Making a Bootanimation
Introduction
Hello xda,
I’m not really into Android development at the moment as I’m just not familiar with anything coding or related, but while my knowledge of Android may need to grow some more I can share things that I already master a bit more. After all, this forum is a place to share knowledge so I hope I can help some people while I am enjoying my stay here on the forums.
Since most of the forum users are here to get the limits out of our phone and probably want to customize it too, it’s most likely that you want to change your bootanimation at some point. Most custom ROM’s already have a customized bootanimation integrated and there are also quite some bootanimations available in the theming section, but what if you want to make your own customized animation?
I wrote this tutorial on how to create a bootanimation for the people who want to experiment with the making of bootanimations, as well as the people that are good at making animations already but don’t really know what to do next. I will try to explain the making of a basic animation using the tools a regular pc user can get or already has, and also get a little more in depth at some points for people who are not satisfied with only the basics. The goal of this tutorial is to get even the less experienced users on their way, not to make the best animation ever. Also, I wrote how I did it, and how I would suggest doing it, but there might be better ways to do certain things described. If you know how to do it easier and/or better, please feel free to leave feedback.
What you can expect in this tutorial:
• What software to use
• How to make a simple animation in MS Paint
• Make an image sequence
• Make the package ready to be installed on your phone
• Porting an already existing animation
Animation: What software to use?
Before we want to make our bootanimation we first want to plan out what software we are going to use. The first thing is of course the animation. Depending on what you’re after and your level of skill these are some of my recommendations:
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Microsoft Paint – The Gimp – Adobe Photoshop – Adobe Flash Professional – Adobe After Effects
Microsoft Paint
Maybe it surprises you, or maybe you just didn’t think of it, but MS Paint is actually a good tool to start making your animation. Anyone with the Windows operating system has it installed by default so this is the software I’m going to use for the animation in this tutorial.
The Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/
Already a bit more advanced than MS Paint and therefore a better option if you want to make a more complicated animation and can find your way through the options the software offers. Best option if you want to go advanced but don’t want to spend any cash.
Adobe Photoshop - http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
I can barely imagine someone who has never heard of this software before. This piece of software is pretty much the standard in the image editing world, and I highly recommend using this software if you can afford to buy it.
Adobe Flash - http://www.adobe.com/products/flash.html
This software maybe is the best software to use for this matter, its interface is designed for the making of animations and if you know how to use it (which I sadly don’t) I recommend it. But again, it doesn’t come for free.
Adobe After Effects - http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html
Even though this software is mostly used for compositing effects on videos it does an awesome job on the more complicated animations and motion graphics. That’s why I’m using this software myself when making bootanimations.
This is some of the software I would recommend using. Of course there are many more alternatives as well as more advanced software out there, 3D applications for example like Blender, Maya, Cinema4D and 3Ds Max could also be useful depending on the complexity of your project. Right now I’m just going to stick with MS Paint for the sake of this tutorial.
Post 1/4
How to make a simple animation in MS Paint
Note: The following step by step tutorial is based on a Dutch Windows system; certain menu entries might not be well translated and are shown in Dutch in the screenshots.
The Base
This is the part where the animating happens. Make your animation using the software that you own and are comfortable with. The goal is to make a sequence of images in the .png format which the phone can read and display while the phone boots thus displaying the animation. If you have never changed anything to your phone before, you see a nice little Samsung logo animation after the kernel has booted. You can find this animation in /system/media and it’s called bootani.qmg (Samsung QImage file made using Samsung theme software). This package is basically the same package we’re going to make ourselves but with a different extension. Now that you know roughly what we want to create we will move on.
We will start the process by launching Paint.
Code:
• Simply type ‘paint’ in the field on the start menu when you are on Windows 7 or Vista or access it from the ‘All Programs’ tab.
• When in Paint, look for the entry ‘Properties’ under ‘File’ in paint.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/1.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/2.jpg[/IMG]
• Set the image properties to 240 pixels in width and 400 pixels in height, this is the resolution of our Samsung Galaxy 3.
• First pick the paint bucket tool from the tool menu and fill the background with black.
• Next search for the Android logo on Google Images, find a .png file or [URL="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Assets/android_logo.png"]download mine[/URL], copy it and paste it in the paint window.
The reason that I’m looking for a PNG file is that it holds an alpha channel so that the background is transparent (Paint transforms it to black when pasted directly from the clipboard).
• Without de-selecting the just pasted image right click it and choose the option called something along the lines of ‘Scale’ or ‘Transform’
• Then set the horizontal and vertical value to 75 percent.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/3.jpg[/IMG]
• Since the pasting messed up the image properties simply repeat the first step. Set the height and width value to 240 x 400.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/4.jpg[/IMG]
• Now make a little progress bar in the middle of our Android logo which we are then going to animate.
• First choose the rectangular shape tool with rounded corners.
• Next change the line thickness to the thickest, the contour to solid color and the fill to none.
• Draw the shape on top of the logo.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/5.jpg[/IMG]
Now the base of our animation is ready.
• Save it as a .bmp on your computer and name it ‘bootanimation_base.bmp’
The Animating
We are now going to prepare our folders for the animation. An Android bootanimation generally consists out of two parts:
• One that could be described as the intro. (part0)
• And one that is in a loop until the system boots up. (part1)
We find this ‘intro animation’ commonly placed in the ‘part0’ folder as a set of images. In the ‘part1’ folder we put the animation that we want to loop for the rest of the time.
You can hold on to this standard, but you can also make your own architecture. For the sake of this tutorial I will drop the ‘intro’ part and go straight to the looping animation. In this case we only need the part1 folder.
Code:
• Make a folder called ‘bootanimation’ like I did in the above screenshot.
• Inside the bootanimation folder create the ‘part1’ folder which will hold our animation. We don’t need the ‘part0’ folder in this tutorial as I mentioned above.
We are now ready to make our first frame.
• Select the brush tool, set the line to the thickest again and leave the color black.
• Then with the brush carefully draw a little on the right of the progress bar and with a little space in between the rest of the bar. This way you're making a little green bit in a black bar.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/7.jpg[/IMG]
This is our first frame! We are going to repeat the next step a couple of times down the road so pay attention:
• Now choose ‘Save as’ from the file menu.
• Save you’re frame as a .png file in the ‘part1’ folder and name it ‘01.png’ Caution: Do not overwrite the bmp file by choosing ‘save’, choose ‘save as’ only!
You can probably see where this is going.
• Once you’ve saved your file open your ‘bootanimation_base.bmp’
• Draw a little more on the left and a little less on the right side shifting the green bit in comparison to 01.png.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/8.jpg[/IMG]
• Now choose ‘Save as’ again from the file menu.
• Save you’re frame as a .png file in the ‘part1’ folder and name it ‘02.png’
• Repeat this process of editing the bmp and saving it as a PNG until the green bit is shifted all the way to the right, and you have a couple of frames in your ‘part1’ folder. [I]Caution: Do not overwrite the bmp file![/I]
• Once your frame looks like the following picture open the bmp one more time;
• Fill up the entire bar with black and save it as a png changing the number so it follows up the last png you saved.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/09.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/10.png[/IMG]
Your folder should look something like this:
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/11.jpg[/IMG]
And that’s going to be your animation!
Making a PNG Sequence in After Effects
Note: If you followed the MS Paint tutorial and if you don’t own After Effects in general you can skip this part.
While Adobe After Effects is mainly seen as a video effects and motion graphics compositor, it is not only capable of exporting video, but also image sequences! Say you have made your animation in After Effects, you can simply let After Effects export each frame as a .png file to your desired location.
If you’re making a typical bootanimation with intro:
• Set the workspace to the intro of the animation, in the screenshot the intro takes 3 seconds.
• Choose ‘Composition’, ‘Add to Render Queue’.
• Switch to the Render Queue
• Change the ‘Lossless’ settings to PNG Sequence and ‘Output to’ your ‘part0’ folder.
• Click ‘Render’
• For the ‘part1’, change your work area to the second part of the animation.
• Add it to the Render Queue and change the settings like you did for the first part.
• Output to the ‘part1’ folder and click ‘Render’
You now have the animation rendered out in a two part PNG sequence!
Post 2/4
Making the Bootanimation.zip
You’ve now probably made your animation, either in Paint following the tutorial, or in your own way.
Samsung stores their bootanimation as bootani.qmg as mentioned above. The file is actually an archive like a .zip, and that’s exactly what we are going to make. In order for our phone to display the animation we need to make a bootanimation.zip with inside it our ‘part1’ folder we just made. A desc.txt file on the same level as the ‘part’ folders tells the phone how to play the animation:
• It tells the phone in what resolution to play the animation, which in our case is 240 400
• The following number is the frame rate in which the .png sequence has to be displayed, in this example it’s 25 frames per second. The human eye experiences everything above 25 frames per second as a fluid movement, so this is your minimum frame rate if this is the effect you’re after. Anything below 25 frames per second appears choppy to the eye (which could also be an effect you purposely want to achieve). I recommend 25 frames per second for fluid animations as more frames per second could cause our phone to display the animation incorrect, because it gets too much images to process at once.
• The next two lines are the folders that are used in the animation with the number of loops and the delay between the animations in front of it. The first folder loops 1 time and doesn’t delay, the second loops 0 (=infinite) times and doesn’t have a delay either.
We have to transform all the above pieces into a bootanimation.zip. While we could do that manually I recommend using the Boot Animation Creator made by despotovski01. Download the software from the thread and install it on your computer.
• Open the program and follow the wizard.
• Select the ‘bootanimation’ folder with your ‘part1’ folder inside and proceed to step 2 of the wizard.
• Now in this window, choose ‘edit’ while holding the first line selected and make it 240 in width and 400 in height.
• Since our ‘tutorial animation’ is only 8 frames long I don’t want to go for the fluid animation, but rather the choppier one. In this case I’m making the animation go 10 FPS (Frames Per Second).
• When you’re ready, click ‘set’
• To actually assign the folder with images to the animation choose ‘Add a loop’
• Choose the folder from the dropdown menu (which shouldn’t be hard, because there’s only one option)
• Set the number of loops to 0, which makes it loop infinite, and leave the delay on 0. Press ‘Add’
• Click next, on the next screen press ‘Save’ and save the bootanimation as ‘bootanimation.zip’ somewhere to your computer.
• Now the bootanimation.zip is ready to be installed on your phone!
Make the package ready to be installed on your phone
If you’re going to use the bootanimation (or any future bootanimations you’ll make) for your personal use only, you can use an application like Root explorer to simply paste the bootanimation.zip in your /system/media folder. If you’re going to share the bootanimations like on the forums for example it could also be convenient to make an update.zip. An update.zip is a package with a couple of scripts and some files inside which can be flashed through Clock Work Mod Recovery and is used to get files in the internal memory of the phone, like in /system/media. CWM Recovery is integrated in most custom kernels and can be accessed by pressing both of the volume buttons and the menu button while turning on the phone.
