AutoCAD 2010 Icons

[jlong101]

I am trying to get my custom icons to look at least similar to AutoCAD's icons, but all I can manage is to get them looking very blurred. Does anybody know how to get them to show up crisp? My work flow is as follows Illustrator -> Export to BMP. I have tried 72dpi, 300dpi. Please let me know what would be the best approach. Thanks.

[RobertB]

I'm not sure what the DPI should be, but the icon size should be 16x16 for small icons and 32x32 for large icons.

[jlong101]

Here I am attaching a test icon I have been trying and a screen capture of the UI showing my icon. See the difference in the appearance between the user icon and the program’s icons. Any suggestions?

[RobertB]

Why don't you post the partial CUIx? That is even more useful than a screenshot.

[jlong101]

Robert,
Thank you for your reply. I don't think that the problem is on the CUIX file. I am more interested to learn the best procedure to load custom icons. In 2010 the only format supported for custom icons is still BMP, which I know. However, there is a big difference between how the custom icons are rendered compared to the application icons. I find that custom icons are rendered very blurry.

[nelson]

What I have been doing is to set my modelspace background to color 192,192,192 (transparent color for ribbon and QAT bar).

Draw a 16x16 box and scale my ACAD session window to that size.
Draw what I want in the area and type bmpout.
For text, I type what I want and retrace with a thickened polyline.
Save the bmp file.
In the CUIx I map to the file for the small and large and hit apply.
You can be quite creative in with this. I have done everything from gradient hatch to using an image file in a button. The difficult problem I am having is making new image for buttons that have a image already assigned to it. It shows right, but for some reason it doesn't want to let go of the previous image.

[RobertB]

Robert,
Thank you for your reply. I don't think that the problem is on the CUIX file. I am more interested to learn the best procedure to load custom icons. In 2010 the only format supported for custom icons is still BMP, which I know. However, there is a big difference between how the custom icons are rendered compared to the application icons. I find that custom icons are rendered very blurry.I've done some further research for my Autodesk University classes and here are my findings:

16x16 and 32x32 BMP files are the supported file types. The DPI is 96. This was determined by exporting both sizes from the CUI editor's Image "editor"*.
It is critical to make sure you are specifying the correct image size for each size in the CUI editor. Suggestion: do not use the "Both" option when specifying either image. The only time I can replicate the blurry issue is when the CUI editor latches on to the 16x16 image for the large image property. I see perfectly sharp images using my 32x32 images.
Remember that images files are now stored inside the CUIx file. So if you need to replace an existing image with an updated image of the same name, you need to use the CUI editor's Image "editor"* to import the updated image and save the updated image to the same name. This is the procuess by which the file stored in the CUIx file is updated. (An alternative would be to open the CUIx file as a ZIP file and directly replace the image file(s).)
* Calling the Image Editor an editor being generous.

[RobertB]

The difficult problem I am having is making new image for buttons that have a image already assigned to it. It shows right, but for some reason it doesn't want to let go of the previous image.See item 3 in this post (http://forums.augi.com/showpost.php?p=1018035&postcount=7).