Finally, a nice way to export PNG or JPEG from Adobe Illustrator CS4 honoring the artboard

By default, when you export from Adobe Illustrator to other raster graphic format like PNG or JPEG, it will export ALL the graphic elements on the document, including those that are not on the artboard. In most of the case, at least for me, that's not what I want. I want export to honor the artboard area by only exporting those without the artboard boundary.

It turns out that it's something very easy to be done in Adobe Illustrator CS4. All you need to do is check the checkbox "Use Artboards" on the Export Dialog.

By the way, I am working on moving some artwork from Illustrator to PowerPoint, and found out that:

• Illustrator exports PNG as raster, which is not too bad.
• PowerPoint 2007 takes PNG pretty well.
• PowerPoint 2007 does NOT take Illustrator file directly.
• I hate the default way of inserting picture in document. It will automatically put it in the content box. So I have a habit of deleting the title box and content box on a default PowerPoint slide first, and then import the PNG. As long as the PNG document size ratio fit the PowerPoint Slide size ratio, PowerPoint will automatically fit the slide. I found this feature very helpful.
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Gotta do it at least once

This is very critical for me to learn stuff: I GOTTA do what I learned at least once. Merely read or watch the tutorial so something do me simply NO GOOD until I actually do something once.

Enable Viewport Shadows in 3D Studio Max 2010

I was following the tutorial "Introduction to Lighting in 3DS Max" chapter 6, and was
puzzled by the fact that the instructor can turn on the "Enable Viewport Shadows Selected" feature while I couldn't.

After poking around and got some hints from this web page, I found out that i can turn on viewport shadowing by:

1. Right click on the viewport quality (locate at the upper left corner of the viewport.
2. Select menu [Lighting and Shadow][Enable Hardware Shading]

And instantly the shadow map shading start showing up in the viewport.

Freeze but not trun in gary in 3D Studio Max

After trying to get into 3D model and animation, I realized that there are 2 things that is very critical whenever you try to get into a 3D application: navigation and organizing. In fact I found them more important then model, or learning all the crazy tricks. If you don't understand how to EFFECTIVELY (not use barely understand) navigate and organize your 3D world, you will be in great frustration and eventually give up, just like I did several times before.

I got the navigation on 3D Studio Max pretty much nailed down, except that I found that the camera thing kind of hard to get used to. The problem I had, though, was that I had problem locking some object while manipulating other objects. It turns out that in 3D Studio Max they don't call it Lock, but instead they call that feature "Freeze". Also, you need to make sure that the "Show Frozeb in Gray" if you want the frozen object to show as usual. For instance, I am playing with lighting now and definitely need to object to show in their regular way.

Also, you may need to get yourself very familiar with the "Select From Scene" listbox and "Manage Layer ..." list box. These 2 listboxes allows you to access object even when they are frozon, hidden and such. Familiar with these 2 boxes save you a lot of headache down the road.

Balloon overlap tricks for Manga Studio 4 EX

I was puzzled by the fact that in the Manga Studio 4 EX quick start document, it showed that 2 overlapped balloon merged into one. However, the feature was not documented in the documentation. Luckily some good souls on the Net figured it out and shared it. Here's the excerpt from GreenLaw:

To do this in MS 4 you must first create a new layer by clicking the New Layer button in the Layers window. Make sure you use the New Layer command and not the New Folder Layer command. When the dialog appears, select Text Folder as your layer type, and then click OK. You can then drag your text balloon layers into this folder. When you collapse this folder, overlapping balloons will appear 'merged'.

Thanks, GreenLaw!

Strange problem with Extrude in Maya 2009

I had a strange problem using Extrude in Maya 2009 while following the "Lynda.com Autodesk Maya 2009 Essential Training" movie "0306 Using the Extrude tool". Inside of allowing me to move the gizmo handle in order to move the extrude face, it just get "stuck", and only allow me to rotate amount the surface. Maybe it was some setting that I made before, but I tried and tried and couldn't get it working. Finally I had to close the application and start it again. That seem to solve the problem.

Little big and my fix for Manga Studio 4 EX

Manga Studio 4 EX is such a big improvement for Tablet PC. But I found little annoying problem: everything when I show/hide the pen palletee, the tablet PC will go haywire. My solution: create short cut to zoom in and out the page. Everytime I do zoom in out, the problem get resolved. Strange but at least I found the way.

CSS wasted me 4 hours this morning

It all started when I tried to add an item at the upper corner of my web site. And then it turned into a 3+ hours of diagnostic session.

The problem is the fact that while to page looks OK on Internet Explorer, the page was messed up in Firefox in the way that the rollover button were all behavior incorrectly. After some diagnostic I found out that the margin-top value was messed up on Firefox. After tracking eventually I found out that the way how the float and position (absolute, relative) didn't work out as I expected. On the top of that mess, I employed the trick that allows me to keep the text I styled with image on the page. It's such a mess.

