Alternative to Wacom Stylus?

Dart Stylus?

Now that Wacom have released a bunch of different styluses for tablets, the Solo starting at $20 ranging up to the top of the line one at $70...there suddenly seems like a lot of choices one of which is the Dart, also $70 but this seems to work much better across various platforms.

Not one I've had the opportunity to try right now, but it's something that should be on any digital artists radar looking for something with a bit more control to be used on various tablets who aren't in the Cintiq budget.

SketchPad Pro is free

SketchPad Pro on iTunes

I don't know how long for, but at the moment, it is free and worth grabbing if you haven't already as it's a nice little app to sketch on the go.

What is Tech Art?

Here are presentation videos from the talk given at 3D Stimulus Day.

The panel was hosted by Chad Moore, who you can follow on twitter as @smapdi

He also has a great blog with a load of information about how to get a job as well as including slides to his talks which you can find here.

The rest of the panel was made up of the following people -

Ryan Griffin, Senior Character TD, Turbine - @griffinanimator
Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts - @Mrt3D
Brandon Bateman, Senior Tech Artist, Turbine
Farley Chery, Instructor, ITT Institute and Bunker Hill Community College
Justin Woodard, Technical Artist, Turbine - @JustinWoodard

The presentation covers what a technical artist means, covering how the varied role differs between the size and direction of the company from a large corporation to a small indie developer.

Roughly 45 mins in total over 3 parts, the final part includes part of the Q&A session.

Part 1 -

Part 2 -

Part 3 -

Using Unity3D to create a 2D game

Presentation given by Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz of Owlchemy Labs.

The topic of making a 2D game by mixing 2D and 3D in Unity and some of their tools that were created and techniques that can easily be used.

Some of these tools are available on their website for free.

The presentation is in three parts, totalling around 45 minutes.

Part 1-3:

Part 2-3:

Part 3-3 including the QA session:

Daylight Simulation White Papers

Autodesk has released a series of white papers about daylight simulation in 3DSM which are well worth a read.

4D Artists has a pretty good write up on the use with Mental Ray as well.

3D Connection

The Space Navigator as most are probably aware is a peripheral device that is supposed to help with navigation in a 3D environment. The basic model, at $60 is certainly affordable and was the reason it was tested out, but unlike software applications, there isn't a free 30 trial, so this was tried and if it were good, the higher up models would have been evaluated afterwards.

It turns out, if this was an introduction to the product, it was off putting enough that after every artist tried it, it just got dumped on a shelf, never to be used again and put paid to any notion of bothering with any other products.

The theory is good, being able to seamlessly navigate your scene, rotate, zoom and pan all at the same time and have simple shortcuts at your finger tips.

The reality, it was too clunky to control, the drivers were rubbish and interfered with any custom layouts and short cuts. It was tried out with 3DSM 8 and 9, ZBrush 3 and a few other programs. It could well have improved since then, but the actual hardware interfacing with the device just wasn't very comfortable either.

I will say, it worked really well with Google Earth though, and it could be worth a poke if it has been significantly improved since it was evaluated. It's a shame that this device didn't live up to expectations nor filled us with confidence to spend the considerably more money on the higher range line of products.