I am new to creating watch faces, and I have an extremely simple, basic understanding of it all. That said, I am trying to create custom minute and hour hands for a watch face, but when I load my own image, it doesn’t rotate from the center point. How do I program the watch to understand which part of the image should be treated as the point from which it should rotate to prevent my minute hand from jumping all over the place?
Essentially, I need what it’s considering the “bottom” of the image to be treated as the “center point” from which the hand should rotate, if that makes sense.
It is the way I use. when I make my own hand image I will crop the size of the image like the left one , so the hand will rotate at the center hole of the hand.
Is this something I would need PhotoShop to do? I may be doing things the hard way. I’ve been downloading an image off of google then using a background eraser tool to crop out what I want from the image. I don’t have photoshop.
@ShaneAshleyA,
You dont necessarilly need Photoshop per se, but you do need a decent graphics editor. So when you download a hand, you’ll need to add space to the bottom of the image so that the center pivot point of the hand ends up at the rotating center of the image.
Thank you, jimmycheung! This has helped me too. Your information was the one thing I needed to get my custom hands finally (almost) working correctly.
Edit: I spoke too soon. Now when I upload my hands to Creator, it places them on the watch face’s center point at the middle of the hands rather than at the end – along with the Align editor.
Resizing or cropping them in my graphics program or in Creator’s editor didn’t help. I was not able to find more instructions on this. Is there any chance there will be a video tutorial on using custom hands in the future?
Hi @Linlay,
I think your issue is still the same problem. When you upload your own images for hands, the rotation is ALWAYS from the center of the image (left image below).
You’ll need to add some dead space to the heel-side of the image so that the the point you want to rotate from ends up dead-center.
If you re-look at Jimmy’s image, you can see that his point of rotation is in the center of the image vertically, then there’s a ton of empty space below the center point.
Thank you so much. When I used Jimmy’s template the first time around, I used a size of 900X900 thinking that would be the same as the face size. My center point was the same as on Jimmy’s template. However, now that I’ve seen this I’m thinking that I should have left the space under the image instead of cropping it before saving. I’ll work on it again tomorrow when my brain is more rested.
I am determined to get this right! Many thanks for your help!
just a follow-up to let you know that I had success on the first try after referring to these additional instructions. Apparently it was my cropping the hand images in my previous attempts that was my mistake.
If you don’t have the ability to install a paint program, not your computer for example, you can also find online resources. I often use https://pixlr.com/editor/