Eventually I got it fixed by using span instead of using div to host the entry. It actually makes more sense for semantic point of view. I think the lesson I learned is that instead of just trial and error and hope that things look correct on the page, I should spend more time to actually understand every single CSS keywords and make sure I understand the implication of using every single one of them.

Remove ruler from Manga Studio EX3

I spent a little while trying to figure out how to remove ruler as I accidentally drew some rectangle rulers. As it turns out all I need is use Object Selectors to select the items and then hit delete button.

Re-branda web site

I was helping out my friend to re-brand her web site. The biggest challenge to me is to untangle all the style that was embedded within the pages in form of online style, layout done using HTML tables, HTML tags that was not closed properly and so on. That is a boring and tedious work, but it has to be done before I can do any real design work .

At that almost took me a whole day of time.

For my friend who tries to repackage other's content and resell it

I don't think reselling web page/site template is that easy. People have higher expectation on sites, and dynamic contents require setting at the server site. If you don't have that kind of knowledge, the user may return your design and ask for refund because they have problem putting them at their site and you can't have resolving the problem. It's less than just pretty static web page these days.

So instead of aim for reselling something for cheap, you really should package it as a total end to end service. In this economic downturn, people are looking for solution that yield revenue directly instead of just a pretty face. Try leverage some existing service like Blogger and FaceBook, telling you client that you can help designing sites that give them a unified message among all these dynamic sites and at the same time providing services to costume (like, for instance, using Twitter to provide service or product delivery status).

That, of course, it much more than just grab some freebie templates and then reselling them. But hey, if it's easy, everyone should have done it already.

Another thing: you may be violating copyright if you just garb stuff online and then resell them, even when those content are free. There are different kind of licensing governing so called free content, like Creative Common or GPL. Make sure you know your right and obligation before you repackage others creation online. You can actually get sued.

Making of photo composition

Last time I create some photoshop work for a poster I worked without writting down what I did. The result: I totally forgot what I did and couldn't replicate the result.

This time I won't make the same mistake.

So here's my challenge, my client gave me a bunch of JPEG files as the source of a photoshop composition being used in a poster. The problem? Most of the files are very poor in quality when using for print. Also the are all in different color tone.

So my plan was trying to "normalize them" by applying a water color filter. I also bumped up the resolution of the composition to 300 dpi so that when the filter got applied, the bitmap will look smooth on the printerd poster.

But then my client told me that all he cared was seeing those photo clear. Damn, so mcuh for doing experiment for him. Well, actually that could be a good thing for me, because the loading, saving and rendering time of applying the filter is so freaking time consuming even on my fast machine. So no filter means much faster load time. Great for me.

But I still need to resolve the color tone problem. Luckily I found a YouTube video with title "Photoshop Tip - Combining Photos & correcting color" (basically it's about using "Curve..." to add color to the photo). I followed the instruction and got some good result. However, there were some photos that I still need to twist a bit. I use Color Balance to twist the color to make it more yellow. And then I use "Brightness/Contrast" to future adjust. The result looks OK from my persepctive. I know I still need to do more exercise to get better on the whole color correction thing, but this is at least a start.

Oh, Adobe Illustrator CS3 crashed on me once today, which totally pissed me off. And it seems like I was not the only one who complain about CS3's stability problem when I serach around the Net.

Importance of documentation

I was disappointed by myself that I couldn't replicate something that I did 2 weeks ago because I forgot to document it down. I better do more documentation.

So that's how I change layer name in Manga Studio Ex

Sometimes to answer of a problem is so obvious that you almost want to chock yourself.

So I was trying to figure out how to change layer name in Manga Studio EX 3. I right clicked on the layer in Layers windows and couldn't find an entry called property. Fustrated, I went to the Net, and eventually find out that there's always a Properties window available. All you need to do is bring it up by pressing [F7]. There you are change the layer name is whatever way to want.

Personally I think 2 things need to be changed in Manga Studio regarding to this issue:

• Add a property menu in right click menu on layer in Layer window.
• Renew Property to "Layer Property"

But then at least I found the answer.

Common mistake when using Toon Boon Studio 4

During my re-learning process, I found out that I made some mistakes here and there when trying to create a cut out animation. So I think I better write down those tidbits cause I may probably make the same mistake next time I pick it up several months later.

