I just heard from Calvin, a reader of my iOS Game Programming with Xcode and Cocos2d book that after cracking the whip on himself to read the entire thing, he developed the Cupcake Kid which is now in the App Store. Click the pic to visit it in the store now. Good job Calvin, and thanks for sharing!
Back from the grave (actually just back from getting his Masters) is one of CartoonSmart’s first instructor’s besides yours truly. Manuel D’Macedo has returned relatively unscathed from years of being immersed in the Maya environment, and the teacher turned student turned back to teacher is back in the CartoonSmart fold.
To welcome his return, and to introduce as many of you as possible to Maya and 3D design, I’m setting the price of this nearly 3 hour lesson to either $0.99 (the “I’m Broke” Level), $4.99 (the “I Can Meet You Halfway” Level”) or $9.99 (the “I Fully Support More 3D Lessons” Level). And don’t worry, I won’t secretly be judging any orders that come in for 99 cents. I’m just excited to offer something new, and I’d like as many new students as possible here.
This Introduction to Maya video series will be housed under CartoonSmart’s ever growing list of sister-domains “CartoonSmart3d.com“. Actually, I’ve had that domain for probably 10 years now, so its nice to finally use it.
Thanks for listening!
You can add the Listeners array to your Story Tellers kit to “listen” for certain events. When a completion event occurs, you can trigger something to happen. The kit currently supports listening for these events…
PairingCompleted - Listen for a certain number of base and puzzle/sticker pieces to be paired together. For example, once 12 pieces are put in place, you can shoot off fireworks and add an image saying “Go to Next Page” .
TouchCountByTag – Listen for a specific number of touches on a group of ImageOverlays. These images don’t have to look the same, they simply need to share the same Tag property. ImageOverlays all have Tag property, which up till now has mostly been ignored in this documentation. For example, touching any image 5 times with the Tag set 999, could automatically go to the next page.
RemovalOfImagesByTag - Similar to the previous listener, you can listen for the removal of images with a specific Tag number. For example, removing 10 images with the Tag set to 888, could show a video.
If you are updating your kit from version 1.4 to 1.5, all you need to do is copy and paste what’s in Page.h and Page.m to your copy of the kit. And then to add a listener, you can copy and paste the Listeners array from the BookSetup.plist (the main property list).
The documentation for the kit now has a fancy Listeners section added to it. Enjoy…
The Great Paris Christou is back! This outing he’s tackling dozens of animals in his aptly named course, How to Draw Cartoon Animals. If you purchase now, you’ll also got a $5 discount coupon off your next CartoonSmart tutorial (the code is in a text document along with your download links to the movie files)
As it says above, he’s traveling to 5 different environments for this course. House Pets, The Farm, The Forest, The Jungle and the Sea. Like his past lessons, Paris illustrates using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 6, but you can follow along with any artistic software on your desktop, pencil and paper, or using an app on your iPad.
Side note: This course inspired me to buy a stylus for my iPad. I got this one by Trent off Amazon. I had one in the past with a very rubbery tip, it was “okay”, but this new one is incredible. It has some kind of fabric tip that makes it very smooth to draw with. So now I have one more thing distracting me from actually watching the television: sketching caricatures constantly during shows. So now I can draw the people on Dateline, that I may or may not utterly despise. I let the jury decide.
I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say this kit is “ready to make your dreams come true”, because I fell asleep last night brainstorming ideas for a sample children’s book to write and that led to some wild dreams. One of the ideas I had, which this kit supports, is reading a book from the bottom up, or top down. Most countries read a book from left to right, and the standard front to back style. But with this kit, you could make a book that begins at the bottom of a really tall building and seamlessly goes upward with each page. Art-wise the book could feel like one giant illustration was drawn that the reader is ascending. Or reverse that, and start on the surface of the sea and descend downwards to the bottom of the ocean. So anyway, feel free to use those ideas yourself.
So what else is so great about this kit? Well, it truly requires ZERO programming. This is an Xcode project but as far as Cocos2d or Objective-C is concerned, you are off the hook. The classes in the starter kit are folded up nicely and tucked away so you never have to worry about them (you are welcome to tinker though if you want).
