The first that we will go over is buttons. So, what makes a menu a menu? It is the buttons that you place on the menu. The buttons provide a means of selection. It has to be something that the user obviously knows can be interactive with. Buttons need to look like buttons nowadays and text is considered button looking enough depending on where it is and how it is organized. Usually, a moving highlight helps with the button text navigation. Let us build a text button from scratch.
I am going to go up to my text tool. I will go to menu 480B because I would rather start with our scene index. And, let us click down here between the two land posts and I am going to type in main menu. Putting text on the menu only adds another text photoshop layer to the menu and just counts as visuals. There is no functionality in this text unless we add some functionality to it. Let me show you that layer. This is the layers panel. Here is the text layer we are starting. Let me click out of this layer. And there it is. That is the official text layer.
I can take the text that I just made and convert it into a button simply by right clicking and clicking the convert to button option. Now, I want you to notice what just happened. I converted that to a button. And if you look at the properties panel, now we have button properties.
Now that we created a text button, let us put in a button with a place holder for a thumbnail. We cannot do this from scratch in Encore so I am just going to grab a template button from the library panel. I will go to the travel set. I will filter this by button. I will go the top here because I want to grab the fishing video button. Click and drag this on to our menu and drop it up here in the top left corner. I think that that is a little too high. I am going to put my title safes on. I am going to press M on my keyboard to get the move tool and I am going to bring this button down into the title safe. That is about where I want it.
Now, we got two types of buttons up there, a normal text button and a chapter button with the thumbnail. Let us talk layers. Let us go down of the layer panel by clicking the layer tab. All right. Let us take a look at this group right here. This is our main menu text and I want you to look at the plus in this parenthesis. This naming convention is how Photoshop communicates with Encore in order to label what layers are part of buttons and what types of buttons they are. This plus simply means that this is a normal button. There is nothing else to it. However, if you look up here, this is our thumbnail button. The plus number symbol in the parenthesis tells us that this is a chapter button. You can see that up here in the properties. Layer groups that you do not see right now, if you wanted a next button or a previous button, those would be labeled as a plus with a greater than symbol or a less than. The greater than symbol would be the next button group and the less than symbol would be the previous button group.
There is also a thumbnail layer down here. That is what this percent sign is. This specific layer is the video thumbnail for this fishing video button. When you link a chapter mark to this button, it would put a poster frame in this layer. Another naming convention that I want you to look at is this equals one in the parenthesis and this labels a highlight layer. What this is if they put their cursor over that particular button, this highlight would reveal itself. Right now you do not see it because it is not visible. However, if you click in the menu panel, this button right here which shows selected sub picture highlights, you will a little arrow show up next to it and that is the highlight for this video thumbnail. You will also take a look that our main menu text turns red. Let us put that back on normal.
You can only have three highlight layers and they get their properties from your menu color sets. We will take a look at color sets later when we design our own highlights. Just keep this in mind for later. We are also going to make our own thumbnail layer buttons letter when I show you how to make custom scene and next buttons in Photoshop.
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