I’ve just become aware of a plugin for 3D Studio Max called 3DCutout which you use in conjunction with Photoshop (or any other drawing program I would think) which essentially lets you animate Flash or Harmony type cut out animation using a custom interface in 3D Studio Max. You can rig characters, create and library assets and of course use the 3d camera. It looks REALLY cool! Check out the clip above!
“Toonstruck” (1996) , a point’n click adventure game, that merged classic cartoon style animation with live action… Â Hard to believe this was a thing… starring Christopher Lloyd no less!
Below is game play from the game:
Paintstorm Studio is an impressive new piece of digital painting software, or at least it’s new to me!
It has many customizable features and seems to have an interface similar to Corel Painter which means that it takes a bit of getting used to when you first open it because there’s SO many options. Thankfully there are a number of tutorials on the Paintstorm to guide you through the learning curve.
After playing with it a few minutes I found that while it’s a VERY cool tool, in order to use it you’d need to take some time learning the interface a bit more but I’m pretty confident with a little practice it could be a worthy asset in my digital toolbox.
Paintstorm Pro is available as a trial download and for purchase at $19 for PC but a supposedly a Mac version is coming.
http://paintstormstudio.com/
Today in addition to the new tiered buying model for Harmony, Toonboom released Harmony 12 which looks to have some pretty cool features, such as more bitmap brush options,  faster rendering times and a new Light Shading feature allowing you to auto add shadows from various perspectives. Below is a video walk through highlighting the newest features.
You can find out more about Toonboom Harmony at Toonboom’s website.
Artist and teacher Jon LeMond posted a quick note about six Android virtual mannequin apps that will allow you to replace the old school wood mannequins from the days of yore before computers took over the art world. You can rotate light, and pose all of the digital mannequins right on your phone. Cool stuff, if you need some sort of funky foreshortened arm pose or an’t quite get a down shot right.
You can read the whole article here.
Today Adobe released an interesting lil’ experiment for iOS called PaintCan and I have to say I like where Adobe is going with these ‘experiments’. Especially when they’re aimed at us artists!
From the Adobe blog:
Today we’re previewing one of our latest experiments, PaintCan (now available on the App Store). PaintCan allows anybody, regardless of skill level, to sit down with their iPad, select a picture, and create a painting within minutes. Powerful brushes adjust themselves to the underlying image, making every stroke look beautiful, so that users can create novel and expressive artworks. PaintCan explores the space between automatic photo filters (which makes pictures look cool, but isn’t all that personal or fun) and manual art tools. With PaintCan, I really am in control, I decide where to paint, where to reveal details, where to obscure them. The app makes sure that all my paint strokes look great, but I’m still the painter.
While I do not own an iOS device, you might so if you choose to download it, let us know what you  thought in the comments! You can read the full article here.
