Radley Marx

Swift3D Plug-in for Photoshop

Electric Rain has upgraded their Swift3D plugin for Photoshop to streamline processes and take advantage of Adobe Configurator.

For those who may be having a huh? moment – Swift3D is an old school, powerful, noob-level 3D modeling and animation package for creating 3D for Flash. I’ve used Swift3D with great success in the past, but it’s been a long time since I’ve done design/animation work.

Recently (in the past couple of years) they’ve integrated more with Papervision to export ready-to-go Collada models and it looks like the have a an express plugin for Flash (Windows only, meh). 

Nevertheless, definitely something to check out. The app is so easy to use it can fill in quickly for print & web graphics.

Link to product

(via John Nack @ Adobe)

A Dream of A1t Comics

I had a wacky dream last night that stuck with me even after I woke up. It was an idea I was seeing in printed newspaper form, but could easily carry over into a Firefox plug-in.

In my dream it was called “alt comics”, but that’s a term for modern “alternative comics” such as Life in Hell and This Modern World. So I had to change it slightly to reflect the nuance, so…

A1t Comics.

Imagine a plug-in that would replace comics with alternate comics with different endings, artwork, and/or threads.

In the simplest of terms, instead of seeing Garfield on the webpage, you’d see something from Garfield Minus Garfield. Or instead of your regular Dilbert, you’d see the most popular mash-up instead:

These alternatives are already possible, but in my dream all web-based comics have been taken to the extreme, with multiple spin-offs seen only by people who use the a1t comic plug-in.

I imagined family comics with urban tags covering the background panels instead of clean walls. I saw other comics with magic marker punked-out last panels. I saw entire comics redrawn with the same story, lines, and characters but by an alternate artists with completely different (and often very wrong) styles.

(NSFW after the jump…)

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David Lynch on Transcendental Meditation

As stunning as Alan Watts… 

Link to website

(via Techcrunch)

Adobe UI Gripes

Ha ha ha ha! I guess I’m not the only one who feels this way…

Illustrator: When Adobe developed their fancy new gradient tool it looks like they never tested it on more than one gradient…

Updater: Adobe Updater ran automatically then bounced about in the dock for this IMPORTANT MESSAGE!!!!

On the bright side, no updates is better than 2 gig of hidden patch files.

Flash: Apparently the Flash team haven’t heard of double buffering, its like using fucking Windows XP all over again.

Link to Tumblog

3D Baseball Cards Using Augmented Reality

(nytimes.com) Beginning Monday, collectors who hold a special Topps 3D Live baseball card in front of a webcam will see a three-dimensional avatar of the player on the computer screen. Rotate the card, and the figure rotates in full perspective. It’s called “augmented reality,” a combination of a real image with a virtual one.

“This is the ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ version of a baseball card that will get kids to buy more. We see this baseball season as a redefining moment for us,” said Steve Grimes, chief digital officer at Topps.

Link to article