Tobybear presents:
Some nice little GFX utilites for GUI design, sprite ripping/editing, ...
which may or may not be useful to you.

Note: These tools were originally developed for internal use, ie. only for 
myself. Therefore, there is no real manual available, although most features 
should be easy enough to figure out.
If you run into serious problems, you can contact me:
web: www.tobybear.de
mail: tobybear@web.de


StitchStudio:
StitchStudio is a free program from me that allows you to load any number 
of GIF, BMP, JPG, PNG image files and stitch them together. You can define 
the width and height of each "tile", so you can actually create borders 
around the images. Background color can be defined as well as horizontal 
and vertical alignment of the images (left, center, right border). The tiles 
can be arranged in an arbitrary m x n matrix, so for example for 48 images, 
not only 48x1 (all images in one row) or 1x48 (all in one column) but also 
8x6 structures are possible. Furthermore black and white mask bitmaps can 
be generated for alpha channel tricks. Output format can be BMP, JPG, PNG, 
GIF and even animated GIF. There is also an "unstitch" mode which will take 
a stitched image and extract the images again as separate files.


PNGTool:
PNGTool, a simple utility to load/save the mask and image channel of a PNG 
image separately. Not that much features yet, but maybe someone is interested.


Cropper:
Cropper is a powerful tool to crop a series of images. "Cropping" means taking
a part of on image and saving it as a separate files. With Cropper, you can
define an unlimited amount of rectangular areas that are to be cut out of a
sequence of images (yes, batch processing, and yes, several areas per image
are possible!) and save them as separate files.


AniMan:
AniMan is a little animation utility. It requires at least DirectX8.1. You can 
have up to 4 layers, each one containing an image in PNG, GIF, BMP, PCX format. 
Each layer can be scaled, rotated, colored, ... over a certain number of frames.
All layers are superimposed and each frame is then saved as a separate picture
(or as a GIF animation, or even as a stitched image). This probably sounds mighty 
confusing, and there is no manual yet, but here is a little example:

layer 1: background for a knob, i.e. a large circle
layer 2: the pointer of the knob, i.e. a line
layer 3: a small dot in the circle

All 3 layers will be drawn over each other and you can for example make 100 frames, 
set the rotation for layer 2 (the pointer) to 30 degrees in the frame #0 and to 300 
degress in frame #99 and the frames inbetween will be interpolated. Same with color: 
make frame #0 of layer 3 green, frame #50 red and frame #99 yellow and the color will
smoothly change. You can make any frame an active keyframe by double-clicking on it.
Argl, I don't know how to explain, but the program is quite powerful - and yes, 
it is freeware.


DXGC:
Another new GFX program, but this is rather special: A graphic converter for DirectX 
files (textures, bumpmaps, ..) that are usually stored in the memory of your graphic 
card. Most games these days have their GFX for example in DDS files, which most graphic 
programs can't open without special filters. DXGC will convert these files to regular 
PNG or BMP files. As I said, probably only of limited use to most of you, this is 
rather a tool for the gaming community.


TGA2PNG:
This is a batch conversion tools to convert TGA files to PNG. Nothing special, you 
might think, most graphic converters can do this. I did however not find any converter 
that converts the alpha channel information from a TGA to an alpha channel in a PNG. 
My converter preserves this transparency information channel, for single color as well 
as grayscale alpha.


T-Rip:
This is a tool for extracting common graphic, video and sound files stored in large 
files like in many games or applications. It is faster than any file ripper I found
and supports the most common multimedia formats. You can also define your own chunks.


