Circluar frame/mask with kgPanels - help me understand how?

[Shanyn]

So let's say I have a square unit portrait, and I'd like to make it into a circle with a thin border. Like this:


Can someone give me the basics on how I might make all the square corners and bits outside the circular texture transparent?

Note: I understand photoshop. Alpha channels, masks, all that stuff--I can make any TEXTURES I need for this without explanation. What I don't understand is the actual execution. How many textures I need, what to mask in which--it seems like I'd take a transparent texture and mask out the corners, but... if it's a transparent texture... wouldn't it do nothing?

I know it's possible; I have an example of a UI that does this (here), but I've looked at the textures in the art pack and still can't figure out exactly how.

[Maul]

You have to trick the eye. If you look at circle skins for buttons, you will notice they have a black ring on the outside or inside of the visual circle to cover the square edges.

There is no true way to mask-off a texture. I have asked for this in the past but was told that the graphics engine the UI uses would have to be re-done, which would be low-priority since the existing engine works fine for Blizzard's UI.

[Grimsin]

that isn't true for the minimap though is it? i know i masked the minimap from circle to square and back again via Minimap:SetMaskTexture([[Interface\BUTTONS\WHITE8X8]])

without having to compensate the edges. i always thought this is how the circle buttons were done but as i have never used circle buttons other then the ones that were in Necrosis i have no idea.

has anyone tried setting the mask texture to their own mask file? or to any number of the files in bliz's art that would work? is that not how the fancy hud bars are done to?

edit - and to answer the initial question to some degree - No, you would not use a transparent texture but rather you would have to set the player portrait texture mask to a circle, a white one? I think. At lest that is how i would think to do it. That is how i did it with the minimap via the code line i entered above. This may be something only the minimap can do but as i have seen a ton of round char portrait stuff and i know the char portrait stuff has a ton of special functions in its code, i would go look through that and see if you find something there maybe and try that line above.

[Shanyn]

Thank you for the assistance, I'll look into that. I know the basic circular char portraits are actually built in to WoW itself, but I was looking to do 3D ones, which are only ever square in any unit frame addon I've used.

[jeffy162]

I know this is a bit late, but have a look at how SquidFrame does it. I'm not sure if the 3D portraits are round, though.

[Lyelu]

I was working on the same thing... Maul's right. The only place that masking works in-game is in the minimap.


If you will look closely at the image you linked, the layers will be like this, from bottom to top:

1. A round background, which is transparent at the outer edges.
2. A square 3d portrait, which is smaller than the background.
3. A round overlay, which shades away the bottom edges, so you can't see the fact that the very bottom of the 3d portrait isn't there.

I'll be done with my oUF in a week or so, if you want to bookmark my portal, then you could use the oUF code after it's done. I also have a page there about graphics, if you need to know how to get your TGAs to be transparent.

It does seem like Blizz uses round portraits, but I am fairly (90%) certain there's no way we can. Which makes no sense, but I'm not queen of the world so I didn't get to decide.