To make an update.zip you can simply download this .zip archive open it with a decent archiver, preferably WinRAR or 7Zip and navigate to /system/media. You’ll see a bootanimation.zip placeholder inside, which you can then (without extracting the archive) replace with your own bootanimation.zip! The archive you now have is ready to be placed on your SD-card and flashed through CMW Recovery. You can rename the update.zip to whatever you want.
Making a simple GIF Animation preview
Now that you’ve made your bootanimation, you’ll probably want to present it to the forums. While posting a couple frames of the animation will give an idea to users what animation they’re going to get, it is also very useful to make an animated preview of said thing. A quick google on ‘GIF maker’ will give you several options of online GIF makers that just let you select the PNG’s you just made and make them into a neat little GIF animation. While this is a fine method I would recommend everyone who owns Adobe Photoshop to do it this way:
• Open Photoshop
• Double click the workspace to ‘open’, or select ‘File’ and click ‘open’
• Navigate to the folder you stored your PNG’s in and select the first frame of your animation.
• Now check the box with ‘Sequence’ behind it and click ‘open’
• Select the frames per second you want the animation to play in. Generally you want to go with 25, but I’m going with 10 as I explained above.
• Now click ‘File’, ‘Save for Web & Devices’ or press ‘Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S’
• In the window that popped up, select GIF from the dropdown menu, change the ‘Looping options’ to ‘Forever’ and hit save.
• Upload your GIF to the public section of Dropbox, to Photobucket or any other online storage service to insert the image in a post!
Post 3/4
How to port an existing bootanimation
There’s a large amount of bootanimations available on the web, but you’ll soon discover that unless their specifically made for our phones the resolution will be to big almost all the time. That means that if you want to use or share the animation you have to port it first in order to make it work on phones with a smaller resolution. Since full fluid animations of 25 FPS are over 100 frames long most of the time it would be a real pain in the neck to scale them all down one by one. I will talk about two ways to port an animation to a smaller resolution.
The easy way
The simplest way of porting an animation would be to just adjust the resolution values in the desc.txt provided in the bootanimation.zip. While this will probably work, it’s not the most accurate way of porting an animation. Since our phone is not the fastest one it is not only the resolution which might make a bootanimation unplayable, but it could also be a pretty hard task for our lower-end device to load such big images in an animation while booting.
The advanced and more accurate way
Editing every image individually would be a really hard task, but would result in a much more accurate and potentially better port. That’s why it is my recommendation to do it anyway, but that’s where Adobe Photoshop comes in! Adobe has made wonderful batch system that lets you process huge amounts of images with a click of the mouse. This is how that works:
• Download the ‘to be ported’ bootanimation.zip and extract it.
• Open Photoshop
• Click ‘Window’ and check ‘Actions’ if it isn’t checked already
• Click the ‘New’ icon at the bottom of the Actions panel and call the action ‘Scale down bootanimation’ in the window that pops up.
• Click record.
• Open a random frame from the animation.
• Now select ‘Image’, ‘Image Size’ or press ‘Alt+Ctrl+I’
• In the window that comes up change the width and height values to 240 x 400 pixels and click ‘OK’
• Next click ‘File’, ‘Save as’ or press ‘Ctrl+Shift+S’
• Save the image as a .png and be sure not to overwrite something as this is just the preparing of the actual resizing of hundreds of images. (It doesn’t matter where you save it, to Photoshop it only matters if you save it. The ‘save as’ settings are going to be overridden as you’ll see later)
• Once you’ve saved the file, close the image.
• Now click the rectangular ‘stop’ button at the bottom of the Actions panel and you’ve recorded the action!
• Delete the just saved image from your computer as we don’t need it anymore and it could mess up the batch process.
Your action should now look something like this:
In the next part we’re going to do the actual resizing:
• Click ‘File’, ‘Automate, ‘Batch’
• The ‘Batch’ window should pop up.
• Select ‘Scale down bootanimation’ as action from the dropdown menu.
• Choose the source to be a folder and then choose the folder with images to be resized.
• Be sure to check ‘Override Action “Open” Commands.
• Choose the destination to be a folder as well and choose a new folder to store the resized images.
• Be sure to check ‘Overide Action “Save As” Commands’ as well
• For the File Naming select the ‘4 Digit Serial Number’ + ‘Extension’ as shown in the screenshot below.
• When everything is set up like in the screenshot, hit ‘OK’ and watch the magic happen!
• Once the operation is completed your downscaled PNG’s will be waiting for you in the folder you selected.
• You can use this ‘action’ now every time you need to resize an animation to this resolution.
While some of you may want to use this method but don’t have Photoshop, I’ve found out about a simple plugin for The Gimp to do pre-scripted batch operations on lots of images just like Photoshop. It’s called David’s Batch Processor and you can install it from here: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
Requesting a bootanimation
We are approaching the end of the tutorial; I hope you found it useful. There’s one thing I want to mention though. Even though I’ve tried to explain the most things about bootanimations it’s most likely that you didn’t become the best artist of all time because of this. If you want to have your own custom bootanimation, or want to port an existing one and don’t feel like you can do it yourself, feel free to PM me or leave a reply here, because I’m having fun making/tweaking/porting bootanimations and that way I’m also contributing a little to this forum.
The End
Thanks for taking the time to read this (or a part of this) tutorial and I really hope it helped some people. This is my first tutorial, so don’t hold back to tell me how to improve it (or change any grammatical issues). If you still have questions you can leave a reply or PM me.
Credits go to:
This great community and its developers
Nishant_713 who helped me out the first time I made a bootanimation.
Ava.tar for feedback and his bootanimation work
Despotovski01 for his cool little bootanimation.zip maker
Samsung for the Galaxy 3
Adobe for their Creative Suite and 80% discount on CS4 for students.
Useful links:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1234611 Bootanimation maker by despotovski01
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1602879 Bootanimations for Galaxy 3 Index by Ava.tar
Let me know if any more links should come in this list.
Post 4/4
Copyright april 2012 © All right reserved Wiggierip
Good Work!
BTW You should have posted this in the "Android Themes Section" so that everyone else can see it and there were some questions about bootanimation posted there.
Good Luck!
Thank you for this comprehensive guide. Its awesome!
Cheers
Sent from my GT-i9003 powered by Stable and Smooth CleanKpu rom
ak700 said:
Good Work!
BTW You should have posted this in the "Android Themes Section" so that everyone else can see it and there were some questions about bootanimation posted there.
Good Luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks , yeah I didn't really know where to start it... Most of it is specifically written for our phone. Like the way the bootanimation is stored and the resolution for example.
Brilliant work! I'll post a link to your thread in the bootanimation index. You deserve many thanks!
wow! finally a tutorial that I can understand
Awesome tutorial! Thank you!
Good research and great work
Oh finall an in-depth tutorial.......i had already made my bootanimation and dint have any idea what to do next....lol....
Thanks for the tut!!
This is really one of the most detailed but still very comprehensive Tutorial about bootanimations I've seen yet! Big probs for that!
There is an aspect in editing bootanimations and I've been thinking about it for months, but still don't have a solution:
What I want to do is editing a bios-bootanimation to fit perfectly to my device and ROM.
This is an example how a bios animation looks like (not the one I would use as base):
Android Bios Bootanimation[/CENTER]
Preview
I only have to change a few parts within the parts to make it fit to my configuration.
Is that possible in a relative fast way? Something like appending changes to several pictures in a batch operation or anything like that? That would be enough for me. But I didn't find any tool I could use that way.
Hope you can help me out!
t-rip said:
This is really one of the most detailed but still very comprehensive Tutorial about bootanimations I've seen yet! Big probs for that!
There is an aspect in editing bootanimations and I've been thinking about it for months, but still don't have a solution:
What I want to do is editing a bios-bootanimation to fit perfectly to my device and ROM.
This is an example how a bios animation looks like (not the one I would use as base)
I only have to change a few parts within the parts to make it fit to my configuration.
Is that possible in a relative fast way? Something like appending changes to several pictures in a batch operation or anything like that? That would be enough for me. But I didn't find any tool I could use that way.
Hope you can help me out!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, batch operations can be recorded in Photoshop and then applied pretty easiy like I wrote in the tutorial, the Gimp has this plugin called "David's Batch Processor" that I found after some research:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
It does some basic batch operations as well. If this will help you out is highly depending on what effect you want to achieve. If you actually want to change the animation it's going to be A LOT harder... Let me know if you found this useful
Any requests for a bootanimation to be ported or to be made?
Please let me know, I have fun porting/making them
as the adobe after effects require a 64 bit windows os., am having 32 bit os...can i able to use it for creating my own boot animation
austin266 said:
as the adobe after effects require a 64 bit windows os., am having 32 bit os...can i able to use it for creating my own boot animation
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well.. I used and still use After Effects CS4, both on a 32bit and now on a 64bit system. Unfortunately After Effect stopped supporting 32bit systems since CS5 came out, so unless you can get your hands on After Effects CS4 you're not going to be able to run it on a 32bit system . If you're really planning on getting AE I would recommend getting a 64bit Winodws copy. What are your system specifications?
@wiggerip if you are bored, maybe port the cm9 official boot animation to g3. It looks really great
Cheers
Sent from my GT-i9003 powered by Stable and Smooth CyanogenMod 9!
bscraze said:
@wiggerip if you are bored, maybe port the cm9 official boot animation to g3. It looks really great
Cheers
Sent from my GT-i9003 powered by Stable and Smooth CyanogenMod 9!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I believe thats already done by SerkSerk: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1513419&highlight=bootanimation
Anything else ?
@wiggerip
hi mate
thanks for the reply
my system requrements
2gb ram
ububtu 11.10 32 bit 0s
2.00 ghz dual core processor
5yrs old laptop
270 rom
Related
Hi Guys,
Here is my first contribution to the community. I have written an application that is capable of doing some basic drawing/image editing functions and hoped it is useful.
Imagine that you take some photos using your phone and want to upload them right away to your facebook. However You might want to edit/draw them before. In that case, this app might help!
Screenshots
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Requirement:
- Windows Mobile 5.0 or better
- Reasonable amount of free ram available before running the application
- .NET CF 3.5.
Current features:
* Drawing
- Pencil
- Rectangle
- Circle
- Callout
- Text Typing
- Line
- Eye dropper
- Stample tool - e.g. for watermarking your image, Stamping icons...etc
* Image Editing
- Resize
- Crop
- Convert to B&W
- Convert to Sepia
- Rotate Left & Right
- Adjust: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation
- Filter: Sharpen
- File-type Conversion
- Undo/Redo
* Supported File Type
- JPG (By saving JPEG image, you have a possibility to limit image size - good for preparing images for uploading to some WebSite that has file size limitation)
- PNG
- BMP
Know Restriction:
- Image Editing is a memory-hungry process. You might not be able to work well with large image with very high resolution.
- In case of not enough memory, undo/redo functionality might not work well.
- Landscape mode is not supported.
Please Donate!
