Graphic and 3D design for cross-media publishing. This entails creating illustrations and imagery for printed publications as well as the web, and mobile devices. The section mainly discusses software that helps with the design process.
Maya 6 was available for Mac OS X in the Complete version. This meant you could everything, except create fur, hair, fluids, cloth, and matchmoving scenes. Maya 6.0.1 is available in Unlimited version, which means you can spend a small fortune and have access to all this creative power on a Mac OS X machine.
Once every while a book is published that makes your jaw drop. Well, this is such a book. Amazing which astonishing effects you can achieve by combining Maya and Photoshop. And the beauty of this Sybex publication is that it will actually teach you how to get there.
eRain’s Swift 3D is a 3D application with a twist: it has the not unimportant ambition to be simple and powerful at the same time. 3D simple and powerful? Up to version 2, Swift was simple enough, but lacked much of the power of packages as Carrara. Then came version 3; the power began to show through with that version. With version 4, the current generation of the program, Swift 3D has become quite a powerful 3D application for people seeking to create 3D scenes that can easily be exported to Flash and raster image formats.
iMap 3.0 is a program that allows cartographers and designers to create maps with information imported from a tab-delimited text file. iMap is a great tool for Keynote users, cartographers, atlas designers, and marketing people.
Wacom released its Intuos 3 graphic tablet a few weeks ago. The Intuos 3 is Wacom’s most elegant tablet up to date. It’s also their best. The tablet has touch strips, tablet keys and the well-know active surface. There is little to dislike about the Intuos 3.
Painter is an artist’s delight: it has everything (and more) that you would find in an artist’s studio. Painter IX builds further on this foundation and adds many welcome enhancements and features. Corel Painter IX is the art application of choice for thos who want an abundance of options. For those who want only the strictest minimum (perhaps not to be distracted...), Alias SketchBook Pro is a better choice.
e-on Software is a developer of 3D applications like Vue d’Esprit. Vue 4 Professional is the company’s flagship product. Vue 4 Pro is a 3D terrain builder and one of the features that makes this a professional program is its capabilities in terms of file exchangeability with other industry-standard 3D programs like Maya, Lightwave, etc. Another high-end feature of this program is its rendering engine. The engine is capable of very high quality rendered scenes, with one Power Mac or PC running long hours before the result can be seen (in highest quality mode). To speed things up, e-on delivers its own render network with the application.
Barcode applications exist in many flavours and versions. Excellent barcode applications for Mac OS X include Intelli Innovations’ products and Barcode Toolbox plug-in for Illustrator. But Barcode Generator from Wolf Software is an especially likeable barcode creation tool.
Portfolio Server 7 is the server edition of Extensis’ Digital Asset Management tool, Portfolio. The server application is a Mac OS X background process. The server comes with a Launch program, but managing the server, adding catalogues, and performing maintenance is all done from the client application. Although Portfolio Server 7 is a powerful DAM tool, I found it requires careful thinking about workflow efficiency, network load, and architecture.
When I first saw the Alias’ SketchBook Pro 1.1 reviewer’s guide, I immediately thought about Painter 8. SketchBook Pro is not really a sketchbook at all. It is a full sketch and paint application that will only be attractive to people owning a graphics tablet, a Wacom Cintiq, or a Tablet PC. SketchBook Pro is used by architects, industrial designers, game designers, and digital artists at large. It may not offer the same preset capabilities Painter 8 has to offer, but it delivers exactly what a designer needs.
Alias released Maya 6 just a couple of weeks ago. Maya 6 is an important upgrade with many new and improved features. Examples of these important features include the newly designed non-linear Trax editor, new scene segmentation and file referencing features and support for more file formats, including PNG and DDS.
Maya 6 comes in two flavours as usual: Maya Complete which is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, and Maya Unlimited which is available for IRIX, Linux, and Windows. The Ultimate version still not being available for Mac OS X is somewhat incomprehensible given the fact that Panther now runs on one of the fastest hardware platforms (Power Mac G5), but is a fact of life.
The idea is great: write a plug-in to draw barcodes in Illustrator, a program that is often used for designing package material. But the idea can even be better: why not build a plug-in that will only allow for correct barcodes to be created? That’s what Yin4Yang did with Barcode Toolbox.
For those of us who don’t know the barcode symbologies’ rules with regards to number of characters, type of characters allowed, etc, Barcode Toolbox may seem like an awkward program to use. For the rest of us, this is professional barcoding at its best.
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