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Overlapping Subpictures (angled buttons) – Please Help!
Hi there
Surfed through all the posts and couldn’t find any references to this problem – but apologies if it has already been asked – it seems simple enough – so i’m sure its easy to figure out.
Using: Encore 2.0
Photoshop CS2
After Effects 7.0I’ve created a menu with angled buttons in photoshop (theres a series of text layers stacked up in an angle, to match the layout of the background).
I’ve imported this photoshop file into Encore and turned each of them into buttons – selecting the Create Text Subpicture option in the button properties.
When I preview the DVD however, the highlighted state of each button seems to overlap with the button above it or below it. Sure enough when I check the button shapes in Encore, they all have rectangular bounding boxes (including the subpicture).
Ideally, what I’d like to do is crop the bounding boxes to match the angle of the text, to avoid overlapping other buttons – however can’t seem to find any options that allow me to do this – all i can seem to do is either rotate the bounding boxes (and rotate the text) or scale it down (again, scaling down the text)
Is there a way to do this or an option I haven’t selected? Or some other method for creating buttons which aren’t horizontal?
Many thanks – this is one of many things to have gone on this project, but the only one which I haven’t been able to solve so far – so any help is greatly appreciated!
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4 Replies
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When you say “at an angle”, are you talking about a 3D effect, or are you talking about a simple rotation of the text?
For the button’s bounding box, Encore will always create the smallest rectangle (and only a rectangle) that encompasses all of the button graphics and text (or text only, in your case). This is not a limitation of Encore – the DVD spec allows up to 36 rectangular buttons per 4:3 menu (18 buttons per widescreen menu).
So as you have probably guessed, your only options are to scale the buttons so that they don’t overlap, or change their relative on-screen positions.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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You can also move out elements in the button layer set that don’t actually need to be part of the button, and have them as part of the menu instead. To the user, the design could look exactly the same, but the button rectangle would be much smaller.
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It looks as though I’m going to have to separate the buttons out a little further – just makes the layout a little more awkward, but I’ll figure it out.
The text is simply rotated – not in 3D space – although that was something I was hoping to do for another DVD.
Thanks for the help and the quick response!
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I had this exact problem, but I figured out, as implied by Joe, if you only have the highlight layer as an actual layer in the button, you can have the layers much closer together. I had 4 menu options all at angle right on top of each other, so I just made them all one flat layer outside of the actualy button group, but kept the highlight layers in place. As the highlight layer in my case was quite small, they didn’t overlap. Simple but it works.
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