Google SketchUp for Game Design

Google SketchUp has been traditionally seen as an easy to use 3D tool for engineers and architects. The new book, Google SketchUp for Game Design by Robin de Jongh, shows how SketchUp along with Unity 3D and GIMP can be used to create 3D game worlds. The book provides detailed steps on how to create […]

Sorenson Squeeze 8 Review

Sorenson Squeeze 8 Review via Andrew Gormley

A program I used quite often when I first started video editing was Sorenson Squeeze. It offered way more output formats than Final Cut Pro at the time and had a wide selection of presets to choose from, which made it easy for a novice to output great […]

Dvorak reviews Alien Skin Snap Art 3

Link via PCMag.com

The Alien Skin Snap Art 3 plug-in allows you to take a photo and turn it into a piece of art generally much more interesting than the photo itself. Not always, though; if you take enough pictures, you’ll soon see which ones are amenable to being redisplayed as art.

The default oil […]

Telestream Wirecast Pro 4.0 Review

Link via Sound & Video Contractor

Wirecast’s performance will definitely scale well with faster computers. For example, I tested Wirecast on a Hewlett Packard 8740w mobile workstation with a 2.0 GHz four-core i7 processor (8-cores with hyper-threading enabled), which was able to produce three streams (640×480 at 732kbps, 480×360 at 432kbps and 320×240 at 232kbps) […]

Software Review – Corel Painter 12

Link via Blogcritics Sci/Tech

Corel Painter 12 is the latest release of Corel’s advanced digital art studio software. By providing the drawing and painting technology, Painter 12 allows artists to pursue their creative endeavors in totally new and inspiring ways. Now with the introduction Real Watercolor, Real Wet Oil brushes as well as other new […]

Jerry Hofmann takes a look at Squeeze 7

Link via CreativeCOW.net Article Focus: With improved video quality, faster H.264 encoding, simplified workflow with Squeeze’s batch window, additional input and output formats, adaptive bitrate encoding, just to name a few of the new features, read why Jerry Hofmann is excited about this new release.

Squeeze 7 is available at an educational discount price […]

Google Sketchup 8 review

Link via PC Pro

That’s about it for the free Google SketchUp, but users wanting more power can turn to Google SketchUp 8 Pro (US$495). The main advantage of the commercial release is that it goes beyond bitmap and KMZ/DAE output to offer a much wider range of 2D and 3D export options such as […]

Toon Boom Animate 2 Review

Link via Digital Arts

Beyond the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes, the primary new features of version 2 include the smart puppet feature which supports forward and inverse kinematics, making it easier to animate a complete character than before. Lip syncing is also available, with an automatic phoneme recognition tool – useful for quick […]

Adobe CS5: 64-bit, CUDA-Accelerated, And Threaded Performance : How Should You Accelerate Adobe?

Link via Tom’s Hardware

Our original question was how best to accelerate Adobe’s Creative Suite. In After Effects, the move from CS4 to CS5 was a clear win, while scaling from four cores to six offered surprisingly little benefit. Photoshop CS5 is likewise mushy on its core scaling benefits, but if you can land a […]

MindManager 9 for Windows Review by PC Pro

Link via PC Pro

Where MindManager 9 steps out in front is with its advanced business features, in particular its integration with Microsoft Office 2010. The first sign of this is its toolbar, which looks identical in style to Office 2010’s ribbon, right down to the backstage view, found under the File tab at the […]