Categorytools

Resizing and reducing color palette of images with command-line

Often you want to batch your assets and prepare them for multiresolutions. One way great way to do it, is by using ImageMagick. It has A LOT of features to manipulate images and since it’s command line, you can just append all commands into a batch/shell script to automate it. For instance resizing all images to half just use this simple command:

Another awesome tool is called pngquant. Which actually reduces 24/32 bit images to 8 bit palette pngs WIDTH keeping full transparency, no idea how, but it works and is a default too to be used as best practice. Here an example for 32 colors:

Conclusion

When it comes to handing massive collections of images for multiresolution it’s always a good idea to automate as much as possible.

Texture Packer

When it comes to optimizing graphic assets you want to use texture atlasses (aka sprite-sheets). Since you can have multiple images in one and therefore have less seperated files to open and load one by one and creating expensive textures into your graphic memory. For instance 95 seperate images or one sprite sheet makes a huge difference:

When you want to create sprite-sheets there’s one really awesome tool called Texture Packer.

Which basically creates them by dragging and dropping them into a scene optionally re-orderes, compresses and creates a file with all the offsets for it with like 3 clicks.

At work we’re using it for some time already and I can highly recommend it.

By the way there is one similar cool tool for css sprite sheets called Sprite Cow. :)

Install Alcohol 120% on windows 8

Acoording to this article you need to install SPTD first. It basically emulates your RAID/SCSI interface, which is needed to emulate virtual cd/dvd devices.