Creating a theme means something different depending on whether you're talking about synapse-style (legacy) panels or Smart Graphics projects.? I'd suggest the former would be an exercise in futility ;-)
So, assuming you're talking about Smart Graphics, you don't actually do the "theming" in VTPro at all.? You need to use another tool to create/modify themes.? There are currently two options - use Crestron's Studio application, which includes a "sub-application" called "Theme Editor".? The pros for that are, it's free and the official Crestron tool.? The cons are: It's a monumental download, and a - I would argue (for obvious reasons that will become clear in a moment) - rather cumbersome to use (slow to use, a rather convoluted system of windows/lists/associations).
** WARNING ** If you know what's coming next (a blatant product plug), please change channels now...
The other option is to use (our) Theme Creator product.
The cons here are that it's a commercial product, and?therefore?aimed at dealers/CSPs who are serious about developing custom themes to gain competitive advantage over those who simply want to make the odd tweak to Crestron's home-grown themes.
The pros are, naturally, endless ;-)
It's a very lightweight application (fast to load, responsive UI, negligible download <1Mb I think for the last build)
It has Crestron's blessing (and very helpful support during development) and after 18 months in the field, we're not aware of any incompatibility with the SG environment.
We provide?enhanced font character set support, so you can tune theme size (fonts can add a lot of bloat)
Other "font" benefits... (I'm not going to be specific here)
Import ANY compiled theme, so you only need the original (compiled)?theme to make edits (no need for the large database exports that Studio uses as the intermediate file format)
File-system-based structure - so it works with version control systems (e.g. we use SVN)
Responsive support - we try very hard to provide customer satisfaction!
Did I mention it was quick? ;-)? We've streamlined the theme creation process so it's easy to understand - create a style, add images, assign it to a control, compile, done.
Lots of other features (like the controls style reference, and control optimisation - which checks styles against the actual installed control to remove dead wood/notify you if a style is missing, etc.)
We have a number of tutorial videos if you want to see various features in action:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL6a9XxYyeyqMnlg9lFYz-96JV3HURL5s
I hope that helps, and we'd love to have you join the ever-growing Theme Creator community.
Cheerio,
Oliver (Ultamation - Theme Creator Lead Developer)
P.S. Once you have created/modified and compiled?a theme, you need to reload VTPro to see the theme in the project properties.? You add the theme to the project and either set as the default for pages, or override the selection at the page level.
P.P.S. We suggest?(and I?believe it's the official Crestron line too) not to use multiple themes if you can help it - themes are loaded at project start-up and?every image consumes valuable memory and is loaded?even if it's not used explicitly in a control.??Additional?bitmaps?are also created (in memory)?for any control that uses an image with non-native dimensions - so it can quickly mount up.? i.e. a native 100x100 image, used in a button of 150x50 will create (at least) two bitmaps in memory (though 20 buttons all of 150x50 won't add additional bitmaps).
