The Advanced Finish Picker

Punch! does all its magic with smoke and lights. And you can forget the smoke.

The objects in Exterior Decorator may be colored or textured using an advanced color / texture picker. Color and texture together are termed "finishes", so this picker has the ability to seelct a finish for your object from among all the types that Punch! has availabel to it, as they are discussed below. A little background might be appropriate before we jump in.

Wherever there is a possibility of controlling a color in Punch!, Exterior Decorator declares a "finish" for that and a set of values to control it. These values which control a single instance of finish includes:

• a Color, a 24 bit integer value that states a color in terms of its red, green and blue intensitiy components. For more detail on how colors work, see The Ten Commandments of Color and Texture. There are four sources for colors:
• The color wheel - a way to choose any value from the 14 million plus possible color values.
• Custom "Decorator" colors - Punch! has pre-chosen 72 color values for interest in a decorator sense - twelve each for each of the four seasons, twelve more "contemporary" colors, and twelve gray-tones.
• Paints - starting with version 8.0, Punch! has defined a way in which paint manufacturers can define their paint colors in terms of 24 bit screen colors, and these are available by the manufacturer's assigned names,
• A project palette - Punch! allows a user to store up to 150 finishes in ten groups within a project. Each may be either a color or a texture. Changing a palette item will change all the surfaces colored with that item.
• Textures. Textures are patterns of colored surfaces designed to suggest many of the natural and man-made patterns that occur in homes. A texture is essentially a picture of a brick wall, a ground surface or anything else (even a fleecy sky). These pictures are then repeated on a surface in a process called tiling, so they that more or less realistically represent what the object they should look like. There is a lot more artistic talent involved in building good textures, but this is the basic idea. There are two sources of textures:
• Punch!'s standard textures, a collection of about 800 common textures that have been embedded in Punch! since the start; these are all associated with a number that identifies each one uniquely.
• Custom textures, supplied by individual users using the Materials Workshop PowerTool (or traded with another such user, natch). These are identified by a pathname to the file that contains the texture's image - it therefore also defines the categorization that the creator built his texture into.
• In earlier versions of Punch! a pair of numbers allowed the user to expand or contract the scale of a texture. These are deprecated and not used in later versions of Punch! (version 8.0 and later). These are two percentage numbers, defining the percentage of expansion in the vertical and horizontal directions, respectively).
• It so happens that Punch! also defined early on what would happen if a user chose both a color and a texture. The texture was darkened by coloring the texture mathematically, a process we call "tinting". For example, a white siding texture and a red color would result in red siding; a red siding merged with green color would result in a very dark brown-colored siding. Punch! has deprecated this effect, but for reasons of backward compatibility is not able to discard it altogether, as it has the scaling factors. It has removed the user interface to implement it, though, so it is not much used. However, Exterior Decorator can, as easily as not, re-implement it, and does so. This vastly expands the possibilities of all existing textures by allowing them to be shaded or tinted. Curiously enough, the default roofing material is darkened with a gray color.
• As explained under color above, it is possible to store a texture in one of the project palette slots, just as a color may be.

Whenever a finish button is pressed on an object's properties dialog, the dialog on the left is displayed to handle the building up of a finish specification. The three rows of buttons deal with choosing a color and/or texture from the various sources:

• Default Gray - chooses the gray color assigned to all objects before they are otherwise colored. The texture is set empty so the color alone is displayed.
• White - chooses for color straight white, and leaves the texture untouched. White when mixed with any texture gives back exactly the texture, so that is the default for a "texture-only" finish.
• Custom Color... - opens up the Windows standard color wheel dialog for choosing any of the 14 million possible colors that the color entry supports. It's "custom" because any possibility is open. This choice leaves the texture as it is.
• Designer Color... - opens up the following dialog for choosing one of the 72 designer colors:
  
  This choice leaves the texture as it is.
• Custom Texture/Accessory... - This choice opens up a screen for choosing a custom texture: see "Texture Picker" below. Choosing a custom texture does not change the color setting.
• Standard Texture... - Similarly displays the categories and denizens of the Punch! standard textures. This does not affect the color setting.
• Palette Item... - Displays a dialog for choosing one of the project's palette items, as explained above. This sets both color and texture, and is accessible in version 10.0 and later.
• Paint... - Displays a dialog to allow for the choosing of a paint category and value; sets the texture clear. This button is only available to version 8.0 and later.
• Wall Accessory... allows for the choosing of one of Punch!'s wall accessory "objects", such as curtains, shutters or drapes. These are textures, but they have a special setting that forces them to be stretched to fit the surface they are aimed at, not tile it. They also make use of the convention which makes black pixels transparent when they are pointed on a surface, so the shape of curtains can be maintained, for example. The dislog for chhoosing the accessories is identical to that for textures. Color is not disturbed by selecting a wall accessory texture.
• Fence... is an additional categories of pseudo-objects. These are fencing panels, which might be useful in certain circumstances.

The Texture Picker

The Texture Picker is a general purpose display for choosing a texture or other item, such as 3D objects, wall accessories, fencing and plants under different ciscumstances. What makes most of these common is that they are all images, which the user will want to contrast and compare. This is difficult to do in Punch!, because the menu area is so small, and the tools for gathering interesting images are limited. The Texture Picker provides a potentially screen-wide are for viewing images.

Depicted in this picture of the Texture Picker in action is a tree selection mechanism on the left which allows for selecting categories and subcategories within the data type this Picker displays, and a number of thumbnails representing textures and other images on the right. The Texture Picker window is fully capable of normal window movement (by grabbing and dragging the title bar) amd also of resizing (by grabbing a window edge or corner and dragging it to expand or contract the window). Each of the icons in the window has a small selection button in the upper left corner for making a selection from the icons, and on the right is a vertical scroll bar, used if the number of available icons exceeds what a full page can display.

At the bottom of the window is a word display bar, which displays the name of each texture icon as the mouse is hovered over that icon. Below that on the left is a series of four resolution choices. These allow the user to see more or less detail in the thumbnails. Obviously the thumbnails are not as large as the real images, so a choice is made whether to show the whole scope of the display reduced to the thumbnail (called full scope or to show just a corner of the image in full detail (called full resolution). There are two intermediate possibilities as well. These control affect all the icons at once.

On the below right are four buttons, labeled OK, Cancel, Max and Help. The OK button is only enabled when a selection button has been clicked (and shows a black "X"). The Cancel button will always be available and will return the user to the previous window with no selection made. Help displays the application Users Guide. The Max button acts like the Windows Maximizer button, expanding the Window to the full size of the screen. When Used, the button caption changes from Max to Restore, indicating that that same button will move the user back to the window size before Max was invoked.

Exterior Decorator and the contents of this help file are
Copyright©2006 by ThistleKeep Engineering; all rights are reserved.
Comments and suggestions, as well as support, are entertained at Lmc@ThistleKeep.com.
"Punch!" and other titles of Punch! operations are trademarks of Punch! Software L.L.C.