Motionworks put up a ‘mysterious’ tease for the ongoing training series Making It Look Great. Looks like this one will, again, be a Cinema 4D title and judging by the little guy peering from behind the logo that it will be hosted by Rob Redman of Pariah Studios. Can’t wait!
The good folks over at LostAndTaken.com have released another batch of free textures. There are fourteen high resolution slate textures available for free download. Many of them simply look like cave wall type stuff, but there’s a few really nice subtle textures and a few grungey ones as well. Great for Photoshop and After Effects. Go get ‘em!
Rob Garrett posted part one of his Cinema 4D MoGraph Fracture Object tutorial. This is really good stuff. If you like this be sure to check out his 8-part tutorial on parenting in Cinema 4D at his Vimeo page. Don’t get turned off by the title, this series has it all: metaballs, texturing, C4D/AE integration and more.
Big Mike Design posted a nice tutorial showing how you can extrude text using Sweep NURBS in Cinema 4D. Check out Big Mike’s other videos on Vimeo.
A few days ago a new Cinema 4D training title appeared on Lynda.com. Cinema 4D: Designing a Promo by Rob Garrott from the Bending Pixels website. This title goes through the creation of a promo for a fictional shark series. It covers how to use C4D, After Effects and Illustrator to make an awesome underwater promo complete with 3D sharks which he shows you how to make from scratch. It also covers everything from the creative brief, making animatics and all that agency stuff you may not be privy to if you’re just starting out. Free samples can be seen at Lynda.com. Or you can get a quick peek at the result right here:
QUICKIE: No further need to pull out the pen and tablet to jot down a hexidecimal from Photoshop‘s Info or Color Panel. Photoshop CS5 has a nice new trick hiding in the Color Panel’s flyout menu. Selecting “Copy Color’s Hex Code” will send the active color’s numbers to your clipboard. Now when you flip back to Dreamweaver you can just paste that hex code into your code. Nice.
Flash CS4 and CS5 come with the nifty Motion Editor which makes it a little bit more like After Effects. It lets you apply preset ease curves as well as create your own custom curves. It also comes with a handful of preset curves that can make something ease in, ease out, bounce, and move back and forth like a Cylon’s eye. One thing it does not have, though, is the ‘easy ease‘ curve which is so easy to get in After Effects.
Center points are selectable
I was making a mess of newspaper ads (as in a lot of them, not messy ones (debatable)) just now when I again encountered some annoying behavior that’s plagued me the three years I’ve been using AI. I would select an object or objects that happen to be within a larger path. In this case that means some type inside of an ad border with no fill. Selecting the text would sometimes also select the border, even though my marquee selection didn’t touch the border; even though the border had no fill. I finally realized that I was also selecting the Center Point of the border which the type I was targeting just happened to be over. The center point is selectable! But there’s no anchor there, right? Just goes to show that to truly get the most out of Illustrator you need to really dig in and understand how it thinks. It’s often not doing what you think it is, or should. Snap to Point is another good example. I just found out from watching an episode of Fridays with Mordy (which is live right now. Damn.) that Snap to Point doesn’t mean any point on your selected path will snap to another object’s point when you move it. Instead it means that the “point” where you grab an object with your cursor will snap to another object’s anchor point when you near it with your cursor. Anyway, gotta get back to work.
Here’s the latest from the Gorilla: How to use the Tracer Object in Cinema 4D.
Or watch it on Nick’s site: greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-use-the-tracer-object-in-cinema-4d/
You can copy an object from Illustrator and paste it into Photoshop as a Smart Object. I often used this feature sparingly because I never really understood what was happening under the hood. The tutorials I’ve seen that describe the process made no effort to explain what was really happening. I’ve since poked around with it and figured it all out. Now I love Smart Objects.
So here’s what’s really going on with smart objects: