Tips & Tricks – Illustrator Appearance panel and more

Sorry about the lapse in my posting but things have been busy… and busy is good. And now for some cool illustrator stuff.

One line + Appearance Panel = This

Adobe has a series of live sessions called Ask a CS Evangelist. These sessions are pretty cool because you log in to an Adobe Connect session where you can see the presenter’s desktop, chat with other viewers, answer poll questions, and more. Very keen! They also post up recorded versions of the sessions so you can view them later. The latest installment was Illustrator Appearance Panel with Rufus Deuchler. He went over some very cool techniques involving the interesting ways you can use the appearance panel to create many layers from one object. He made some very cool graphics using a single line with multiple tweeks to the appearance of said object. I had no idea! Also, at about 56 minutes in, he explains the Shape Builder Tool (CS5 only?). This is a very cool alternative to constantly using the Pathfinder tools. It may take some getting used to, but it seems like a quick way to accomplish complicated tasks involving different shapes.

See the recorded session for yourself here, and follow Adobe on facebook to keep up to date on other sessions or check out old ones. Keep in mind they have a bunch of different pages for their different products, but also one for CS which tends to contain them all. Enjoy!

You got FCP in my Maya 2k11!

Did you know you could integrate your FCP files into your Maya scene? I certainly did not. This vid was sent to me by a coworker and I think it will easily work itself into my permanent work flow. Basically you can set up clips in a sequence in FCP and bring it into Maya. Maya will then translate that into multiple cameras and image planes for an easy pre-viz setup. Yall know any other cool things like this?

Tips & Tricks – AE hidden gems

I found this post on the After Effects Facebook page. If you are an AE user I highly recommend liking them on Facebook. I find a good amount of useful information through that.

This page is just a preview of an upcoming book, but I did learn a few small things. Hopefully the book will be even more useful.

This is one I did not know about, but will be sure to use many times in the future….

Maximize Frame

To expand the current panel or frame to fill the entire Application window, press ~ (the tilde key). This is useful for quickly expanding the Timeline when you are using the Graph Editor, or whenever you want a detailed view of a panel. Press ~ again to return to your previous arrangement.