By soup (Studiosoup) (193.195.74.242) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 11:48 am:

anyone got any tips for creating apple's aqua-look icons and gui in lightwave?

is there any surfacing/lighting tips you can pass on?

all of apple's icons look pretty consistent, so i'm guessing they have a 3d program set up with various surfaces, lighting and so on, and then just import the object to be rendered as an icon into the scene.

all suggestiuons gratefully read!

By Stephen Enggass (Enggass) (206.26.225.35) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 01:56 pm:

Use Photoshop... I'm sure that's all Apple is doing...
S

By David Michael McClain (Miguel446) (4.33.169.34) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 12:16 am:

check out iconfactory.com. They've got a plugin that works through PSD to generate the icons. Haven't used it myself. Let us know.

M

By Arnie Cachelin (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 11:38 am:

Apple actually used LightWave to create many of their Aqua icons.
I like Iconographer for fiddling with icons.
Also, remember that icons will be composited over arbitrary colors, so they need to be treated like spreits, with sprite-edger or fader-alpha style rendering.

By David Michael McClain (Miguel446) (208.193.202.115) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 12:02 pm:

I don't understand. You mean Apple generates it's icons DIRECTLY from Lightwave.. no intermediary post work whatsoever? I can see them generating them in Ltw. But certainly they are posted in a image editor and then exported to the icon format.

And what do you mean to treat them like sprites with sprite edger or fader-alpha style rendering. Are we talking about transparent backgrounds?

My intereste in generating icons is creating the actual file that contains the transparency and scaling ability that the system icons have. It is my assumption that Iconfactory's IconBuilder_3.5.1 does this. But again, I've not had time to sort it out.

By claire (Claire) (199.229.1.1) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 12:21 pm:

I have seen a great tutotial for making aqua icons in photoshop but I can't remember where. I'll look around and see if I can find it.

By John A. Johnson (Johnny) (67.73.160.64) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 12:47 pm:

== Apple actually used LightWave to create many of their Aqua icons. ==

How do you know this? I'm not contesting what you say, just curious how you know..it's pretty cool that LW plays a part in the look of Aqua.

J

By ingo (Ingo) (62.109.114.15) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 01:37 pm:

Here you go, guys :

http://www.macmerc.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=70

Have fun

By Arnie Cachelin (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 02:38 pm:

Some artists at Apple used LW to create artwork for some of their Aqua Icons. We got this info directly from those at Apple doing the work. I'm sure they didn't render directly to icons, and probably did significant hand tweaking of pixels in many cases.

As for the Sprite thing, there was a little tutorial that was done to go with the sprite-edger script somewhere, but basically, the goal is to make sure all the antialiasing is done by the alpha channel, otherwise whatever bkg color you rendered against would be mixed in with the RGB along the edges, and will result in an apparent fringing when the icon/sprite is displayed against a different background color.

The same goes for partially transparent areas, only more so!

By ted devlin (Eblue) (12.149.3.2) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 03:37 pm:

the Apple developer pages have actions for Photoshop to help lay images into existing 3d-looking icons. They also have a guide in PDF for the development of Icons, from concept to lighting.

its pretty obvious that apple did indeed use a 3-d app to build the look of many of their icons, and i was always pretty sure it was LW, bc of the render quality, but they also use tricks when they can to make things easier.

check out the Apple dev site.
hers a goodish link:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/AHIGIcons/index.html