Ruby Dropshadow Tool

[adamszabo]

Here is a tool for creating dropshadows for your shapes, instead of using photoshop. You can dynamically change it any way you like. I used it in my projects, I thought I'd share it with you all. Feel free to improve it

[Spogg]

Very impressive Adam!

Thank you for sharing!

[RJHollins]

Nice !

Thank you for sharing Adam

[tulamide]

I feel like a father seeing his son going to college! I even have a tear in my eyes.

There are other ways to do it, and probably ways that are quicker, but this is a solid approach to the topic and I just love seeing it done by Adam! Good job!

[adamszabo]

Thanks guys, Im glad you like it

There are other ways to do it, and probably ways that are quicker

I would love to see a faster way for learning purposes

[kortezzzz]

Thank you a lot, Adam. that's a great share

Am I wrong or this method can be used not only with Ruby own drawn shapes but also with png images?...

[adamszabo]

Thank you a lot, Adam. that's a great share

Am I wrong or this method can be used not only with Ruby own drawn shapes but also with png images?...

hmm I am not sure, I havent tried it, but I guess it could be possible to draw png images over each other and it can change its opacity to create the shadow effect.

[kortezzzz]

I guess it could be possible to draw png images over each other and it can change its opacity to create the shadow effect.

Interesting idea
So what's actually needed is a Ruby command that may darken the second duplicated image. Guess maybe one of our experts here knows if something like that is achieveable?

[tulamide]

I guess it could be possible to draw png images over each other and it can change its opacity to create the shadow effect.

Interesting idea
So what's actually needed is a Ruby command that may darken the second duplicated image. Guess maybe one of our experts here knows if something like that is achieveable?

No. But you can pre-edit your images to a darkened version and use that.

[tulamide]

I would love to see a faster way for learning purposes

Here you are. Note, that it is just a prototype. Lots of knobs to play with and lots of code to explore (mostly helper methods). The core is using GDI+ to calculate everything, so it's as fast as it gets. One exception is the shadow_transform() method. Unfortunately Flowstone doesn't provide access to the results of matrix manipulations (like translate) and so I had to do all the calculations manually to have access to the results. It's not much though (but if there are any takers to optimize my rather straight-forward math, go for it).