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Texture Selection Dialog

Dialog Controls

Use the texture selection dialog to view the textures in the textures directory and select one for your material. Your choice is made when you click the OK button. There are five functional components on the dialog:

Folder View

This is seen to the left of the dialog, and is what you use to navigate the files and directories. When you click on a cross or minus sign the item to the right expands or contracts accordingly.

Everytime an item is expanded, the directory that it represents is read and traversed so you know it is up-to-date. For convenience, when you expand an item, it is selected and the list view in the middle of the dialog is updated.

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Texture View

This is seen in the centre of the dialog and lists the files in the directory that was clicked on or expanded in the treeview to the left.

It features:

Thumbnail Preview
You can see the texture before you select it.
Last Selection Memory
When you open the dialog, the currently selected texture is automatically selected!
Draggable Column Headers
These represent the bitmap column and the filename column. click to refresh the listbox
Hide/Show Mechanism for Thumbnails
For fluent population, you can drag the bitmap column header to a zero width and experience the listview as a bog standard list box with no thumbnails.
Vertical and Horizontal Scrollbar
For scrolling large sets of textures, and long filenames.
Underline Hot-tracking
When you hover the mouse cursor over an item it becomes underlined ready for activation.
Whole row selection
For visual clarity.

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Large Preview Window

This is seen to the right of the dialog and is for viewing purposes only. It displays a large preview of the bitmap you are currently in the process of selecting. It is a much bigger version of the small preview window that can be displayed in the list view control.

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Import User Bitmap

This is seen underneath the large preview window if you have the .NET framework installed. This button allows you to select textures of various file formats and convert them to BMP's that you can use in the Articad system. Any texture that is imported to the User directory will be always be resaved under a different name. It is intended that nothing will ever be overwritten because a different filename is derived for each save.

File types you can import:

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Edit Texture Button

This is seen underneath the large preview window. The button when active and visible can be clicked on to launch the Texture Edit program. Texture Edit allows you to tweak the image to your discretion. For more information click here. Any texture that is edited using the texture edit program will be always resaved under a different name in the Users directory contained in the textures directory. This happens on exit from the Texture Edit program, it is intended that nothing will ever be overwritten because a different filename is derived for each save.

It holds one of three states at any one time.

The states are as follows:

Visible and Enabled
This state holds when the following is true:
Visible and Disabled/Greyed
This state holds when the following is true:
Invisible
This state only holds when your machine does not have the .NET Framework 2.0 or above installed.

The .NET Framework is distributed with releases of Articad. For information call Tech Support or consult the Microsoft website http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en

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