Everything is built through a Property List file, which you can see a small snippet of at the sales page. It’s essentially like a basic spreadsheet. You just fill in values for things like, the image name to show, the time to show it, is it animated, how many frames animate, etc. Adding stuff to the app is a little like answering basic questions each time. And the same is true for adding interactivity.
If you want to read more, you can below. I’ll paste in the same text that’s over at the sales page, but I’d rather you jump from the blog over to their now. There’s some great pictures of the kit, as well as links to ALL the documentation for free. You can watch a video demo, and download either an iBook or PDF detailing the entire kit. Yes, I went all-out this time and made some really polished documentation!.
Check it out: The iOS Story Tellers Starter Kit.
- Unlimited layers of images and scrolling backgrounds. Images can have their own animated transitions onto the page, like fades, movements, rotations or scaling.
- Particle systems, premade systems like snow, fire, smoke, fireworks, suns, can all be customized to create your own FX (the full list is in the documentation).
- Interactivity, any image can be touched to interact with other images, trigger sounds, go to URL’s, and a lot more!
- Drag image or particles, set objects to follow the user’s touch. This creates some very cool possibilities with particles.
- Any image can be animated with as little as 1 frame or hundreds. Animations can be looped and played / stopped through interactions. Looping animations can also play sounds.
- Lots of page transition options, the popular page flip effect isn’t your only option. Others include sliding right, left, top, bottom, clockwise, and more (the full list is in the documentation). The Kit also supports Hebrew or Arabic style books to simulate reading back to front.
- Run-on / continuous pages, for example one page can seemlessly slide into another page, creating the illusion of one really long piece of art. Transitions can slide up or down too, so you could create a really tall book as well. You could even include 4 directional arrows to navigate up, down, left or right!
- Puzzle or Sticker Pages, with drag-n-lock-to a location functionality. One image acts as a “sticker” or puzzle piece, that snaps to a “base” image inheriting it’s size, location and rotation.
- Quizzes, tap the right answer to proceed to the next page.
- Choose Your Own Adventure style reading, give readers multiple paths through your book. Essentially you can create multiple books in one book by just jumping around to different pages or chapter beginnings.
- Sound Machines, create a virtual beat box, or a soothing sound machine using the looping background audio properties
- Page Narration, include a narration track on each page. Images can also trigger sound files to play, so narration could be included at any time.
- Randomness, image or particles can appear at random locations. For example, a single button could be pressed to spawn twinkling stars randomly in the night sky.
- Movements, Rotations, Scaling, Fading, & Flipping are all built in properties for each image. Set a start and finish value for each transformation (which can also be reversed and looped).
- Smash things, create images that explode when pressed and make a funny noise. Kids love these apps.
- Add back stuff, repopulate the page with images that have already been seen & removed by simply using the same property list data again to add back the image.
- Twitter, an image can open a Tweet window with an auto-filled in message.
- Easy Reorganizing, simply drag and drop pages in the property list to change the book order.
- Custom Index, create an index that goes to any page of your book. Any image can jump to any page of the book.
- “Special” Pages, not every page has to be included in the primary reading order of the book. You might want a page that is only seen when requested. For example, you could include a map of the setting of your book.
- Landscape or Portrait, your choice.
- In-App Purchase ready, your book can be free, paid or in-app purchasable. There’s nothing to change code-wise, just a little extra setup in iTunes Connect if you want to include an in-app purchase (details are in the documentation for adding the Buy Book and Restore Purchases button).
The Story Tellers iOS Starter Kit was made to help you create a highly immersive environment for whatever tale you want to tell. The App Store has an amazing number of users who are more than willing to listen to a well-told story (and pay for a good one). The best ones have sounds, animations, special FX and interactivity. And that’s not just an opinion, it is also what Apple wants to see from apps that are being submitted as “Books” to their store. A simpler, more regular book would be better off distributed in the iBookstore.
This kit is made with that distinction in mind. You are going to learn how to customize your story book app with incredible features making it submittable to the Apple Store as an App in the “Books” category, using the Xcode project, documentation videos, and free setup guides in either iBook or PDF format.
Don’t worry, it won’t take much work beyond supplying some fantastic creative assets on your end, and it won’t involve ANY programming!
Happy 2013 Everyone!