It was quite a lot of effort for me to develop this application. If you guys like my work, please donate! Only a few dollars can already help me a lot. Thanks!
Not sure how to embed html here. However you can donate by visiting: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=DTW8DTHSFJWBS&lc=GB
Current Version:
1.3.27.1353
Donators!
Thank you very much to :
csrgiron
Change log:
1.3.26.1338 (This could be the final release, since I'm starting my new job very soon and I won't have much free time in that case. There might be an update for bug fixes, if some are found)
- Replace the right menu "Up"with "Cancel" in Open/Save file dialog for better meaning.
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Fixed some bugs
- Added Redo functionality
- More undo steps possible (depending on memory and image size), maximum 5 steps.
1.2.19.1251
- Enhanced Open/Save file dialog.
- Sharpen
- Saturation
- Added an option not to use COM object to open/save file
- Added % progress indicator for long run task
- Added possibility to abort long run task
1.1.009.2236
- Eye-Dropper tool
- Enable easier Fore-/Back color switching
- Fixed Pencil Tool lagging problem.
- Rearranged the tool buttons.
1.0.3.1921
- Added line tool
- Change Max Zoom to 800%
- Added an option to disable Anti-Alias when displaying zoomed image.
Screenshots? Seems interesting enough .
Livven said:
Screenshots? Seems interesting enough .
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Livven,
Just added the screenshots. Hope that helps!
If anyone has tested it, please let me know your feedbacks.
I have only two devices I can use to test the application. It would be great to know how it behaves on other devices.
Hey Menos,
I have been looking for a basic drawing program that I can use on my Qvga screen (wing/herald) but so far I am unable to find one that can do what I am looking for. I just caught this thread just before bed tonight so tomorrow I will try it out. In the meantime, an issue I have run across with all other paint programs thus far is anti-aliasing (AA) at full magnification. When I am zoomed in all the way, either the program itself or my wing is AA'ing everything. What I am looking for is a program similar to MSPaint where at full magnification I can draw pixel by pixel, line by line, without the blurry effect of AA. I really hope this is only a system limitation on my end so when I do decide on a new device I will be able to use this. Let me know if all portable drawing programs will do this or if you have any idea how to either change the program/settings or possible a way to disable AA on my device temporarily. As you can see from my avatar, I kill time by making pixel cars and would love to use my phone for that purpose. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
-Dan
tC_Driver said:
Hey Menos,
I have been looking for a basic drawing program that I can use on my Qvga screen (wing/herald) but so far I am unable to find one that can do what I am looking for. I just caught this thread just before bed tonight so tomorrow I will try it out. In the meantime, an issue I have run across with all other paint programs thus far is anti-aliasing (AA) at full magnification. When I am zoomed in all the way, either the program itself or my wing is AA'ing everything. What I am looking for is a program similar to MSPaint where at full magnification I can draw pixel by pixel, line by line, without the blurry effect of AA. I really hope this is only a system limitation on my end so when I do decide on a new device I will be able to use this. Let me know if all portable drawing programs will do this or if you have any idea how to either change the program/settings or possible a way to disable AA on my device temporarily. As you can see from my avatar, I kill time by making pixel cars and would love to use my phone for that purpose. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
-Dan
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Dan,
I would say that currently you will see AA in my application due to the drawing algorithm of gdi+ I'm using. However, yes it is possible to draw enlarged images without having AA. You can see an example, when you try to select an image for the Stample tool. If you image is smaller than the preview picture box, it should be enlarged without having AA. Let me know if this is the case for your device. If not, then it means that your device might do AA additionally.
I will add an option to next release to choose whether to enable AA for displaying enlarged images or not. Thanks for your thought!
Menos,
Thanks for the quick response. I took your advice and tried a few things. I installed the .cab file and the first thing I noticed is the inability to search the SD card contents to open a file. After saving an image to the phone I could easily open, just an extra step. First attempt, the zoom function is nice but does not zoom in far enough to see individual pixels for alteration. I also noticed that your program lacks a straight line drawing tool. I do the majority of my drawing with the line tool, if possible, please add. After zooming into my PNG image (width 425 X height 115) I noticed that there was AA. Second attempt, I tried another PNG image (around 100 X 100) to see if a smaller image at full zoom produced the same result. It did, still AA'd at full zoom. Third attempt was using your stamp tool which I must say is a great addition to the program. This tool allowed me to see the entire PNG (100 X 100) image without AA and was able to increase the size which in turn increase the magnification after the image was stamped. Only problem, after I stamped the image, everything was anti aliased once again. I hope this helps in some way. Let me know if you need any further testing on a Qvga screen and I would be more than happy to oblige. I will keep an eye on this thread for future releases.
-Dan
tC_Driver said:
Menos,
Thanks for the quick response. I took your advice and tried a few things. I installed the .cab file and the first thing I noticed is the inability to search the SD card contents to open a file. After saving an image to the phone I could easily open, just an extra step. First attempt, the zoom function is nice but does not zoom in far enough to see individual pixels for alteration. I also noticed that your program lacks a straight line drawing tool. I do the majority of my drawing with the line tool, if possible, please add. After zooming into my PNG image (width 425 X height 115) I noticed that there was AA. Second attempt, I tried another PNG image (around 100 X 100) to see if a smaller image at full zoom produced the same result. It did, still AA'd at full zoom. Third attempt was using your stamp tool which I must say is a great addition to the program. This tool allowed me to see the entire PNG (100 X 100) image without AA and was able to increase the size which in turn increase the magnification after the image was stamped. Only problem, after I stamped the image, everything was anti aliased once again. I hope this helps in some way. Let me know if you need any further testing on a Qvga screen and I would be more than happy to oblige. I will keep an eye on this thread for future releases.
-Dan
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your information. Yeah as I stated before, that the previous version used gdi+ to draw image and I have no control over the algorithm it uses. However, I have updated the application to have an option, not to do AA when rendering image.
Additionally I have added the line tools and increase the max zoom to 800% as requested.
For the problem that you don't find the files on you SD card, that is already known to me. This is because the default open file dialog does not look for files in all folders. (but it does if you have folder like my documents on your sd card). I am planning to create my own dialog box later.
Please try the new version and let me know if that meets your need?
Perfect!
The additions fit my needs and hopefully the needs of your other potential end users as well. The magnification is exactly what I was looking for. It gets me in far enough to change the image one pixel at a time. I can also confirm that your AA option works perfectly. You have no idea how thrilled I was to see that my device wasn't the problem and that it was capable of seeing a raw image with the proper setting. As of right now I can also confirm that the program works perfectly on my QVGA screen. There are a few more things I would like to request, I hope you do not mind.
-Eye-dropper tool: I use this hand in hand with the line tool to pull a color from the image or a shade chart and would love it if this tool was considered for future releases.
-Eraser tool: I wonder if there is a way to use the eraser tool in a manner similar to MSPaint. In MSPaint, with both a primary and secondary color selected, one could change the primary color in the image to the secondary color by holding the right mouse key while pressing the left key over the area in need of a color change. Could this be possible while holding a soft key at the same time the tool is run over an image? Just a thought.
-Selector tool: I use this in conjunction with a copy/paste function in MSPaint to select and move pieces around as needed. Would a copy and paste function also be possible?
This is a great program already and it is still considered a beta. I am thankful for your willingness to go out of your way to accommodate my needs. I hope I didn't come off in that tone. This is the first program I have seen in development that I felt a need to support. If there is anything you need by way of testing, please do not hesitate to ask. I cannot contribute to your fund at this time but would like to offer my services for the time being. Thank you again for your quick response and even faster update.
-Dan
tC_Driver said:
Perfect!
The additions fit my needs and hopefully the needs of your other potential end users as well. The magnification is exactly what I was looking for. It gets me in far enough to change the image one pixel at a time. I can also confirm that your AA option works perfectly. You have no idea how thrilled I was to see that my device wasn't the problem and that it was capable of seeing a raw image with the proper setting. As of right now I can also confirm that the program works perfectly on my QVGA screen. There are a few more things I would like to request, I hope you do not mind.
-Eye-dropper tool: I use this hand in hand with the line tool to pull a color from the image or a shade chart and would love it if this tool was considered for future releases.
-Eraser tool: I wonder if there is a way to use the eraser tool in a manner similar to MSPaint. In MSPaint, with both a primary and secondary color selected, one could change the primary color in the image to the secondary color by holding the right mouse key while pressing the left key over the area in need of a color change. Could this be possible while holding a soft key at the same time the tool is run over an image? Just a thought.
-Selector tool: I use this in conjunction with a copy/paste function in MSPaint to select and move pieces around as needed. Would a copy and paste function also be possible?
This is a great program already and it is still considered a beta. I am thankful for your willingness to go out of your way to accommodate my needs. I hope I didn't come off in that tone. This is the first program I have seen in development that I felt a need to support. If there is anything you need by way of testing, please do not hesitate to ask. I cannot contribute to your fund at this time but would like to offer my services for the time being. Thank you again for your quick response and even faster update.
-Dan
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Dan,
I will add your request to my to do list. The first two shouldn't be much difficult, but for the selector, I will have to spend sometime on it.
Menos,
This is an absolutely brilliant app.
Thank you very much.
Would it be possible to:
- improve a litle bit the drawing function (difficult to draw some real curves. It tends to make some lines instead of curves).
- propose more colors
- improve the quality of the Icon resolution.
Thanks. I really adore your app.
Amazing to see it's only a beta. There is so much potential in it.
PS, for the drawing part, I use PocketPicture ( http://sites.google.com/site/osdmsoftware/pocketpicture ). it's not bad. Maybe it can help to find some ideas.
Hi Guys,
Sorry for late reply, I was busy for some other stuff. Together with this post, I released the version 1.1, which has some improvement as stated in the change log.
I will have limited time to work on this app. Any comments are still welcome, but I cannot commit to work fast on them!
Wow! Very nice app! Thanks for your contribution!
Hi,
I installed the app, it installed fine on my HD2. I did run the program and it loaded nice, but when trying to open a image on my device, it was not responding at all, it even keeps freezing my device and a soft-reset is necessary.
I use the Energy ROm of 13 may the GTX version.
Greetings,
Birger
Birger said:
Hi,
I installed the app, it installed fine on my HD2. I did run the program and it loaded nice, but when trying to open a image on my device, it was not responding at all, it even keeps freezing my device and a soft-reset is necessary.
I use the Energy ROm of 13 may the GTX version.
Greetings,
Birger
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Birger,
Have you tried to update the .NET CF? Here's the link from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...49-3c6b-42f1-9fd9-0041345b3385&displaylang=en
when I see how my wife edits pics on her iPhone, THIS is what I need!
thankz!
Thanks ill try it
menos said:
Hi Birger,
Have you tried to update the .NET CF? Here's the link from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...49-3c6b-42f1-9fd9-0041345b3385&displaylang=en
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I do have the latest .net CF (3.5). I have a lot of other apps using the .net without problem. It is also cooked in with the ROM. (Energy ROM; one of the best)
I have got the same prob as Birger has: freezing a.s.a. I press "open" to open a file.
