Digital Workshop

In producing interactive training demo's I would like to be able to -

1. Take a screenshot of the application.

2. Place an Opus button over the top of a graphical button that appears in the screenshot.

3. Make the face of the button transparent so that the underlying button, graphics/text is visible.

4. Set the light and dark bevel colours on the overlaid button so that they reverse, and the button "goes down", when clicked.

So far the only way I have been able to accomplish this is by -

a. Creating an overlaid Opus button, with colours and text identical to an underlying text button.
-or-
b. Capturing the image of an underlying graphical button and incorporating this as an image in the overlaid Opus button.

This is very fiddly and time consuming and it would be much easier, and adequate for my purposes, if I could simply make the button face transparent. I note that there is a control to set the degree of transparency of the bevels, but apparently not the face.

Am I missing something, or can somebody tell me how to do this?

Any help appreciated.

johyray

Try setting the colour to none by removing the checkmark found on the button properties tab.

Thanks Leo, The trouble then is that the button becomes effectively an invisible "hot-spot" that does not "go down" when clicked. What I really need is to be able to set the button face colour to "none" or "transparent" but keep the bevel still visible, and coloured as specified, so that it behaves just like any button except that you can "see" the underlying button image through the face.

What I am trying to do is create a reasonably convincing simulation of the application so that the user has a fairly realistic experience of using the real thing. I had this feature in another product I once used but unfortunately the supplier went out of business several years ago.

Anyway, thanks for your helpful suggestion. Unfortunately it doesn't look like I can do it the way I would like. I wonder if v4.5 is any different?

Here is something you could try:

Create a solid color image. Save it as an image file (JPG, PNG, etc.)
Go into Opus and create a button. Click on Button Tab. Turn off Colour.
Click on Image tab. Select the solid color image you created. Make the solid color transparent. Now just add borders to it to make it look like a button, say Sunken 2px. Then click on the Button Down or Mouse Over items on the Properties scrollbox and choose a different border (Raised 2px). You should now have a transparent button that looks like a button.

Thanks for that suggestion, I'll give it a try. If that works it will certainly speed up and simplify the process.

I tried the suggestion from bwpartric and it worked perfectly. Thanks!

FYI I also found that it was not necessary to include an image with a transparent colour. I did this...
.
...and it gve me exactly the result I wanted.

Thanks again for help.

Thanks for that, bwpatric and johnray -- I appreciate it.
I was using a more complicated method to achieve the same effect

Can't think of many forums as useful as this one.

Paul