Yesterday I mailed this same announcement out to the CartoonSmart newsletter base, and hopefully I’ll catch a few of the same readers again with a couple small corrections/clarifications.
But first, I created a possibly finished, possibly unfinished iBook/PDF Book which is 100% free right now. It’s 70 pages of instruction and depending on which version you download, either contains or links to over 2 hours of video tutorials on a start-to-finish Motion Posters project in Flash CS6. Normally this is the type of thing CartoonSmart would sell since I do have to justify spending my time on something that pays a few bills. Except, I want this new format of Part-Book, Part Video to have a bit more “reach” than a handful of buyers so I’m making this totally free for now. There’s no catch, nothing to sign up for. No buy-up option or in-app purchase inside of the book as it is now.
When I write a few more chapters in this How to Fake Great Animation series , I might add them to this book OR maybe upload it to the iBookstore as is and keep it free as an intro to a longer series. I haven’t decided. If anyone I emailed yesterday was confused by whether or not this was a free finished book or free preview of something longer, I want to clarify that I’m honestly undecided. But regardless, its still free. And if you like it, and want to buy more of the same, you simply can’t right now because thats all there is for now. Sorry for the confusion though.
Also I had no idea Firefox didn’t support mp4 files. Whoops. I spent quite some time last night reading up the history on that. And royalty fees the browsers will one day pay to use mp4. And HTML5 video, and all sorts of techie drama. So anyway, for anyone reading the PDF version of the book and clicking to watch the example videos online, there’s now two options available: .mp4 and .mov. If you’e using Firefox, the first option won’t work. At least for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, if you read all this, thanks! If not, here’s the important part: check out this new tutorial and format! I’m excited about it, so I hope you are too!
CartoonSmart student, Nipin has returned from the depths of the ocean to present his War of the Caribbean Pirates app. And he’s got 20 promo codes for free downloads of this wave attack style game (no pun intended). Check out some screenshots first though. Good work, Nipin!
If you all remember how this works, its just a grab bag of codes. Pick one and if it doesn’t work, try another….
KJAKR37JRPXW
X4R4J6KR7PEY
9J3K4HJ3YNLA
J7XNRYK66E7E
A7T6E7YF4KFT
NWW4WW9HYHTY
MPP4AYKRKTLP
JFWRJKMAKL3W
P6HXKWWXNK6F
9ARHN973RRE3
LPLYJWNJWFN4
K4K6WXL6ELFP
WWMHFNEX3LAP
MWL4HF3MMTNL
WWTY6MPKFHKE
J9FNH4PF6ANX
JRKKLTLERA49
FET7T7WJ33Y3
3E6WT6XFKYMY
She’s finally ready! My first book! I mean CartoonSmart’s first book. Ah, heck, I am CartoonSmart. The machine and me are one (wait, isn’t that from Iron Man?) =)
If you want more of a preview you can click below, or if you’ve been waiting months upon months for this, here’s the link to it in the iBookstore. The book is 413 pages AND counting. I can add more to this at anytime, and past buyers will get notified in their iBook app that there’s an update. YUP! That’s the future of books, folks. Always update-able! It might not make sense for Stephen King, but for code authors it’s pretty darn perfect.
Also for anyone lucky enough to be using an iPad 3 or newer, the images are Retina display-ready, so they look pretty darn beautiful. Even that fugly green-haired looking punk kid eating onion rings looks polished.
I hope you enjoy it! Oh and the first 4 chapters (122 pages) are FREE! So you can definitely try before you buy.
I saw two new trailers for zombie movies today (World War Z and Warm Bodies), so The Universe must be telling me it’s time to release the Zombies Assembled tutorial! This is 3 hours of Photoshop fun with Justin Cook (our prolific Toon Boom instructor).
AND as an added BONUS! If you purchase this week, we’ll include his recent Adobe Illustrator tutorial on drawing a Cyborg.
For you non-undead, enjoy the weekend!
I gotta tease this tutorial! Justin Cook is busy finishing a new tutorial that we’ll just codename: Zombies Assemble for now.
And available now, Justin has a new 3 Hour Adobe Illustrator Tutorial on How to Draw a Cyborg, which would be a great warm-up to this up and coming course!
