Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Procreate Cut/Copy/Paste Problem Resolved

I was excited when Procreate added a cut/copy/paste feature to their iPad app. It's one of my favorite apps and it is my favorite art app. To my dismay, the feature worked intermittently.

Each update I would try it again to no avail. I have a 3rd Gen non-jailbroken 32GB iOS 6 & 7 iPad and with every version of Procreate that had the cut/copy/paste feature through version 2.0 this feature would not work consistently. I read all the posts on it trying the suggestions.

This morning I figured it out. Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom was enabled. Disabling it, now Procreate's cut/copy/paste works consistently.

So it seems like the OS is absorbing the 3-finger drag gesture even though that functionality does not come into play until after the 3-finger double-tap zooms in. As I mentioned, when zoom is enabled, the cut/copy/paste only occasionally works.  I don't use this feature in Procreate but I do use it sometimes with other apps.

I don't want to clutter up Procreate's interface since it appears most folks don't have zoom enabled, but if there were a button that would invoke the cut/copy/paste dialog, that would be great.  Maybe one that appeared when there was a selection above the + (plus sign)   :-)

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

My first (written) Blender tutorial


http://www.raywenderlich.com/52804/beginning-blender-tutorial-animating-rendering-mushroom

I've created 8 full-length Blender video tutorials, my most recent being A Blender Game Character, and 62 episodes of Bits of Blender. Now my first written (not video) Blender tutorial is on RayWenderlich.com. The site features iOS and game tutorials.

My article builds upon the introductory article by Vicki Wenderlich where she shows you the basics of modeling in Blender. In mine, I show how to rig, skin, animate, and render the mushroom. These articles are oriented at newcomers to Blender and take you step-by-step through the process.  #b3d

Monday, November 18, 2013

Bits of Blender #62 - Stenciling



In this Bit, Richard and I show you how to use the stencil feature of Blender.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Bits of Blender #61 - Extruding Along a Path with Tapering



Richard and I have a new Bit out. We show how to use tapering when extruding along a path and our technique of keeping the taper object in line with the path that has the extrusion.

This is our first Bit in a long time. In this one you can tell we're having fun, especially towards the end. I hope you enjoy it!

8 years of Blender

November 7th marked the 8th anniversary of downloading Blender with the following email to a friend of mine.
This is interesting:
http://www.blender.org/
Technically, I became aware of Blender a couple years earlier than that when I came across the first edition of the book The Blender GameKit at my local Barnes & Noble. This email was in response to finding it free to download (which I did). You might say the last 8 years has been a Ton of fun! 

Tuesday, November 05, 2013

A Blender Game Character




On Wednesday, November 6th 2013 CartoonSmart.com is releasing a new course A Blender Game Character by John R. Nyquist, BFCT (me!). The goal of this 7.5 hour course is to show you how to create an animated character and then render out sprites. In this course you'll model, texture, rig, animate, and render out images in an iterative fashion. The course is downloadable in Quicktime format and you'll also get a coupon to stream it via Udemy.com.


A Blender Game Character is taught in real-time, no accelerated video (so a 10 minute lecture really is 10 minutes of work). You'll see my workflow as we develop this character from scratch and how Blender supports iterating over the creation of a character, even when in different phases of its development.

This course is intended for folks with some Blender experience (not complete newcomers). If you are comfortable with my previous course A Blender Quickstart (free to stream from Udemy), you will be okay (but maybe challenged). As a bonus, it includes the downloadable files for the 1.5 hour A Blender Quickstart.

For the month of November you can get A Blender Game Character for $20 (which is a 50% discount) at http://www.payloadz.com/go/jump?id=2398009&aff_id=3465194

Enjoy! :-)

Monday, November 04, 2013

Over 1,000 Students


This weekend A Blender Quickstart passed the 1,000 student mark! A Blender Quickstart is my free course on Udemy that gives you a quick tour (about 1.5 hours) of some of Blender's major features by building an animated pencil (with bite marks).

So far we've had one live session as well, it was great to meet some students in person (via Google Hangout). Many thanks to all the students who've taken this course!