New XBMC Experience
#1
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I've noticed a lot of excitement around the idea of creating a new skin for XBMC that mimics the style of xbox's new official dashboard Xbox Experience.

I see a lot of good starts out there (FourTwentySmilz, djh_, watzen), and I would love to see this project come together.

I am not going to pretend that I have any experience coding a skin for XBMC, but I am an avid user and a graphic designer. I have been putting together some graphics in photoshop and illustrator the last month that might help the "New XBMC Experience" project along. I also have a pretty good wireframe of what I think this skin should be able to do (that I will post at a later date).

So any of you ballsy coders out there that need some graphics let me know, but only if you are serious about making the New XBMC Experience a reality.

-d*rock

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#2
Not a coder, graphic designer myself. Just wanted to say:
Beautiful work, very well done. Hope someone with coding skill will jump on.

Very nice indeed!
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#3
Could you remove the "last played" and "free space"...things like that, from the images?

And post a link to D/L the images ( seperate, not all on one sheet)
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#4
That is some nifty graphics, very nicely done.

Looks like very much like the real deal, you made any other 'avatars' then the one in the examples?
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#5
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Everything that makes up these images is on a separate layer. I would assume that it would be best to create these icons by having each peace of art separate as I have illustrated above. All the text would be ideally dynamic.

I would imagine each of these images as a 300 dpi PNG would be what you are looking for FourTwentySmilz, is that correct?

Martomo, this is the only 'avatar' i have made thus far. I made it and pulled it from the neat website meez.com.

Thanks for the positive feedback thus far everyone!

-d*rock
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#6
D*ROCK.........Put all your images (seperate) into a folder. Zip it up and upload it to Rapidshare. Post a download link to it so I can see if I might be able to use them.
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#7
FourTwentySmilz Wrote:D*ROCK.........Put all your images (seperate) into a folder. Zip it up and upload it to Rapidshare. Post a download link to it so I can see if I might be able to use them.

Damn, maybe a please? Great work D* I do agree with FTS though the community could use these if you would like to make them available. PLEASE.
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#8
Hey d*rock, got a few questions and pointers about the 'skin'.

d*rock Wrote:Everything that makes up these images is on a separate layer. I would assume that it would be best to create these icons by having each peace of art separate as I have illustrated above. All the text would be ideally dynamic.
Which program did you use to create the graphics?

d*rock Wrote:I would imagine each of these images as a 300 dpi PNG would be what you are looking for FourTwentySmilz, is that correct?
Not sure about 300 dpi, think most of the skinners use 72 dpi, never thought about it for graphics on television, also I think it's different per platform, but I guess the bigger the better, you can always scale it down to a proper size.

d*rock Wrote:Martomo, this is the only 'avatar' i have made thus far. I made it and pulled it from the neat website meez.com.
Nice site, but still the question is, how you can make a 3d avatar without overloading the skin, I assume there is a limit of controls you can use, but still how to make it so 3d as possible.

That being said, most of time you can't really copy a skin that has a different function then media center, keep in mind this 'dashboard' is made for a game console, your skin is getting close to it, but it's going to need a lot of add-on scripting like MC360.

I myself am curious what the graphics look like, did you create a custom font, if not which did you use.
Please do share your work, or maybe get a project started with people that are interested in making this.

//EDIT
Also want to point out that, when sharing this graphics, you might wanna make sure that nothing is copyrighted and all handmade, seeing Team Blackbolt had some issues with Xbox about MC360, so meaning all have been created from scratch.
I'm not saying I doubt your graphic skills, just wanted to warn you about this.
Microsoft/Xbox can be a bitch about these sort of things, I'm not familiar with the legal right of Meez, but you might wanna check that too.
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#9
I am using a mix of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to create the many graphics. I am favoring Illustrator a bit, because I am trying to keep as many images vector as possible. For web and typical video these images would be optimized to 72 dpi, but I would like to make sure that whatever graphics I create will have the possibility of being HD, which is something I have to look into more.

I don't think it is possible to be truly HD with raster-based images though. They have to be resolution-independent vectors. Regardless, to get the most use out of my images I would suppose that bigger is better, Martomo is right, you can always scale down.

This New Xbox Experience dashboard's 3d animated avatar system in general is problematic and I highly doubt an exact clone of this dashboard will ever be replicated for XBMC, however, I think with the right resources we can get it close enough so when someone first glances at it, they say "oh, is that the New Xbox Experience?"

My thought was to simply treat the box with the avatar and gamer information like the gamer card on Blackbolt's MC360, and allow the user to choose the image to fill the avatar space (the same with the avatar in the upper right hand corner) With my image, I happened to use a 3d image of myself in an attempt to get close to the look of New Xbox Experience. Someone else might use a different image out of preference.

Example:
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Copyrights are an issue as always. My graphics have all been created from scratch except for a few exceptions (Meez Avatar and Xbox orb icon in the lower right hand corner). The other images (game covers, movie covers, music covers...) would be user generated so I don't think there is a problem there. Even the Meez Avatar would be swapped out for a user generated avatar. I am using the xbox orb logo for a place holder for now.

I went into this project with the mindset of making this thing look as close to the real thing as possible, and then we can pull back and change and strip out things that may not be legal before releasing. Much like Blackbolt had to create a new orb to replace the copyrighted Xbox one in his awesome MC360 skin.

The main font was actually pulled from Blackbolt's MC360 and I used a couple other fonts in there. I'll pull them and release them with the rest of the graphics.

Long post. Thank you to all that have enough interest to read this whole thing.

I am working on getting all the images together for ya FourTwentySmilz and I will hopefully have them available sooner than later!

Thanks again for the great feedback everyone.

-d*rock
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#10
looks good. hope to see it become somthing
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#11
Well what's nice about vector graphics, is that you can export them to any size, without quality loss, what might be the best resolution to aim for is 1920×1080 (1080i) or 1920x1200.
If it's to big, you can always scale the image down to the desired size.

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I really like the 2D avatar, what also might be an idea is to create an sort of color picker to have the ability to customize your avatar more.
If you want to expand it even more people could import logo's for on a sweater/t-shirt or equip accessories like glasses or bracelets.
But again there is a limit on how many controls you can use in a skin.

About the copyright, just wanted to inform you have to keep it in mind, it shouldn't matter much with the mock ups, but the final product might give some trouble with the rightfully owners of the copyright.

Keep up the good work!

//EDIT
Here is a streaming movie about the avatars, kinda funny actually all the emotions, maybe will prompt some other ideas for more customizing.
http://www.xbox.com/NR/rdonlyres/B59496E...tarsHi.asx

//EDIT2
Here are some press kits of the NXE (Next Xbox Experience), might help in the progress of creating a mock up of the dashboard.
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#12
Any word on releasing those images?
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#13
Hi,
it would be interesting to continue this project! I can help with the graphic work.
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#14
pipposanta Wrote:Hi,
it would be interesting to continue this project! I can help with the graphic work.

You do realize that this thread has been started almost exactly 2 years ago and there was no new post for almost 2 years as well?
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