3Pic - What? When? How?

Ever since Aston 1.92 was released and 3pic format introduced many Aston themers seems to have problem with skinning taskbars applying them. I personally was thrilled with that feature and have been using it from the day one. What is the big issue with 3pics ? Before 3pic we could not mimic Windows XP (now Vista) taskbar like behavior. I said mimic and I stick to that :)
So let me break it down and show you how it is easy to use and create taskbars that use 3pic file format. First of all if you didn't know 3pic is a zip file with changed extention so you can easily view (extract, handle...) the content of any 3pic file with any zip supporting application. Yes 3pic is a zip archive that can contain from one to up to six bmp or png files. The important thing are the names of those files. You must give exact name to every element but we'll come to that soon. Now have a look at the image below.
This is example from my Silver Surfer theme. Ok once I have finished work on empty taskbar I started to work on taskbars for other states (active, inactive and minimized).

For me the best way to make taskbars for other states is to use empty taskbar as a starting point. Ok you take your empty taskbar and work on top of it. I like to work with an larger image that way I have nice overview on how it will all look once it is done. In general I think that the best way to work on a theme is to work on large canvas where you can place all the elements. This way you really see how it will all turn out. When your done you can chop it down and put it all together. Have a look at the image below. It is active taskbar from Silver Surfer theme. Once I was satisfied with its look I chop it to segments. Left segment (Left.bmp), central segment (Tiled.bmp) and the right segment (Right.bmp). When it was chopped to those 3 segments I just packed it in a single zip file. Don't pack folders just files. And changed extention from zip to 3pic (from TaskActi.zip to TaskActi.3pic). That is all.

It is very important to give those segments right file names. You have several options:
left.* - the left flank in BMP or PNG format
right.* - same for the right flank
tiled.* - the centered tiled part
stretch.*- the centered stretched part (You cannot use both tiled and stretch within the same 3pic you decide winch one is better for you)
glass-left.png - the left glass skin (32 bit PNG! although you're free to play with it)
glass-right.png - the right glass
glass-tiled.png - the center part glass
(Taken from official skinning tutorial)

Note that you can make wonders with glass. Glass segments go over all the others segments (even text on task bar) so you can achieve very cool effects. Although it is not that often used. But note that you cannot use glass-right if you don't have the actual right segment. File names are not case sensitive so it is the same if you use file RiGht.bmp and right.bmp For a cool task bar I recommend use of minimum 3 segments (Left, Right, Tiled). But 3pics can be used for other skins as well achieving interesting effects. (Taskbarclock, tray skin, search plugin skin, main menu elements...).
Have a look at this solution for tray skin from HolyEve 2008 theme.

What we have here is a 3pic file for tray skin that has 2 segments (Left.bmp and Tiled.bmp) and a clock that has only one segment (Tiled.bmp). Since Tiled.bmp from trayskin.3pic is the same as from the taskclock it all looks nicely joined together. Like I said I recommend use of 3 segments for taskbars (active, inactive and minimized) but you can feel free to experiment with less or more.
So go ahead :)