@monster

1. I have some updates soon to release public again. Some things that I tackled are:
   • support for folders (grabs sub-files in folders)
   • optimize setting in the texture packer, to create drafty quicker results (useful on very complex or large sprite collections)
2. easy :) just hit the Enter key, its the same as hitting the save key for quicker working.

a few weeks ago I was also prototyping some measure and slicing tool

But that is early stuff and again more UI building related

Hi Renderhjs,

Thanks a lot for the tutorial! yes! you are right, using the "Ani to Sheet".

Thank you for this great tool!

btw, im only tested it with PNG files, what about TGA with Alpha Channel (Transparency Mask)?

@Badmouse:
TGA, PSD,... maybe in the future. Right now PNG is the easiest as its the most complete format I use in terms of library and tools. But if you have a tool such as XnView it should be easy to setup a auto-converter.


some improvements on the Bitmap Font tool. It has now a nicer preview window and I got 90% of the fnt format completed in the exporter.

I managed to make it work in Unity using uiToolkit. The upper part shows unity and the lower part the preview window of ShoeBox with the Bitmap Font tool.



A friend is going to try this tomorrow in Cocos2d to see if this works right out of the box for him.

some more tweaking on the Bitmap Font Tool, pretty much done with this tool

pixel font test
I had to tweak a few things internally to allow detecting such tiny pixel islands as characters but now it works pretty well with pixel fonts too.




Narrow Sans Sarif font
Your typical anti aliased reading font. Even though the kerning is constant here it looks actually pretty decent if not quite good.




Bitmap Font settings
The output format can be customized but will be a *.fnt file (non XML) as a default. But it also can be a custom XML, json or anything else file.

very nice tools must say!

I just released version 1.50
AIR file 1.50 download link



major changes:

• Sprite packer supports now also animated GIF and SWF (AS1,AS2,AS3) files and splits them into individual frames along with the other frames to be packed.
• sprite packer supports iOs _2x convention option to export packed sprite sheets in standard and retina _2x files (uiToolkit for Unity supports this for example).
• Flickr upload supports private uploading now (see settings) and custom tags for each uploaded shoeBox picture.
• Bitmap font plugin added. This tool comes with a CSS export option as well as the famous fnt file for Unity, Cocos 2d Starling or other frameworks. A HTML bitmap font demo is also part of the documentation sample page.
• Added initial help screen to explain the basic controls. It shows only on every major version update, you can show it again by right clicking next to a tool in the shoeBox main area.
• Extract sprites detects automatically transparency. Meaning if a file doesn't have an alpha channel it uses the first color in the upper left corner as transparency masking color.

I'll be creating a few YouTube videos soon to demonstrate some of the new enhancements and tools.

on a related matter:
A few days ago some of our HTML dev's had to solve a tricky font issue in which the client insisted to have a very specific outline effect in HTML (iPad, Android support) that does not work right away in HTML or with CSS.

This is what they ended up with successfully, the text on the ice cream bucket is dynamic and a css driven bitmap font exported from ShoeBox



These are the 2 sprite sheets generated. One for the outline and one as the top one. Booth had different kerning values so they would match perfectly on top of each other.



Once I get my hands on their improved JS code to add the fonts on the fly in the DOM tree I will add a sample kit on my website.

Damn dude. Good work

This is what happens when I load up some animated Gifs I have

try a different GIF file, for me it always worked so far. I use a library for loading animated GIF's. Either there is a flaw in that library or in that GIF file you tried. The GIF files I generated with PS however just worked fine.

2 new video tutorials for ShoeBox on YouTube:

Short overview of the flickr Tool

ShoeBox: Flickr tool - YouTube

I use the flickr tool everyday at work. If you have a pro account at flickr (e.g. you pay a yearly fee) make sure you check the pro account setting in the settings. Also if you use this at work or NDA stuff make sure you set the public URL setting in the settings to false, otherwise your uploaded pictures will be visible to the entire world.


Creating a Bitmap Font

ShoeBox: Create Bitmap Fonts - YouTube

I use right now this feature for a Unity project at work to get PS designed UI's 100% carried over to the Unity build. Usually I use it for bold or style driven fonts like scores, counters etc. that come with some 3d or metal like textures.

I'll be adding more videos in the next few days

Hey Renderhjs what would I need to do to use this bitmap font creator on a commercial project? Im a little confused because on the actual shoebox homepage it says the tools are "free" but on this polycount thread it says "non-commercial"?

Originally Posted by Ged

Hey Renderhjs what would I need to do to use this bitmap font creator on a commercial project? Im a little confused because on the actual shoebox homepage it says the tools are "free" but on this polycount thread it says "non-commercial"?

It refers to my philosophy as in ShoeBox is intended as a free non- commercial tool. Free for anyone to use for any kind of project including commercial.
It means for me that I don't have any interests in commercialisation on my part, like stripping the app at some point to sell a paid version. It is free as it is and you can use it for whatever you want.

Maybe I should rephrase that- but no worries its just like TexTools: free for anyone in any way to use.