I also have a HD2, with a custom ROM (MIRI v10, WwM6.5.x).
I'm sure I have the newest versions of .NET FW, since I installed the newest .NET FW version to solve the batt. draining issue of the newest version of advanced home tab from c0okiemonster...
Hope this can be solved, since I think I will like the app.
I am sorry if this is a noobish question or there is an easy answer, but I was looking at customizing my phone a bit and I saw the part about making your own splash screens (which is awesome), but I was wondering how to make custom boot animations - what tools I would need, type of files, etc. I thought there would have been a thread somewhere in the Themes & Apps section but I could not find it, and doing Google search leads me to just people posting their own custom animations.
Is there a thread someone can direct me to that has this sort of information? Any help would be appreciated - thanks!
Bump - does anybody know? Also, the boot noise for the BAMF Sense 3.0 RC3 does not work, another reason why I want a new one, ha.
Have you opened one of the bootanimation.zips? What file types are in there?
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk
A PNG image and a series of JPG images that make the animation, but I was wondering if there was a program that took an animation to make it into a series of JPGs, or if there were certain requirements/specifics in terms of how to make a boot animation.
+1 on this whole post, I attemted last night to make my first animation, and if it is just the tedious task of re-saving the same picture over and over again with just minor changes on each one to create the animation, than ok, so be it.
It just seems that with some of the very cool animations there are, for example the boot animation to the new BAMF 3.0 has moving clouds in the background, that seems like it would be pretty hard to do manually moving the clouds a little bit for each frame.
It would seem pretty obvious to anyone that extracted the bootanimation.zip how the animation works, just more speaking on the creation of each of those frames.
Would be nice if someone with experience with this chimed on and offered some help.
Thank's in advance.
Does seem pretty tedious manually moving and saving them as you said but I'm guessing that's what they do.
Probably wouldn't take that long if you had everything on layers in photoshop and you could just move layers themselves.
Alternatively, if you already have a video, I'm sure there's a way to convert that to a series of png's as well.
Ok I'm on the phone so giving a tutorial is out of the question. All you really need is patience and a goal.
First download Gimp for editing. Forget PhotoShop all together unless your rich.
Download the following scripts or plugins.
Background overlay
Save all layers
GAP (video editor for Gimp)
Google the hell out of what you want. Chances are someone allready has done what you want.
Read, read, read (time to not be lazy, what ever your doing you can find some direction at least with some good internet research)
Google "editing Android boot animations".
Create images (JPG or PNG) in the same aspect ratio of 480x800.
JPG images will be significantly smaller in file size
PNG images will have a much better quality
Sent from my thunderstick
Use GAP to convert an existing video to images frame for frame.
Very useful if you find a good video.
Sent from my thunderstick
I actually do have Photoshop, do you know how I can use that instead of Gimp/GAP? Also, I am sort of confused at how you take an existing video and turn it into something you can use as a boot animation... I found this link (http://www.machackpc.com/how-to-changecreate-your-boot-animation-for-droid/) but I am sort of confused by it and wish I could find someplace with simpler instructions.
I just use others. I used the Call of Android animation and the mw2 style on my incredible, and I just edited the files to use the same ones on my thunderbolt.
Message delivered via my BAMF Thunderbolt
Ok, did a little research last night and today and tried a bunch of different programs for converting animations to a series of .png files and finally settled on one. I tried some free one's some trials and this is probably the best one I found so far.
Xilisoft Ultimate video converter. I was able to load an .avi, (or many other supported formats.) Program made it very easy using the "clip" feature to select out a section of the video I wanted, then converted that "clip" to a series of .png files. I was able to easily select the length of times between the extracted images "less time will obviously give you a smoother animation but require more pictures", also I could manually input the size of the outputted files (to match our phone's resolution).
I have only played with it a little bit but so far seems to be pretty good.
Also I have one other program I have been playing with to help with this. Jasc animation studio, which works with paint shop pro, has a pretty cool feature, which lets you copy into the clipboard all of your extracted image .png's, then "paste" them into animation studio as a new animation, you can then watch them from there, or load any indivual frame into paint shop pro. You can also save the clips as an animated gif. Very easy to make changes to individual frames and see the result's without having to flash to your phone.
Hope this helps.
Wow! Awesome, thanks, this is perfect and in great detail - what about sound? If the video has sound, will I try hope it gets synced with the series of .png images? And what else would I need for the bootanimation.zip folder? Will I need a .txt like when I change the splash screens?
An Introductory Guide To Theming Miui
Much like CM7’s theme chooser, Miui has it’s own powerful theme engine. If you’ve ever wanted to create your own theme or have a theme that you like, but want to make some personalized changes; then this guide’s for you. This guide is intended as a supplement to Team D3rp’s thread; [Guide][Reference] An Intro to Themeing. Please keep all questions, comments, and suggestions in this thread Miui related also feel free to hit us up at #miuithemes on the IRC. General theme questions, image editing questions, xml editing questions, or anything of that nature should be asked in the afore mentioned thread. Before we begin it’s necessary to thank scott951 and bigrushdog for there past, present, and future work on this rom. In addition, thanks to toastcfh & Cayniarb for they’re work on the AOSP kernel, to bliind for his ongoing IRC support, tips & tricks, and lastly thank you to Team D3rp (il Duce, ranger61878, thoughtlesskyle, vanessaem, dkdude36, jdeloach, and pstevep), all the old HeroC guys, the many talented themers, and everyone else on XDA and IRC who continue to advance my knowledge of the Android Operating System.
To begin your adventure into the world of Miui theming you will need some tools, listed below:
7zip or similar archiving program
Notepad ++ or similar text editor
gimp or another image editor of your liking
Root Explorer (or your prefered file manager with root access)
Patience, patience, patience
Time, time, time
A willingness to bork your theme over and over again until you’re satisfied with how it looks
Recommended knowledge of adb and/or Android Commander- not required but may save you the time of having to restore a nand.
Table Of Contents: for your convenience in finding specific areas of help.
Lesson 1: File Structure
Lesson 2: Beginning Your Theme
Lesson 3: Lockscreens
Lesson 4: Changing Icons
Lesson 5: SystemUI
Lesson 1-File Structure
Before you can actually theme anything, you need to learn and understand the basic file structure used by Miui. Themes are compressed into zip files with a .mtz extension and are applied by the Miui theme engine at “run time”, meaning you can change almost any aspect of your theme on the fly, without a reboot. Download my intro.mtzfor use along with this guide. This is the default Miui theme with a simple lockscreen included that you will have to edit (It works but you will have to edit it per my instructions for it to look good), and a generic android boot animation / boot audio file. If you currently have a theme that you are generally happy with and would prefer to edit that more to your liking, you may do so by opening the Miui theme engine, select customize, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select “Backup Theme” After the backup finishes running, navigate to /sdcard/Miui/theme/backup and move the “backup.mtz” to your computer. Now let’s extract our .mtz and have a look at what’s inside. Right click on the intro.mtz, select 7zip from the popup window, and then select extract. Now navigate to the extracted intro.mtz folder and have a look inside. You should see the following:
“boots” folder
“preview” folder
“ringtones” folder
“wallpaper” folder
“com.android.launcher” zip file
“description” xml file
“icons” zip file
“lockscreen” zip file
The folders can be opened as any normal non-compressed document folder, the zip files (although their extensions are nonconventional can be extracted with 7zip, and the xml file can be edited with notepad ++.
Lesson 2 – Beginning Your Theme
Decide what you want your theme to be called and create a new folder for it somewhere that’s easily accessible.
Open up the description xml with notepad ++ and edit it to reflect your theme name on this line: <title>Default</title> (Change default to the name of your theme), edit this line: <author>MIUI</author> (Change MIUI to your name), and edit this line: <version>1.0</version> (from 1.0 to whatever version # you would like to call your theme). Save your changes and move the document to your newly created theme folder.
Now, if you so desire, in your theme folder create a sub-folder entitled “boots”. Place any boot animation & boot audio files in there that you would like to use, and make sure they are named correctly (bootanimation.zip & bootaudio.mp3).
Create a “preview” sub-folder next. This is where you’ll put screenies of your theme as you continue to develop it. Make a note of the file names and sizes in our original preview folder, also if you look you’ll see that some of the photo’s are jpegs and some are pngs. I’m not sure as though it matters, but I’ve developed a habit of keeping the extensions the same.
Now you can create an optional “ringtones” subfolder and assign rintones, notifications, and alarm sounds, by default when applying your theme. Use any mp3 you like so long as the files are named alarm.mp3, notification.mp3, and ringtone.mp3.
Create a “wallpaper” sub-folder within your theme folder next. This will be the home of your theme’s default wallpapers. Again look back at the intro.mtz and notice the size of the wallpapers in that folder and the file names. When you put your jpegs in this folder make sure they are named exactly default_lock_wallpaper & default_wallpaper.
Congratulations, you’re now on your way to making your own custom theme. Now that we have the simplest things covered and out of the way, we can really start to dig in and do some theming!
Lesson 3 – Lockscreens
Skipping over icons for a moment, lets jump to the lockscreen. As you know by now our Evo 3D’s QHD displays don’t play nice with a lot of lockscreens. So lets have a look at what we can do to fix some lockscreens. Please keep in mind that depending on which lockscreen you want to use they will require varying degrees of changes to work properly. The lockscreen I included with the intro.mtz functions, but looks terrible so now we’re going to fix it.
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Extract the “lockscreen” file that you downloaded. Inside you’ll see an advance folder.
Open the advance folder. This is where the lockscreen magic happens. In this folder are all of the lockscreen png’s and the manifest.xml
Let’s start with the png’s.
-Resize bg to 540X854
-Resize bottom to 540X178
-Resize bottom_batterylow to 540X178
-Resize bottom_batterylow_light to 540X240
-Resize charging_bg to 540X178
-Resize charging_bg_mask to 540X178
-Resize status_bar to 540X40
-Resize time_bg to 540X107
Feel free at this time to edit and/or replace any of the png’s in here, as you see fit, but be sure to keep the icon names correct and watch out for the .9png’s (there are none in this lockscreen, but if you’re using a different one beware).
Now that the png’s have been fixed let’s have a look at the manifest.xml, shall we? Our images are all the proper size, but if we loaded the lockscreen now the icons and text would all be shifted to the left of the screen. In addition to making positional adjustments in this file we can change font sizes, font colors, time & date format, even which apps the lockscreen will launch. Go ahead and open that xml file now with notepad ++.
Find the two lines that begin with <DateTime. On these lines you can change the x & y locations to get the proper spacing from the edge of the screen. (x is the horizontal plane, y is vertical x0,y0 being the top left corner of the screen). You can change the text color (#FFFFFFFF) to whatever you like, the font size (size="22"), and the date format (format="EEEE, MMM d")
Now, work your way down through the xml file making any adjustments you want to make to text sizes, colors, and the necessary x shifts to get your lock screen lined up and centered. If by chance you get stumped, compare your manifest.xml with my manifest_edited.xml.