• When animating your cut out animation, make sure that either "Tranform" or "Rotate" button are selected. Otherwise the movement you made will be just on the first key-frame.
• Check the preference and make sure that "Create Constant Keyframes" checkbox is OFF, unless you totally don't want the in-between automatically generated for you. After all, you can always set and reset the in-between nature by first selecting the in between area, and then right click to select the segment nature (constant or non-constant)
• Animation only happeneds on the peg. So make sure you set the hirechachy so that everything you want to animate is sitting inside a peg.
• You may wonder why all the parts do not show up on the screen after you have the hireahacy set up. Mostly that's because you are at the "Drawing View". Switch to Camear view and you will see all the parts.
• Save frequently. My Toon Boom Studio 4 still crashes very once in a while.
  

Here's a typical work flow of creating a cut out animation using Toon Boom Studio 4:

• Create a new document. I use 800x 600 camera size
• Go to Exposure Sheet. For each part of your cut out, create a new "drawing" at Frame 1. Remember to name your drawing properly. That makes organizing hireachy much easier.
• Create Peg, put drawing into the peg, with right hireachy. I name peg with "P-" prefix
  
• With "Rotate" selected, select each Peg, and move the pivot to the proper location (make sure indicators are all green.
• Save, before animate anything (that way you have a base to go back to)
• Collpase all hireachy. On the very top Peg, drag the first frame all the way to the final frame. Now the timeline should fill up by a blueline, with all the cutout part.
• Go ahead and animate. But make sure that (1) you select the peg instead of the drawing (easier to be done on the timeline), (2) Make sure either "Rotate" or "Transform" tools are selected (3) Use the solid black square handle to move the rotation.

Finally, try create a static drawing to layout the route of the motion to make sure that it's smooth.

Relearning Toon Boom Studio 4

I opened Toon Boom Studio 4 and tried to do some simple animation, and found out that I already forgot a lot of basica concept of how Toon Boom Studio works. Fortunately I downloaded some tutorial video back then. And those video really helps me to pick up what I left off all over again.

Manga Studio 3 EX blue, and then a happy ending

I haven't been using Manga Studio 3 EX for a while. The last time I used it was way before I got the ATI HD 4850 graphic card and the DELL 24 inch UltraShape display as my second displace. So when I found out that Manga Studio went nuts when I tried to use my Wacom Graphite 4 8" x 6" tablet with it. I wan't too surprise. What surprised me was the solution.

The moment I encountered the problem, I went ahead and downloaded the driver to update the Wacom driver to 5.0.8.6. Well, does NOT solve the problem.

Then I went to Smith Mirco's site and found that there's NO UPDATE on Manga Studio 3 EX... great.

Finally I found my rescure in CP Forums. Someone found out that by removing Wacom Tablet Perference, reboot, and set the preference again, it will resolve the problem. But how do I remove the preference?

Well, Wacom provided instruction to remove the Wacom tablet perference. I basically followed it, but went 1 step future by removing both Tablet.dat and Pen_Tablet.dat. After removing all these perference files, reboot, and then set the Tablet setting, Manga Studio works again. In fact, I am continue using my dual screen setting with no problem.

Poser vs Daz Studio

Comparing with Daz Studio, Poser (and Poser Pro to that respect) is like a lousy elder-brother who has talent but horrible people skill, while Daz Studio is an aggressive younger one who only inherited a few talent from the heritage but does those several things very well.

May be that's not a particularly good analogy, but the relationship between Poser and DazStudio is just too strange. And to fully take advantage of all the Poser format content, you need to have a good grip on both environment.

Ironically. while Daz Studio takes Poser scenes files in most case, you can't do the other way around opening Daz Studio file in Poser. So there's an incentive to do most of the work on Poser, until you found out that the posing environment in Poser is so much inferior comparing with Daz Studio. Daz Studio is definite so much easier to work with.

And then there's an issue of organizing material. Daz Studio has it's own little database in SQLite format which to me greatly enhance the workflow. Unfortunately Poser, even when pointing to the same runtime folder. Thus I am struggling about whether I should reorganize my Poser content physical folder structure so that both DazStudio and Poser can benefit the content structure. I am afraid that this procss would that me several days to complete, and even then I probably won't know for sure that I have all the content at the right place. ,

I already spent/wasted most of my time yesterday trying to get myself used to Poser Pro. I am not srue if I am willing to spent another day to just doing mechanical stuff today ... sigh ...

Wait and wait

I feel like I spent a lot of time in my life to wait for stuff. Especially waiting for Daz Studio to load up. Hopefully the graphic card that coming will ease that part of the pain in my life.

Crossdresser 3.0.1 has it's limit

I was overjoy figured out how to use Crossdresser 3.0.1, but then there are quite some limitation that I am to live with:

- Crossdresser doesn't do well on converting shoes or any sort of footwear.
- Crossdresser may not always convert clothing perfectly even when I do all the right setting. The Mongolian gown virtual cloth I brought is one of the example.

In fact I need to check around and see if there's others who have the same problem as I do.