Originally Posted by renderhjs

It refers to my philosophy as in ShoeBox is intended as a free non- commercial tool. Free for anyone to use for any kind of project including commercial.
It means for me that I don't have any interests in commercialisation on my part, like stripping the app at some point to sell a paid version. It is free as it is and you can use it for whatever you want.

Maybe I should rephrase that- but no worries its just like TexTools: free for anyone in any way to use.

Wow thank you very much, that is very generous I have tried other font creation tools for use in unity games and so far I like yours the best. Other tools force me to recreate a font style I already made in photoshop but shoebox lets me use my photoshop designs to create the font, a much better approach.

Update
ShoeBox_1.60_public.air

some fixes I addressed

• replaced the GIF parsing library to fix the issues people had with some GIF files
• Fixed a stupid error on the CutOut Sprites tool, it should now proper detect all blobs (before it used to skip some on complex sheets).
  
• packing: id name overlay so you can see (if fitting size wise) which id is assigned to which sprite even on animated sprites like GIF or SWF frames
  

Not in this update yet but...
I also have been working on a new tool that tries to mask a image automatically by providing a separate background only image or assuming a solid background color.

It uses a difference blend to make out the pixels that make out the object we want to extract. On a second pass (not yet done) I want to increase the saturation on aliasing or transparent pixels to get rid of the sampled background pixels.

Here is another example, some of the white textures on the car itself are transparent like the background which is a side effect of this process, but it should provide a nice precise starting mask.



Another nice example with rather unexpected results at first (this one is missing a checker background image in the last result)



I see this as something useful for extracting alpha channels out of merged image data (like the Windows and OSX clipboard data) as well as photography and other source materials.

I got asked again for command line support so right now I am prototyping a additional button in the settings of each plugin to generate a bat (bash on mac) file.

this was the idea:



right now I have a prototype that I am working on that does something like this



it first pop's up a dialog to choose the target or file you want to address in the command line. After that it will pop up a save dialog where you specify the *.bat file (or bash on mac). After that it opens the bat file in notepad so you can tweak additional values or copy paste the arguments into your script.
Not sure yet about the mac support because I don't use the mac much or at all - so it would be more painful testing it on the mac. I will have a look though on windows to see how far i can get, like cuing up commands, assigning multiple files ect.

Hi renderhjs, im using your tool a lot! is amazing! thanks!

In the tool you have a gif to sheet, any interest in add a tool for Sheet to Gif Animation and Sprites to Gif Animation? in case of yes will be cool a option to set the time of the Animation.

Thanks for this great tool

1.8.0 is now out
ShoeBox_1.8.0_public.air

Some highlights


Not mentioned in the image but another new tool is the HTML text
http://www.renderhjs.net/shoebox/htmlText.htm
for the web developers out there, might be more something that is used at my work but still useful if you have a mac and want to get rid of control characters.

I'll write up later a more detailed change log as a lot of stuff changed in this release.

Nice update!

Btw. is there an option to write our own templates for packing and bitmap fonts?

Originally Posted by SpeCter

Btw. is there an option to write our own templates for packing and bitmap fonts?

Yes
If you look at the settings for the bitmap Fonts there are 2 variables "fileFormatLoop" and "fileFormatOuter" which define the file structure of what you are about to export.
The order or structure of those 2 variable is like this

<fileFormatOuter>
    <fileFormatLoop/>
    <fileFormatLoop/>
    <fileFormatLoop/>
</fileFormatOuter>

where @loop within the "fileFormatOuter" places the looping elements like in this case each character.

Characters sequences such as @x, @id, @w etc. within those variable strings get replaced with character or sprite values. More info on all of that here
http://www.renderhjs.net/shoebox/bitmapFont.htm

As for the template dropdown menu:
Sadly there is not an support yet for that, but...
You have now 2 options of exporting your setup and re-use it for future uses or different computers.

1. Option 1 is to use the JSON clipboard exporter / importer.
2. The new added command line stores all settings that you last selected into a batch script file and sets it ever ytime you execute it. More on that here: http://www.renderhjs.net/shoebox/commandLine.htm

If you have a new suggestion for a template and it would be useful to other people as well I am more than happy to pick it up and add it with the next update of shoebox.

I think it would only benefit me and the few people who use Gorilla with Ogre3D.
There are other tools which do what I need, but i always liked the way you design your programs and how easy to use they are ;)

Originally Posted by SpeCter

I think it would only benefit me and the few people who use Gorilla with Ogre3D.
There are other tools which do what I need, but i always liked the way you design your programs and how easy to use they are ;)

Just looked it up
http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Gorilla
Could you provide me some sample files? Is the lookup file ASCI based or a Binary? If it's within my range of possibilities I could create a template for BFG.
Otherwise I'll have a look whenever I have some extra time.

Actually it´s just a simple ascii text file.
https://github.com/betajaen/gorilla/...ILLA_SCHEMA.md

This is the example gorilla file shipping with it:
https://github.com/betajaen/gorilla/...dejavu.gorilla

will look into it, looks like i have already most variables covered.