*hint, I usually use a pencil and paper to draw out the screen, then calculate how big of a left margin I want, add the image widths, to figure how big of a change to make. For example x20 + 480 png width=500 (leaving a margin of 40 on the right). Now if I change to x30 + 480 png width = 510 (leaving me a margin of 30 on both sides).
Once you’re done editing the .xml save it (keeping the original of course to refer back to)
Back out of the advance folder now and right click on it. Select 7zip from your popup window and “add to archive”. When prompted, save as “lockscreen.File”, set your file type as .zip and save your lockscreen to your theme folder. After it saves delete the .File from the name. Windows will prompt you that this may make the file unusable, click ok.
Navigate to your theme folder and select all of the contents inside of it (boots, preview, etc…). After selecting all of your theme components, right click again, select 7zip, and add to archive. Save your theme as “whatever_name”.mtz again choosing .zip as the file type.
Place your newly created theme on your sd card in /sdcard/MIUI/theme
Apply your theme and enjoy. If you’re happy with your lockscreen take a screenie to add to your preview folder when you make your next edits. Remember if you do something that breaks your lockscreen you can unlock by pressing back & volume up, or you can use adb to delete lockscreen from /data/system/theme and push a good lockscreen back.
Lesson 4 – Changing Icons
Changing your desktop and folder icons is a great way to enhance your theme. Miui’s theme manager makes this a relatively simple process. You can edit the default system icons with your image editor, or take your favorite icon collection and resize them to 90 X 90 pixels if you wish to keep the default Miui icon size. Lets begin!
Navigate to your intro.mtz and use 7zip again to extract the icon.File
Inside your extracted icon folder you’ll find all of the icons for the default system apps.
Changing system app icons
Find the icon that you want to replace in the folder. Let’s use the browser for example.
Find the icon you want to replace it with and rename that icon to com.android.browser
Copy your new browser icon into the icon folder, overwriting the existing one.
Adding icons for user installed apps is a little more involved but worth the extra time to make your theme complete. Here is where it’s handy to have Root Explorer.
Let’s say we want to add an icon for dropbox
To do this we need to know the process name. There’s a couple of ways we can figure this out. Since every app installed creates a data folder we can use Root Explorer to look in /data/data for the package name of dropbox.
If the package name didn’t jump out at you, don’t worry there’s another way to do this. Again using Root Explorer navigate to /data/app and find the dropbox apk, long press on in and select “extract all”, navigate to /sdcard/extracted and open up the extracted dropbox apk. Now tap the AndroidManifext.xml file, which should open up a text document and the very first line should give you the manifest package name.
By now you should know that the package name for dropbox is com.dropbox.android
Find the dropbox icon you want to use.
Rename the icon to com.dropbox.android
Drop the icon into your icon folder.
Repeat these steps for all of the icons which you want to replace.
Once you are finished replacing and / or adding icons, from within the icon folder, select all, then right click, select 7zip, and add to archive.
When the 7zip popup screen appears, save them as icons.File
Delete the .File extension
Move your zipped icons file to your theme folder.
Zip your themes folder up as a .mtz and apply it to your phone the same as you did after you finished your lockscreen.
Again, if you are happy with your icons take a couple of screenshots for your preview folder.
One last side note in regards to icons. You may notice some apps such as google + install additional icons to your homescreen (G+ Messenger). I have not figured out the image naming trick yet for these icons to display from the theme, but I’m working on it. For the time being I extracted my G+ Messenger and replaced the icon in the /res/drawable-hdpi folder, but I am searching for the correct way of doing this and will update accordingly once it’s figured out.
Lesson 5 – SystemUI
Now, we're going to add a whole new element to our theme. We're going to create a SystemUI zip in our theme mtz. Examples of some things that we can change in SystemUI are notification bar icons (signal, battery, gps etc), Statusbar back ground, and the various tabs you see in your drop down expanded notification page. Let's begin.
Create a working folder somewhere easily accessible on your computer (I like to work from my desktop)
Inside of your working folder, create a subfolder named "res"
download my theme_values_SysUI.xml, place it in your working folder (not in the "res" subfolder), and rename it to theme_values.xml.
Now you will need a SystemUI.apk from Miui. You can either unzip the rom on your computer and move the .apk to a convenient location of your choosing, or you can use adb to pull the SystemUI.apk from your phone. It's located in /system/app.
Now that you have your SystemUI.apk, using 7zip, extract it.
Open up your extracted apk and navigate to the "res" folder. Copy the "drawable-hdpi" folder and the "raw" folder and move them to the working folder on your desktop, placing inside of the "res" subfolder you created earlier.
Begining with the "drawable-hdpi" folder, use your image editor to make any .png adjustments that you want incorporated into your theme, or replace the png files as you see fit. Be sure to maintain the nomenclature of the images if you opt to replace them. Beware of editing .9.png's as they cannot be edited in a conventional fashion. If you need help editing .9.png's there are several methods and guides around xda. Or ask in [Guide][Reference] An Intro to Themeing.
When you're finished with the drawable-hdpi folder move to the raw folder. This is where your battery icons are located, contrary to Sense and CM7 roms. You'll notice that there are not 200 little battery png's but 3 large png's with all of the images put together in a sort of battery collage. To assemble a battery collage, take your individual battery pngs and resize them to 38 X 38. For graphical and charge indicators, you will now need to create a new image sized at 152 X 190, copy and paste your individual png's into the large image so that you have 5 rows each with 4 png's. Follow the same procedure for making a % png, except that you'll be using 10 rows of 10 images, so your png size should be 380 X 380.
When you're done with all of your images, open up the theme_values.xml with notepad ++ and make any color edits that you see fit. Please note, that these color changes will have minimal impact on the look of your theme. Most of the color changes of your system will not happen here. These are default values for only a handfull of apps.
When you're finished editing the xml save it and close it.
Finally select your theme_values.xml and your "res" folder and right click your mouse, select 7zip, and add to archive. In the 7zip popup window name your file com.android.systemui (no additional extension here, make sure it does not say zip at the end....just: com.android.systemui)
After the folder is compressed and zipped, move it to your theme folder and zip your theme up as a .mtz as you have been doing right along. Apply theme to your phone and enjoy.
To Be Continued…..Next update will be for Framework-res or launcher depending on my upcoming amount of free time!!!
Additional Information: Tips, Tricks, & Links
Advanced Lockscreens - Tips and Tricks
Thanks il Duce for these links:
Lockscreen 2.0 Reference
General Miui Tips & Tricks
I wasn't born rich, I'm good lookin' instead!!
Great job Hockey!! Love how everything is coming together!
Added to the OP in the one stop shop also.
Edit: This is really thorough. Very nice indeed.....
Awesome work
Sent from my PG86100 using xda premium
Place holder for me
Is that all we do to the manifest because I really want that Evoluer slider to unlock my phone.
Temari x Shikamaru
scott951 said:
Place holder for me
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you sir, for providing us with a rom worthy of the time it takes to do all of this!......No disrespect intended to any of the other developers who's roms I also use, but I've fallen head over heels for Miui
knowledge561 said:
Is that all we do to the manifest because I really want that Evoluer slider to unlock my phone.
Temari x Shikamaru
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, there's a lot you can do with the manifest xml, but to make them work properly yeah....It's just resizing the png's and shifting the x & y values accordingly for our screen size. I'm downloading the lockscreen you're trying to use now.
Thanks for this.
hockeyfamily737 said:
Well, there's a lot you can do with the manifest xml, but to make them work properly yeah....It's just resizing the png's and shifting the x & y values accordingly for our screen size. I'm downloading the lockscreen you're trying to use now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks because im Stumped!!!! If you manage to hook it up do you think you can throw in that green charging light? And when its not charging it turns blue when you touch it? Check out "ikun" to understand the lockscreen.
Temari x Shikamaru
vanessaem said:
Thanks for this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My pleasure. Hopefully everyone including myself can learn from this, because I'm certainly no expert. Just a guy who like to take stuff apart to see how it works.
knowledge561 said:
Thanks because im Stumped!!!! If you manage to hook it up do you think you can throw in that green charging light? And when its not charging it turns blue when you touch it? Check out "ikun" to understand the lockscreen.
Temari x Shikamaru
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll do what I can. First let's see if I can get it to work right Working lots of O/T right now so I haven't had a heap of time.
Thanks so much for this hockeyfamily737!
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Thanks homie.
Temari x Shikamaru
Also I will possibly be able to help out on this as well if someone doesn't get it figured out by Sunday... been working alot of double shifts..
knowledge561 said:
Thanks because im Stumped!!!! If you manage to hook it up do you think you can throw in that green charging light? And when its not charging it turns blue when you touch it? Check out "ikun" to understand the lockscreen.
Temari x Shikamaru
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Hey, nice introduction =)
If anyone is inerested in speeding up the process of testing your themes, I have created a Makefile/Windows Batch file for compressing themes and pushing them to the phone auto-magically
http://forums.miui.us/showthread.ph...ild-Script-(Windows-Unix)-Now-with-a-Makefile
Let me know if you guys have any problems!
Thank you for posting this amazing tutorial!
I am slowly fixing my lock screen, I'll post some before and after screen shots.
Before:
After:
thanks for this. i rlly needed it....
now to figure out more stuff...
steam374 said:
Thank you for posting this amazing tutorial!
I am slowly fixing my lock screen, I'll post some before and after screen shots.
Before:
After:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Terrific and this was the one I was trying to do today. Great job with this.
Brought to you from my EVOlutionary 3-Dimensional Smartphone
Wow! Great work... looking forward to more. Thanks hockeyfamily!
Sent from 3D A.W.E.S.O.M-O
Right, I know a lot of you are waiting for me to post this after seeing my videos, social media posts and preview gifs!
Many of you will likely have seen the awesome new Android Wear boot animation as leaked in the LG G Watch system dump. Well now I have successfully made versions for other devices as well!
Initially I made one for the MotoACTV smartwatch (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53150797) because it also has a small display and the frames in the system dump are obviously very low resolution for the small screen of the LG G Watch and so are not suitable for phones and tablets. The MotoACTV has an even smaller display and downsizing is not an issue for quality.
However, I have managed to get around this problem. I traced and vectorised each frame to produce a set of scalable SVGs from which I was able to create the high-res png frames needed to make boot animations to suit different devices. There is no limit to the resolution now obviously because I have vector copies of each frame so support for any device is possible. I have also thoroughly optimised the final frames to bring down their file size as much as possible (losslessly) which ensures they run really smoothly (this makes a big difference on high res devices!).
For the MotoACTV I had to change the loop format too because Android pre 4.1 doesn't support the new "c loops" which are required to get the same behaviour as on the LG G Watch (MotoACTV is Gingerbread). On these new ones I had to use a different desc.txt structure to Android Wear for compatibility purposes but have used the c loops and so this actually loops exactly as it would on Android Wear.
