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Topic: PureRef for size comparison collages
Hey again. I've been using PureRef for a while now and it has come in handy for a variety of things, one of which I wanted to mention, as I noticed it just recently.
Due to PureRef's infinite plane and infinite zoom features, you can really easily set up ad-hoc size comparison collages.
For instance, if you have a bunch of pictures of different buildings, if you know the height of each building you can scale each image such that all the buildings in the images are accurately sized relative to each other. Of course this also works for animals, or fighter jets, or fictional spacecraft and so forth.
It can be handy to import a ruler image for measuring things if the subject images don't have scale indicators on them.
On a related note, info-graphics that relate values to length or surface area can also be compared in this way, if there's a common value between them.
Anyway, I just thought this was another kind of cool application of the program, and so I wanted to mention it. :)
(update: It just occurred to me that you could also use this functionality for concept art, when designing your own suite of vehicles or buildings and such, for quickly eyeballing and adjusting their relative sizes in a flexible environment.)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2016-04-20 08:02 by fisholith.
Thanks for sharing your findings :)
We have thought about adding some built in assets such as arrows and circles that you could add to the scene, maybe a ruler of some sort would have been nice as well?
That could come in handy.
A ruler, or faint semi transparent grid overlay.
As for arrows and circles and such, that could also be an interesting addition.
If you do add stretchable arrows and circles, you might want to look into using a "9-patch" approach for rendering them. Well, arrows and rounded rectangle frames would work anyway.
The nice thing about using a 9-patch system to handle arrows and boxes is that you can just make 9-patch scaling a toggleable rendering mode for the existing images. Then all the existing scale, rotate, flip, etc functionality will work for arrows/boxes using the same mouse and keyboard interaction that all the other images use.
So, for example, if a user wanted to add an arrow via an option in the right-click menu, PureRef could add a built-in arrow image and default it to 9-patch rendering. Then when you stretch it, it will scale appropriately, but all the standard position and rotation commands would still affect it's bounding box normally.
The other kind of interesting side effect would be that anyone could make their own arrow and box images, drop them into PureRef, and set them to use 9-patch mode. So they could have a variety of their own arrow/box graphics.
That said, when an image is set to 9-patch mode, it might be handy to be able to grab and drag image corners (for boxes), and edges (for arrows), which would be a bit of an extension to the default UI.
I don't know, just brain storming. Then again, this is one of those situations where maybe it would just be simpler to make some vector arrows and circles, which you can pick a color for. :)
I only have the perspective of one user, so it's always hard to say if a feature I think might be handy would really be practical for the broader user base. Plus I know it's way easier to suggest a feature, than to find time to add it, when there's a bunch of other stuff on the to-do list.
Either way, the program is doing it's job fantastically as is, so I'm certainly not complaining. :)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2016-05-26 17:28 by fisholith.
Thanks for the suggestions, we are always glad to hear ideas from a users perspective as it is you who will be using the features that we make, so keep them coming :)
As for the features, we will probably look into these areas a bit more in the future when we are done focusing on other areas, but when that happens we will keep this in mind!