Next up, Super Cheap Royalty Free Vector Art

Continuing our week of new stuff, here’s another first for CartoonSmart: A HUGE collection of royalty free vector art. We’re calling this the Props, Parts and Gadgets Collection and it has 500 pieces of art you can use anywhere, commercial or personal projects. And for a brief moment in time, all this will be priced at just $10. If you’re familiar with other vector clip art sites, $10 usually buys you one or two pieces of art and the licensing isn’t always as kind.

This collection has every piece in .ai (Adobe Illustrator) format, as well as Flash files of the artwork.

These were all made by Brian Zaikowski which you all might recognize from past blog articles featuring his work at DementedDenizens.com

New Isometric Pixel Art Tutorial!

Alrighty, a CartoonSmart first! A real isometric pixel art tutorial. And I wish I could say I birthed this one into the digital world, but all I did was tell the instructor, René Hernández, to do the thing he does best. Immediately below is a link to check out the tutorial details and I also want to show off  some of his portfolio work below.

And I’m doing something a little different this end o’ month, I’ve got 3 other things coming out this week, so I’ll blog about one or two a day, then announce it all again in the usual new-stuff newsletter. Other things ahead are, more Toon Boom Character Packs (Zombies!), another of Tibi’s amazing templates, and a massive package of royalty free vector art pack (its got over 500 pieces and it won’t break the bank)!

Below are some pieces from Rene’s portfolio at PixelFreak.com , I think you can see why I called in a specialist!

Tapping into Gestures on Adobe TV

Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Its a fun time to be a Flash developer. Actually its just a fun time to be alive in general.  I said this yesterday, but I’ll say it again, I’m fully onboard now with my next project and  tutorial being Flash & Android related, or Flash and any mobile device (iOs included now). And look what Adobe posts on their site. A nice 8 minute video talking about pinching, zooming, swiping, etc, with Flash CS5. Click the pic to get there….

Big Toon Boom Discounts Tomorrow Only

Animate Pro is $999 and Animate Reg is $299. Just sayin’ is all.

Also because I want to share this but not create another post, here’s a good freelance comic for ya’ll. Some of you won’t find it funny at all though. Too real….

Nope, I’m not dead, here’s what I’ve been working on.

Alright I think I can finally pull myself away from this project. I’m mere hours away from submitting this app to Apple, and I recorded some of the gameplay below. This has been an immensely fun project overall, but like all good things, they get annoying after a while. I’m just ready to have something else open on my desktop.

So hot or not? I’ll probably set the price around $3. So for only 12 quarters, I’d say thats worth it. And actually I’ve got a little more work to do to make a Lite version which will be free. With an in-app purchase of course.

And for the record, my next app will definitely be made using Flash so I can dabble in the less roided-up Android market.

Adobe teams up with CTU to make crispy images

So easily my biggest movie and TV complaint is when the techie guy zooms in on a photo or video, it gets all pixellated, and then someone else in the room is like “can you clean that up”. The techie pushes a classic arcade-style button under his desk, and magically its a crystal clear image. For years the show 24 was easily the biggest offender, and if I remember right, in a later season they even mocked themselves some in an episode where they couldn’t clean up the image. I guess my handwritten complaint letters to the producers were read after all. Your own blood makes a good ink by the way.

But now thanks to Adobe, some fiction can be more believable if you can believe the image was shot with one of these cameras in the video below.

It doesn’t pay off much until the very end when you see a hint of what’s possible. Up till then it looks like a fly eye view of the image, which I guess is the future of photography. Emphasis on “future”, I don’t want to see any TV shows where a liqour store security camera just happens to use some new million dollar lens.

And WordPress please, I know how to spell liqour , don’t underline that in red.

8Bits Animation

If you haven’t already seen this, its about time. Its quite impressive!

Copying / importing from one Toon Boom Animate Project to another

Below is a relatively short lesson for our Toon Boom Animate crowd. Justin Cook made this for you guys because copying artwork with your bone structure intact directly from one Animate project file to another isn’t possible with a simple cut and paste, but  this video will explain why that is and what to do instead. Basically you’ll be creating Templates for your Animate Library out of the artwork you want to reuse in other projects…

Cool concept art.

The geek in me can’t resist showing this off, and I didn’t even watch Voltron as a kid. I think I was more into GoBots. The toys were so much easier to change forms. There gorgeous pieces were done by Andree Wallin, check out his DeviantArt gallery for more. And click the pics below to supersize ‘em.

Zombie Bods Preview

Here’s a preview of our upcoming Zombie Bods Character Pack for Toon Boom Animate and Animate Pro…

Check out the body substitutions in particular. Yummm…. And for those of you just stumbling onto this blog, we’ve already got an Office Bods template pack available here.