It is possible to make animations for devices with earlier than 4.1 too but I will have to change the way it loops slightly. There are also a few devices (like the MotoACTV) which prefer jpgs rather than pngs. I can quickly produce jpg versions if required too. I am willing to take requests for devices people would like an animation for and will try and do them in order of demand but I make no promises on how long the turn around will be.
Below if a video of it running on my Nexus 4 (note: animations are quite a bit smoother than this now and the small amounts of weird jitter were caused by YouTube's video editor) you can also see a preview in post #4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jior6pwamg
Update (9/6/14): New v2 versions are up! These are even smaller in file size (read: better performance) and contain some fixes plus two new resolutions!. See post #45 for more details on the update. We now have Android 4.1+ bootanimations which support most common device resolutions: 800x480, 960x640 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x800, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440 and 2560x1600.
Note: as @vedantgp thankfully reminded me you cannot use these standard type Android boot animations on Touchwiz ROMs because Samsung uses their own proprietary format. There are mods to remedy this though, although I have not tested them. See here: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/add-custom-boot-animation-to-any-samsung-rom/
Instructions
Firstly this will almost always need root. Secondly, these are not flashable zips and you cannot flash these in recovery! This is what you do:
Picking The Correct Animation For Your Device
If you know your device resolution and you see it there then great - grab it move onto adding it to your device. If you don't know the resolution a quick Google of should let you know. You should bare in mind that the actual frames are square so the boot animations are supported based on their smallest dimension (lowest pixel count). This means that whether you have a landscape device (10" tablet) or portrait (most 7" and below) it does not make a difference, the one for your resolution will be fine.
If you find there is no zip matching your device resolution then fear not - you are not out of luck! If you have a different resolution than any listed you can pick the one with largest width (the smallest dimension) that is less than yours (or the same if it exists) and it will work just fine. The only difference is that it will not fill the complete width of your screen. For example: if you somehow had a 1340x950 device then you'd use 1280x800 one as 800px is the closest available smaller resolution of the shortest dimension (width) to your device. You would then just have a 150px gap (75 each side) between the furthest reach of the animation and the edge of your display which would not look too bad as the background is black and most of the screen width is still used. Hope that makes sense. You cannot use one with a resolution greater than your device or it will be cut off.
Manual Method
Download the attachment with the boot animation suited to your device. Rename the zip to bootanimation.zip and push to either /data/local or /system/media making sure the file permissions are set to 644. This process can be done with a file manager or using ADB. If opting for a file manager I do not suggest you use ES File Explorer has it lacks the required permissions options. CM File manager, Root Explorer or Solid Explorer (my favourite) all will work well. If pushing to /data/local the animation will not be wiped when updating your ROM but will be lost with a data wipe / factory reset. For system/media the apposite is true. /system/media is the default location for the boot animation so if using that I suggest you backup your existing one first. My recommendation though is that you use /data/local.
Below is an example of what the permissions should look like for those having difficulty. This is an example from Solid Explorer but others should be similar!
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
New: for those who find written instructions hard to follow Alexander Ruiz has made a great video of these manual instructions on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ-XyZLGCBc
Simple Method
As helpfully pointed out by @bradhoschar you can actually preview and install boot animations with ROM Toolbox! You can grab the free version here and the pro version here. This might be easier for some users!
Future Plans
I intend to create a flashable zip with Aroma installer at some point in the future so you can flash easily to many different devices with options for different Android versions, device resolution and preferred installation. I will need to make it for a few different device specifications first before this becomes worthwhile.
Disclaimer
As per usual, while this almost certainly not going to cause any damage to your device, if it makes it your phone explode, causes hair loss, summons the dead or tears the universe apart, I am not responsible!
Enjoy!
(and please consider checking out my new Android blog: www.littlegreendude.com - thanks!)
Great bootanimation. Rocking this on my N713
Amazing job !!!! .. Thanks one more time
Very soon I shall be renaming all the zips by resolution instead of some by device (it is clearer and neater as several devices are suited to each zip) and adding support the following resolutions: 1080p (1920x1080), 1280x800, 800x480 and 2560x1600 in addition to the current 1920x1200, 1280*768 and 720p (1280x768). I feel this should cover most devices for now. All of these will be for Android 4.1+. I shall later add some zips for lower Android versions for older devices and once I have done that I shall then also combine them into a single AROMA Installer for ease.
Also here is a preview gif so you can see clearly what it looks like (updated preview - no longer huge, fixed colour issues and increased gif speed/framerate):
IgnorCZ said:
Amazing job !!!! .. Thanks one more time
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
haha, no problem! Thanks for showing your appreciation, means a lot!
Anyway to get these to work on Samsung Devices?
lewy95 said:
Anyway to get these to work on Samsung Devices?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, they use proprietary files.
wollac11 said:
Right, I know a lot of you are waiting for me to post this after seeing my videos, social media posts and preview gifs!
Many of you will likely have seen the awesome new Android Wear boot animation as leaked in the LG G Watch system dump. Well now I have successfully made versions for other devices as well!
Initially I made one for the MotoACTV smartwatch (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53150797) because it also has a small display and the frames in the system dump are obviously very low resolution for the small screen of the LG G Watch and so are not suitable for phones and tablets. The MotoACTV has an even smaller display and downsizing is not an issue for quality.
However, I have managed to get around this problem. I traced and vectorised each frame to produce a set of scalable SVGs from which I was able to create the high res png frames needed to make boot animations to suit different devices. There is no limit to the resolution now obviously because I have vector copies of each frame so support for any device is possible. I have also thoroughly optimised the final frames to bring down their file size as much as possible (losslessly) which ensures they run really smoothly (this makes a big difference on high res devices!).
For the MotoACTV I had to change the loop format too because Android pre 4.1 doesn't support the new "c loops" which are required to get the same behaviour as on the LG G Watch (MotoACTV is Gingerbread). On these new ones I had to use a different desc.txt structure to Android Wear for compatibility purposes but have used the c loops and so this actually loops exactly as it would on Android Wear.
I have attached zips designed for the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 (2013). The Nexus 4 one should work on any Android 4.1 (or higher) device with a resolution of 1280x768 and the Nexus 7 one on any 4.1+ device with a resolution of 1920x1200. I have 1080p and 720p versions in the works too so I'll add those shortly (to support devices such a the Nexus 5, recent Samsung Galaxy phones, Moto G etc). (now done!)
It is possible to make animations for devices with earlier than 4.1 too but I will have to change the way it loops slightly. There are also a few devices (like the MotoACTV) which prefer jpgs rather than pngs. I can quickly produce jpg versions if required too. I am willing to take requests for devices people would like an animation for and will try and do them in order of demand but I make no promises on how long the turn around will be.
Below if a video of it running on my Nexus 4 (note: animations are quite a bit smoother than this now and the small amounts of weird jitter were caused by YouTube's video editor) you can also see a preview in post #4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jior6pwamg
Edit: added multiple new resolutions, renamed Nexus 4 and 7 to their resolution for consistency. We now have Android 4.1+ bootanimations which support most common devices: 800x480, 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x800, 1920x1080, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The actual frames are square so are supported based on their smallest dimension meaning whether you have a landscape device (10" tablet) or portrait (most 7" and below) it does not make a difference, the one for your resolution will be fine. Also if you have a different resolution then pick the one with largest width less than yours (or the same if it exists) and it will work just not 100% fill the width. E.g. is you somehow had a 1340x950 device you'd use 1280x800. Hope that makes sense. You cannot use one larger than your device or it will be cut off.
Smaller devices tend to be older so unless I get a request otherwise I will not do lower than 800x480 in the 4.1 format.
Instructions
Download the attachment with the boot animation suited to your device. Rename the zip to bootanimation.zip and push to either /data/local or /system/media making sure the file permissions are set to 644. This process can be done with a file manager (needs root) or using adb (will work without root if pushing to /data/local). If pushing to data/local the animation will not be wiped when updating your rom but will be lost with a data wipe / factory reset. For system/media the apposite is true. /system/media is the default location for the boot animation so if using that I suggest you backup your existing one first.
I intend to create a flashable zip with Aroma installer at some point in the future so you can flash easily to many different devices with options for different Android versions, device resolution and preferred installation. I will need to make it for a few different device specifications first before this becomes worthwhile.
As per usual, while this almost certainly not going to cause any damage to your device, if it makes it your phone explode, causes hair loss, summons the dead or tears the universe apart, I am not responsible!
Enjoy!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Bit of a noob here. Which one would I use on my N5??? Gonna try to do it! Looks so good!!
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
johnnyfr03 said:
Bit of a noob here. Which one would I use on my N5??? Gonna try to do it! Looks so good!!
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1080p-bootanimation.zip
vedantgp said:
No, they use proprietary files.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good point, I forgot about that! It will only work on custom ROMs or GPE editions of most Samsung's.
wollac11 said:
Good point, I forgot about that! It will only work on custom ROMs or GPE editions of most Samsung's.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not even GPE. GPE is Touchwiz based, and uses TW files
That's just awesome. Thank you. What impresses me even more, is the OP. Very professional and well structured.
right bootanimation?
On my nexus 5 I'm getting a gray "android" bootanimation instead the one is shown in the post below... I downloaded and installed the 1080p.bootanimation.zip, copyed to system/media/ renamed to boot animation.zip and restated the device ... What did I wrong?
leoashley said:
On my nexus 5 I'm getting a gray "android" bootanimation instead the one is shown in the post below... I downloaded and installed the 1080p.bootanimation.zip, copyed to system/media/ renamed to boot animation.zip and restated the device ... What did I wrong?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Probably a permissions error. Did you do it with a file explorer? If so you'll need to make sure you set the permissions to 644 or it won't be able to read it. Also make sure the name is "bootanimation.zip" with no spaces.
