Creative Suite 5.5 Printing Guide

 InDesign  No Responses »
Jun 262011
 

Adobe has just released the Creative Suite 5.5 version of its ongoing Printing Guide. If you haven’t seen it before, this is an extensive document updated for each version of Creative Suite. It explains in detail a myriad of technicalities related to getting your documents to print correctly in a commercial environment. Even if you have read it before it’s always worth reading up on new features and how they affect existing print workflows and for known problems. You may not be aware, for example, that InDesign cannot honour all Photoshop blend modes, which can cause unpredictable problems on output. The printing guide also acts as a great overview to the new features of the various CS apps and as introduction to some of the more difficult workflow concepts such as colour management and transparency flattening. Best of all, it’s free.  Read more...

Adobe Captivate Widgets (part 1)

 Captivate  No Responses »
Jun 242011
 

Recently someone drew my attention, through a comment on one of my posts, to a very useful Captivate Widget that enables you to associate actions with a mouseover event for any object.  Inspired by this, I thought it might be a good time to discuss Widgets in general: what they are, and how they can help you with your Captivate development.

A Widget is a piece of software code that extends the normal functionality of Adobe Captivate.  It is typically written by a Flash developer using Adobe Flash, and supplied to the Captivate author as a .swf file. If there is any new feature of Captivate that you require (for example, a text caption with some special behaviour, or a new type of quiz question) it is possible that it could be provided by a Widget.  Read more...

Modelling a vehicle within Blender – final result

 Blender  No Responses »
Jun 222011
 

I am a big fan of the web site blendercookie.com, and they recently came out with a lovely tutorial series by Jonathan Williamson (using artwork from David Revoy), the Vehicle Modelling Series.

There are over 15 hours of movies, taking you through the process of modelling a Gyrocopter, from a series of pictures. It took we a while to go through all the videos, but it was well worth it. Here is a still of my final result…

Final gyrocoptor render

Final gyrocoptor render  Read more...

Balance text columns with InDesign CS5

 InDesign  1 Response »
Jun 162011
 

A question on a recent training course reminded me of InDesign’s Balance Columns feature which is easily overlooked.

If you’re the kind of person who can’t stand unbalanced text you’ll recall it used to take a fair bit of manual adjustment to make columns line up evenly.

Screenshot of unbalanced text columns in InDesign

Unbalanced text columns

In CS 5, the Balance Columns checkbox was added to the Text Frame Options dialogue box.

The feature works only on multi-column text frames. Select the frame and got to Object> Text Frame Options (ctrl/cmd+B).

Screenshot of InDesign's balance columns option

Columns are balanced  Read more...

Illustrator and Smart Objects

 Illustrator  No Responses »
Jun 142011
 

Smart Objects come highly recommended for anyone using Illustrator and Photoshop in conjunction as it enables users to speed up their workflow significantly.

Smart Objects and Illustrator go hand in hand when transferring your brilliant vector artwork to Photoshop. This very useful featured can be covered in three simple steps: Copy, Paste, Position.

Copy: I have just finished this piece of vector work in Illustrator and now want it in Photoshop, ideally fully editable. To do this I select all of the lines and hit Cmd/Ctrl + C for copy.

 Read more...

 Posted by on June 14, 2011

Latest Blender 2.5 tutorials and DVDs

 Blender  No Responses »
Jun 112011
 

Here is a round-up of some of the latest Blender 2.5 tutorials and DVDs that I have come across. I am slowly going through them, and when I finish them I will upload the final renders and .blend files to share with you, but it will take me a while to get through them all.

In the meantime, here is the list, and below some of them is the current render that I have created after going through the tutorial.

Blenderella (http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=133)

Creating realistic outdoor lighting (http://www.blenderguru.com/how-to-create-realistic-outdoor-lighting/)

Environment still 63

Environment still 63

Blender Cookie Vehicle Modelling Series (http://cgcookie.com/vehicle-series/)  Read more...