at all?

Edit 2: The alpha seems to be working fine, it's blending in with the edges of the background of this page... But I'm still confisued... I guess my question is, does everything that's grey scale have to have a level of transparency to show up correctly? Or will MAL take the different values of grey and know what to do with them? Maybe a better way to ask, is the alpha channel only for blending the edges, or for the entire image if you want it to be anything but only "black and white?"

Ok, I think I've got it...

Is this the kind of image I'm supposed to make???

One more post...

FYI for you IE people... Firefox and Mozilla actually display PNGs correctly... Here's a jpg with a comparision of Firefox vs IE displaying PNGs... Firefox is on the left, IE on the right... Notice how Firefox translastes the transparency info in the PNG and ties in the background color of the page, IE simply shoots out an ugly raw image... PNGs are so great, I hope IE handles them better soon...

Edit: Morgan, maybe this could help fix this problem??? Since most of people here use IE and I'm guessing we're going to see a lot of logos around here soon...

Ok, let me update my posting with more details.

Greyscale is absolutely what you want, not black and white dot pattern/dither.

The first logo you produced is close to how the logos are done. You've got a greyscale image with full intensity with transparent cutout.

The second logo seems to be 50% transparent plus a cutout. That's not what you want, since MAT2 already brings the transparency down to 70% on imported logos.

Ok, here's some testing I did...

Test 1
Test 2
Test 3

All of those tests use the same images, just different background colors. I used the html from the Microsoft link above... Seems to work fine with IE... Now the bad news... It kills the image completely in Firefox/Mozilla... :(

Ok, that's what I needed to know! I guess nevermind all the PNG talk above... :flush:

That's correct. To display a PNG properly in different browsers, you must use Javascript to detect the browser and put different HTML depending. It's a real mess.


I mucked up and it's supposed to be Targas, not PNGs. And it needs to be a flat image with an alpha channel, not a "pre-multiplied" image with transparency already applied to it. Sorry for the mix up.

Blah, what a pain, obviously I had no idea...

TGAs huh? Well, ok then... Can't wait for this thing to come out so I can mess around with it... :)

I didn't mean to discourage you. If you give me a PNG file with transparency, I can reformat it to work without losing anything.

On a side note, realize that your penguin logo basically will look painted on the crystal, rather than looking embossed into it. If this is what you want, then don't mind me. :)

Generally I have tried to create logos that are outlines so that they can be made to look carved. This definitely creates limitations.

well, how do we do to make the picture become more embossed looking? what kind of point we need to look out for in order to acheive this? grey scaling? outlining?

In Photoshop 6+, I create my logo on a separate layer and pull down the Layer menu to Layer Style and choose Inner Shadow. You'll want to twiddle with the default settings.

so does it work on embossed image?
i know ACDSee can do pix emboss...

I don't have a recent version of ACDSee installed to test this. I use 3.11 since all I want is the viewing capabilities.

Realize that the PNG-24 method is an advanced way of making logos. If you have a black and white logo, just paste it into MAL and it will emboss and cut it out for you.

drfish,

Here's what your logo looks like.

Haha! Sweet! Thanks! I can't wait to mess around with this...

drfish,
this is the emboss image i've created to go with the MAL.:cheers:

Looks good, I think I like the last one the best.

Now, MAL will do embossing for you though, right (with grayscale I mean)? But with some tweaks I'm sure you can get it to be a more dramatic effect...

That's creepy.

Realize that the "emboss" plugins in these programs turn the whole image grey and add outlines everywhere. This is probably not what you want. If I put that on the crystal, it would be the grey image just flat on the crystal. The penguin wouldn't even be cut out.

The automatic embossing feature of MAT2 only kicks in if you load a black and white BMP.