Etihad said:
That's just awesome. Thank you. What impresses me even more, is the OP. Very professional and well structured.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you! Glad you like it!
vedantgp said:
Not even GPE. GPE is Touchwiz based, and uses TW files
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lewy95 said:
Anyway to get these to work on Samsung Devices?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Samsung uses proprietary bootanimations but there are mods out there to make TouchWiz ROMs use the standard Android bootanimation format. These should (I haven't tested) allow you to use this animation. See here where they link to two of such mods and explain with more detail: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/add-custom-boot-animation-to-any-samsung-rom/
wollac11 said:
Samsung uses proprietary bootanimations but there are mods out there to make TouchWiz ROMs use the standard Android bootanimation format. These should (I haven't tested) allow you to use this animation. See here where they link to two of such mods and explain with more detail: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/add-custom-boot-animation-to-any-samsung-rom/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cheers. I'll try that out now
wollac11 said:
Samsung uses proprietary bootanimations but there are mods out there to make TouchWiz ROMs use the standard Android bootanimation format. These should (I haven't tested) allow you to use this animation. See here where they link to two of such mods and explain with more detail: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/add-custom-boot-animation-to-any-samsung-rom/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lewy95 said:
Cheers. I'll try that out now
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It flashed the enabler with no worries. Though trying to install the boot animation failed.
lewy95 said:
It flashed the enabler with no worries. Though trying to install the boot animation failed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you place the bootanimation.zip in the correct place (unless the mod says otherwise /data/local or /system/media with the correct name ("bootanimation.zip") and permissions set to 644? Note also that you cannot flash the bootanimation from recovery - not sure if that's what you tried to do? You just push it in place without extracting it or flashing (after renaming).
wollac11 said:
Did you place the bootanimation.zip in the correct place (unless the mod says otherwise /data/local or /system/media with the correct name ("bootanimation.zip") and permissions set to 644? Note also that you cannot flash the bootanimation from recovery - not sure if that's what you tried to do? You just push it in place without extracting it or flashing (after renaming).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Tried both, none work :/
Part of making a great rom lies in personalizing it with a great startup animation. When it comes to Samsung however, things can get a bit tricky as samsung likes to deviate from the norm by using their own unique boot animation format. Thus, instead of the standard "bootanimation.zip", which contains the whole startup animation and whatever image or loop you would like to have appear at the end until the device boots up, with Samsung things get split up into 2 separate files. These files are called "bootsamsung.qmg"(the start of the animation) and "bootsamsungloop.qmg"(the end of the animation that repeats until startup or whatever still image at the end that you'd like to land on). Recently I tried to make one such animation and managed to get it right on the first try, but since making animations for Samsung devices seems to be somewhat of an elusive topic on the net I decided to make an easy to understand tutorial.
So, here we go then. Let's get started, but first let's make sure we have the required things.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Samsung Theme Designer: http://developer.samsung.com/bada-themes/tools-sdks/Samsung-Theme-Designer-2-0-4
- Photoshop(or another image editing program)
- A ROOTED DEVICE
- A Root Explorer App(like "ES File Explorer", "Root Browser", etc.)
- An awareness of the target device's screen resolution size in pixels.(ie. 480x800, 1440x2560, etc.)
Alright, now here are the steps to making a Samsung boot animation.
NOTE: For the purposes of this tutorial we're just going to keep things simple by only working with 3 images that will alternate repeatedly, but you can always do more images to create a more elaborate animation if you want.
NOTE 2: If you already have your own images from a bootanimation.zip, then you can just skip steps 1 and 2.)
STEPS:
1) Create Your Images In Photoshop - Just start by creating a new image in Photoshop. The image dimensions must be the same as your device's screen resolution. Mine is 480x800, so that's what I made. Now do whatever you like with the images. I just made 3 images for mine with the title of the rom and just used the fill tool in Photoshop to add different colors to the text and the background. Then I saved the image in PNG format and used the fill tool to change the colors again and then saved that file too under a different name. I did this 3 times and ended up with 3 different images of different colors and put them in a folder on my computer. I just named the folder "boot", but you can call it whatever you want.
2) Create The Full Animation - For this part you're going to want to turn those 3 images you made into about 30 images by duplicating them so that the image doesn't flash by too fast in the animation. Just open the "boot" folder where you saved the images and right click on the name of the first one and select copy. Then paste it 9 times so you end up with 10 duplicate images. Now do the same thing for the other 2 images to make a total of 30 images(10 of each) in this folder. Now go to the first set of images and name them whatever you want, but name them in sequence using this format here. Start with "yourimagename_000.png", then "yourimagename_001.png" on up through "yourimagename_009.png". Then go to the second set of identical images and start naming those starting where you left off with "yourimagename_010.png" and so on and do the same for the third set. You should end on "yourimagename_029.png" with 30 images.
Next make another folder. I called this folder "loop" just to keep things organized. Afterwards, copy the previous 30 images from the "boot" folder into the "loop" folder, so that you now have a total of 60 images in 2 folders, with the same 30 images in each. Then, go into the "loop" folder and start renaming the images in there in sequence. Make sure to start from where you left off in the previous folder so that you end up with "yourimagename_030.png" through "yourimagename_059.png" in there. These will be the images that loop at the end until the phone boots up.
3) Set Up Your Animation Project - Open Samsung Theme Designer and under "Create New Theme" select "Feature(NonTouch) Phone". Then under "Select Model" just click on the one near the bottom that has the word "Spring" in it. Then under "Select Showcase" just click on "Default" and just type any name you want to call your project in the "Name" box. You might want to then just make sure to save it to the same folder location where you have your image folders stored just to make things easy and after all that, then just click on "Ok".
4) Define The Animation Parameters - Once you have your project loaded, just ignore the preview that you see in the window(as it's irrelevant ALWAYS) and click on the "View" tab at the top of the theme designer and click on "Tree View Window" just to make sure that you can see that menu in the left pane. Then near the top of the tree view under "Idle Component" click once on "Idle Background" to pull that menu up on the right. Now, in the "Idle Background" window, click on where it says "fixed" under "Background Type" and change it to "animated". Then change "Frames" to "30", because that's how many images we have in our first folder, and change the "Duration" to "50"(usually between 30-450 is best) and make sure "Repeat" is set to "False" for this one.
5) Building The First Animation - After you have everything set, then let's start by building the first part of your animation. To do this you need to go back to your "boot" folder where you stored your first 30 images and select them all. Now drag and drop them all into the "Animation Object Window" pane at the bottom of theme designer to fill the 30 empty frames with your images. Then click the "Save" button at the top left of the theme designer to save your work before finalizing your project. Now click on the "Home" tab. Then in the top right of theme designer click on "Export Theme" and export the theme to your same project folder. The project name doesn't matter. It takes a few seconds to export too, but once it does just click "Ok" and then on "Yes" to open the folder where you saved the file. Then rename the "yourprojectname.smt" file in that folder to "yourprojectname.smt.zip" and open the zip file. Extract ONLY the "IdleBgAnimObj.qmg" to your project folder and rename it to "bootsamsung.qmg". BOOM! You're done with the first part of your animation.
6) Building The Second Animation - Now to make the second part. The second animation is the part that loops at the end and is pretty easy as it's basically the same process as the first part with only a couple of changes. First thing you want to do is click "Save As" at the top left of the theme designer and change the name of this new animation to something else. Then, you want to click on one of the images in the "Animation Window" at the bottom and just keep hitting delete until they're all gone. Now, since we made the images in our "boot" and "loop" folders exactly the same images, then we can just once again set the "Frame" to "30" and the "Duration" to "50". The only difference this time actually is that we want to set "Repeat" to "True" so it loops. Then open your "loop" folder and drag the next 30 images and drop them in the "Animation Object Window" like you did with the first 30 above and export. Once you extract the "IdleBgAnimObj.qmg" file this time, however, you will be renaming this one to "bootsamsungloop.qmg". After that you are done creating your animation files!
7) Copying The Files & Fixing Permissions - Now that you've created your animation you will want to test it to make sure it looks right and that everything works. Plug your device into your computer and navigate to your device storage in a new window. Then, from your original project folder window, drag and drop the "bootsamsung.qmg" and "bootsamsungloop.qmg" files over to anywhere you want on your devices sdcard. Next, open your root explorer app on your device and navigate to the place where you copied the files. Select both and either move or copy them to the "System/Media/" folder. BE SURE TO BACKUP THE ORIGINAL FILES TO ANOTHER FOLDER ON YOUR DEVICE FIRST though, just for safe keeping, as this will overwrite the originals. Then, once you've moved the files, you want to make sure they have the right permissions. To do this touch and hold on each of the files and click on either "Permissions" or "Properties", whatever it says in your app, and look for the permissions. The only permissions you want to have checked for each is both "Read" and "Write" for "Owner" and only just "Read" for both "Group" and "Others". So the abbreviated version should read "rw-r--r--".
8) Testing Your Animation - After that you're all done. The only thing you have to do now is just reboot and see if it looks the way you want. If the animation is too fast or slow, then you just need to go back and adjust the "Duration" setting in each of your projects and do steps 5 through 7 again. If you're doing a more elaborate animation where each frame is different and the finished product doesn't look right then you may just need to go back and rework some of your images. Other than that, if you've followed these steps correctly, you should now have successfully made your very first Samsung boot animation. Congrats! You can now add it to your own custom rom or just use it on your own device.
I hope this helps some of you by the way. Feel free to respond to this thread if you have any questions or comments regarding the Samsung QMG boot animation creation process. Thank you!
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HERE ARE SOME SAMPLE ANIMATIONS THAT I'VE MADE USING THESE STEPS:
HONOR 8 Boot Animations
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=70645944
"ASCENSION" Boot Animation
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=70324907
"ASH vs EVIL DEAD" ANIMATION(w/ Sound):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/themes/boot-animation-ash-vs-evil-dead-sound-t3307025
"TWILIGHT ZONE" ANIMATION(w/ Sound):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=64538922
"DOS STYLE" ANIMATION(For Galaxy Core Prime).
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=64186973
HERE'S THE SIMPLE ANIMATION THAT I MADE WHILE CREATING THIS TUTORIAL TOO.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=64093741
Please be sure to hit the "Thanks" or Donate button below if this helped you out!
I've tried this multiple times and am still not able to boot after swapping the files, changing the permissions and rebooting the device. I've also tried multiple settings in the duration ranging from zero to 30 (which happens also to be the amount of frames in my image sequence). the only alteration I've made from this guide (which I believe to be irrelevant) is the naming of the pings, in which I just left them named 001, 002 so forth without any prefix. Oh also I have left the closing boot in place (figured I'd change it after I get the first one working), that wouldn't be a big deal would it (The beginning and ending boot animation being different)? Oh btw, I have also tried with loop on and/or off, neither booted for me. Am I missing something? The images were in 480x800 resolution as per the device. I feel like I really should have had it right the first time. This is the guide I was following originally http://forum.xda-developers.com/gal...animations-t2217795/post39844577#post39844577 (obviously with the specs changed for my device), which is similar to this guide just not as detailed or in depth maybe, but I've followed the steps and I just can't seem to be able to duplicate the results. Maybe I could upload the images or my boot that I created or something for you to look at but I dunno if that would even help or what that would accomplish.
---------- Post added at 04:59 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:57 AM ----------
Koognod said:
I've tried this multiple times and am still not able to boot after swapping the files, changing the permissions and rebooting the device. I've also tried multiple settings in the duration ranging from zero to 30 (which happens also to be the amount of frames in my image sequence). the only alteration I've made from this guide (which I believe to be irrelevant) is the naming of the pings, in which I just left them named 001, 002 so forth without any prefix. Oh also I have left the closing boot in place (figured I'd change it after I get the first one working), that wouldn't be a big deal would it (The beginning and ending boot animation being different)? Oh btw, I have also tried with loop on and/or off, neither booted for me. Am I missing something? The images were in 480x800 resolution as per the device. I feel like I really should have had it right the first time. This is the guide I was following originally http://forum.xda-developers.com/gal...animations-t2217795/post39844577#post39844577 (obviously with the specs changed for my device), which is similar to this guide just not as detailed or in depth maybe, but I've followed the steps and I just can't seem to be able to duplicate the results. Maybe I could upload the images or my boot that I created or something for you to look at but I dunno if that would even help or what that would accomplish.
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Click to collapse
Also found this page regarding framerate description http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2189934 Still no help to me though, unfortunately...
Koognod said:
I've tried this multiple times and am still not able to boot after swapping the files, changing the permissions and rebooting the device. I've also tried multiple settings in the duration ranging from zero to 30 (which happens also to be the amount of frames in my image sequence). the only alteration I've made from this guide (which I believe to be irrelevant) is the naming of the pings, in which I just left them named 001, 002 so forth without any prefix. Oh also I have left the closing boot in place (figured I'd change it after I get the first one working), that wouldn't be a big deal would it (The beginning and ending boot animation being different)? Oh btw, I have also tried with loop on and/or off, neither booted for me. Am I missing something? The images were in 480x800 resolution as per the device. I feel like I really should have had it right the first time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you set the duration to 0 you will see nothing. It should be at least 20 or 30 probably, but I'm not sure how elaborate your animation is or how often you want it to change. If you look at my animation everytime it changes color that's 50 duration x 10 frames. The duration by the way is in milliseconds. You're right about the image names though. The title doesn't really matter as long as alphabetically & numerically it falls in the right order. Maybe try starting at "000" though. Also, are your images in PNG format? Again too, make sure that the number of frames matches the number of images in each of your animations as well.
I realize that now, I only had it set to zero the very first time I tried to render (have tried at least 4 times since then starting at 1 and most recently at 30). I will try next extending the duration to 80 maybe. Oh also i have gone back to look at the files and I did start with 000 although I believe this to be necessary only so you can drag and drop the images into the software and have them still be in order.
Sent from my OG 420 using Tapatalk
Koognod said:
I realize that now, I only had it set to zero the very first time I tried to render (have tried at least 4 times since then starting at 1 and most recently at 30). I will try next extending the duration to 80 maybe. Oh also i have gone back to look at the files and I did start with 000 although I believe this to be necessary only so you can drag and drop the images into the software and have them still be in order.
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Yeah, name doesn't really matter just the sequence. The duration will probably always do better higher than 30 I think too unless you have a very low number of frames. How many frames do you have for each animation btw?
Sent from my SM-G360T1 using Tapatalk
4 for some 2 for the rest. Theres only 30 frames in all
Sent from my OG 420 using Tapatalk
---------- Post added at 06:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:54 AM ----------
So 80 didn't work, still bootlooped =(
Sent from my OG 420 using Tapatalk
Koognod said:
4 for some 2 for the rest. Theres only 30 frames in all.
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So, you have about 15 frames for bootsamsung.qmg and 15 for bootsamsungloop.qmg then maybe? Are you duplicating some of the images like I mentioned above or is each one different? Do you want it to loop at the end or just hang on a final image? You can go as high as 5,000 duration if you just have one or two images that you want to hang on in the bootsamsungloop.qmg, but I found that that doesn't work as well as just duplicating some of the images and providing a lower duration(ie. frame rate). Also, if you have a significantly low amount of frames and/or duration too, it may be that it's happening but it's just flickering by too fast.
Sent from my SM-G360T1 using Tapatalk
bogarty said:
So, you have about 15 frames for bootsamsung.qmg and 15 for bootsamsungloop.qmg then maybe? Are you duplicating some of the images like I mentioned above or is each one different? Do you want it to loop at the end or just hang on a final image? You can go as high as 5,000 duration if you just have one or two images that you want to hang on in the bootsamsungloop.qmg, but I found that that doesn't work as well as just duplicating some of the images and providing a lower duration(ie. frame rate). Also, if you have a significantly low amount of frames and/or duration too, it may be that it's happening but it's just flickering by too fast.
Sent from my SM-G360T1 using Tapatalk
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No sorry, I only have made one folder so far because I was only focusing on getting the beginning animation working. so 30 frames for the total sequence. Also, if it were flickering by to fast my device would still be able to boot all the way, I could imagine, which has not been the case.
Koognod said:
No sorry, I only have made one folder so far because I was only focusing on getting the beginning animation working. so 30 frames for the total sequence. Also, if it were flickering by to fast my device would still be able to boot all the way, I could imagine, which has not been the case.
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Click to collapse
It's true it would just kick to the standard samsungbootloop.qmg after your animation if you only did the first part and only replaced the bootsamsung.qmg. I would say first though maybe, just put back the originals to make sure it still boots fine, then try making it work. Also, remember that the more complicated your animation is, the more complicated this process will be. Make sure your permissions still say that they're "rw-r--r--". Make sure that resolution is right and everything else is too, etc. Did you download the newest theme manager too? The link I provided should be fine. Also, if there's any steps you skipped because maybe you already did some stuff, maybe try starting from the beginning(except the image creation of course), but once you get it working right I think it's pretty easy to make more from here on out. Maybe try the animation emulator in theme manager too on the home tab. It won't show you the whole display, which is normal, but it will show you the rate of change between frames and whether or not it seems to be working.
Sent from my SM-G360T1 using Tapatalk
It plays in the emulator. Also I have been restoring system from saved recovery in order to replace my custom animation in between flashes. My permissions have been set proper as well. Resolution too it says 480x800. It really confused me as well that my animation not working caused my phone to bootloop but as I've said I really can't find a step I'm missing.
Sent from my 000 using Tapatalk
Koognod said:
It plays in the emulator. Also I have been restoring system from saved recovery in order to replace my custom animation in between flashes. My permissions have been set proper as well. Resolution too it says 480x800. It really confused me as well that my animation not working caused my phone to bootloop but as I've said I really can't find a step I'm missing.
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Click to collapse
Yeah it should be working if you followed those steps. We have the same device after all. The only thing I could say is maybe try making a super simple one first and get that working, then slowly build on it with more images as you go along. I rebuilt these files while I was making this tutorial to make sure I didn't miss anything and it still works fine. Also, you don't have to reflash the whole rom everytime to go back. Just copy back the originals. That's why I definitely always prefer copying over moving myself, as that way you always have the originals somewhere on your device.
Oh snap, finally saw a glimpse of it!!
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---------- Post added at 07:36 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:36 AM ----------
Think I might have maybe figured out the issue.
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---------- Post added at 07:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:36 AM ----------
I believe the culprit was maybe the fact I hadn't picked the same device in samsung theme manager you recommended. I had read previously it didn't matter. Once I tried again following your guide more thoroughly I got it to boot.
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---------- Post added at 08:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:45 AM ----------
Thank you again, sorry about giving you such a hard time. Especially since your tutorial is on point.
Sent from my OG 420 using Tapatalk
Koognod said:
Oh snap, finally saw a glimpse of it!!
Think I might have maybe figured out the issue. I believe the culprit was maybe the fact I hadn't picked the same device in samsung theme manager you recommended. I had read previously it didn't matter. Once I tried again following your guide more thoroughly I got it to boot. Thank you again, sorry about giving you such a hard time. Especially since your tutorial is on point.
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Click to collapse
I'm so glad to help!
REQUIREMENTS:
- Samsung Theme Designer:[/B] http://developer.samsung.com/bada-themes/tools-sdks/Samsung-Theme-Designer-2-0-4
- Photoshop
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Could this also be accomplished with Gimp photo editor?
---------- Post added at 07:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:56 PM ----------
also can they be made to 60 frames instead? for smoothness purpose
drago10029 said:
Could this also be accomplished with Gimp photo editor?
also can they be made to 60 frames instead? for smoothness purpose
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Not sure what Gimp photo editor is, but probably not as the QMG format is pretty exclusive to Samsung. Why wouldn't you want to use the theme designer?
You can use as many frames as you want though. My last animation had about 200 frames. It just depends on how much you want the animation to change. The example I gave in this tutorial was just a simple one to make it extra easy to learn. You can do up to 500 duration btw to make the frame last longer, but if it's still not long enough, then you just have to duplicate some frames.
bogarty said:
Not sure what Gimp photo editor is, but probably not as the QMG format is pretty exclusive to Samsung. Why wouldn't you want to use the theme designer?
You can use as many frames as you want though. My last animation had about 200 frames. It just depends on how much you want the animation to change. The example I gave in this tutorial was just a simple one to make it extra easy to learn. You can do up to 500 duration btw to make the frame last longer, but if it's still not long enough, then you just have to duplicate some frames.
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I meant can I use GIMP instead of photoshop? it's a open source free photo editor. Photoshop is like a lot of money that some people don't have
drago10029 said:
I meant can I use GIMP instead of photoshop? it's a open source free photo editor. Photoshop is like a lot of money that some people don't have
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Oh shoot...haha! Sorry. To me the term "Photoshop" is a specifically universal term for just making decent images. It won't matter where you make your animation, but it will matter for your Core Prime that they are exactly 480x800 resolution. They should probably be PNG format too if you can produce that. Also, obviously, the names of each frame must be numbered properly.
bogarty said:
Oh shoot...haha! Sorry. To me the term "Photoshop" is a specifically universal term for just making decent images. It won't matter where you make your animation, but it will matter for your Core Prime that they are exactly 480x800 resolution. They should probably be PNG format too if you can produce that. Also, obviously, the names of each frame must be numbered properly.
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cool thanks, and is there anyway to make a bootanimation run 60 fps instead of 30?
drago10029 said:
cool thanks, and is there anyway to make a bootanimation run 60 fps instead of 30?
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Click to collapse
Well, 30 was just the number of frames I used total for each animation in the example. Not the frames per second. If you had 60 frames per second for a 2 minute boot animation, then you'd have to make 7,200 images, so you don't want that. It doesn't do that anyway though. The animation is more like a gif than a video, where each frame lasts awhile. The speed is altered in "duration" too, but I believe it's in milliseconds, which isn't very fast. That's why you might have to duplicate some frames to allow for enough time so that each image can be seen.
For instance, in my DOS animation(linked in the OP), I used about 185 frames(which was 36 images duplicated) for the first animation, but only 20 frames(which was only 4 images duplicated) for the second animation(ie. the looping part at the end). In other words, I had to be duplicate each image 5 times and put the each animation at a duration of 450, so that it would last long enough to appear at the proper speed, as I don't think the duration goes higher than 500ms. There's an emulator in theme designer where you can preview your animation too, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to show the true speed, so you may have to just make the animation a few times and test it out each time until it displays at the speed you want. Anyhow, I hope this helps.
How's it going, so I've started playing with creating custom boot animations on my SCH-I545 running on OF1.
Instead of using a photo shop program I've used a video to jpg converter to create image files from some anime vids then built them into qmg on Samsung Theme Designer.
I've also have successfully created sound clips to go with the bootup. I use a free online ogg converter. I've had full success with this process.
Its just a matter of tweaking the fps/duration to get "my desired" play out length. Once I get this down I'd like to share my animations. Could you direct me to the best thread to post them to.