Link via The Enlightened Image
 CINEMA 4D R11 – Part 1: The Core is the first of a multi-part series covering MAXON’s new CINEMA 4D Release 11’s offerings. Because this product has so many items available for the user, that I could not do it justice in a single write-up, and so I will break it down in separate articles. This first one will cover the core product functionality.
Cinema 4D R11 (includes BodyPaint 3D R4) is available at an academic discount price of $195.
Link via PC World
 In Photoshop CS4, Adobe isn’t a huge leap forward, but there’s enough to warrant some eye-openers. Here are five cool features Photoshop CS4 has to offer.
5. The New Adjustments Panel
4. Finally… Tabbing!
3. 3D editing made easy
2. Playing Around with Depth of Field
1. Context-sensitive Scaling
Photoshop CS4 Extended is available at an academic discount price of $299.
Link via Express Computer
 The faculty in the first term uses Cintiq 21UX (an interactive pen display) for teaching process. When students want to learn and get attention, it is really tough to teach them art while standing around faculties and observing the process. With Cintiq 21UX, connected to the projector, they can sit in their own 2D workstations and learn more efficiently watching on the screen. “Wacom has made our teaching and production environment much easier, faster and very cost-effective, and helped our students to deliver high quality works in less time in WWIL,” informed Gokul.
The character design, turnaround, attitude poses, facial expressions, and ex sheet amongst others are created much faster with the help of drawing directly in Toonboom with Wacom Intuos3 pen tablets and this digital process helps the students to minimize errors. Backgrounds and mattes are created with Photoshop and Wacom Intuos3, which helps students to create rich visuals in less time. Digital color storyboard and digital animation and final digital output are created with a combination of Photoshop and Toonboom with Wacom Intuos3 in less time.
The Wacom Cintiq 21UX is available from Creation Engine for $1999.
Link via CGSociety
“This was such a huge item,” explains Sharit. “What we basically started with was the rough models. We’d seen some black and white forms, some silhouettes of the creatures. These were really very rough models, set up on a very rough rig. This was passed onto animation to get an idea of how it would work in the game play. The roughs were all done in Maya. To get our normal maps we did a high resolution model in ZBrush. We were doing a lot of texturing with the models in ZBrush and then baking all that information out when we did our normal maps. From there, once it worked in the game, we could begin to form the monster and make sure it then fitted onto the skeleton. This is actually pretty standard fare workflow in creating the models for games.”
Using Maya, Insomniac artists were able to perform quick sketches of buildings, environments, models, and other elements that enabled verification of realistic proportions compared to the huge creature, all before fully programming the enemy. Maya has always been a big part of Insomniac’s building pipeline. They build environments, characters and animations within the app. On Resistance 2, however, they used Maya more for visualization than on other games. They visualized in Maya with a custom shader, and used the system to figure out physics calculations. For huge, complicated objects, they calculated in Maya, which was then translated into the game. That way, there’s more action on screen.
ZBrush 3.1 is available at an academic discount price of $390.
Maya Unlimited 2009 Superpack Mac/Windows (perpetual license) is available at an academic discount price of $395.
Link via eweek.com
 What’s interesting about MindManager is that its maps are not static. The visual diagram includes actionable data, live hyperlinks, along with collaboration tools such as word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail. The idea is to keep users within MindManager so they don’t have to leave to access other services.
For example, MindManager 8 features a number of new perks, including a browser window so you can view Web pages and PDF documents without leaving MindManager. Users may view and edit attached Microsoft Word, Excel, Project and PowerPoint files from within MindManager’s embedded browser, Mindjet CEO Scott Raskin told eWEEK in a recent interview.
Various Web services can also be triggered directly inside a map with one click. Users can search Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft Live Search, eBay and StrikeIron. Also, maps and attached documents created in MindManager are searchable by most desktop search apps. MindManager 8 also now includes task management features.
The crown jewel in Mindjet’s new release is easily the Mindjet Player, which allows users to take the interactive mind maps they created with MindManager 8, turn them into Adobe PDFs or Flash .SWF files.
These files can be shared with anyone with a computer. Or, if you don’t want to share the mind maps, you can publish them in blogs or embed them in Web pages.
“The idea is that I could send a PDF to somebody, they could open it up and what they would see instead of just a picture of a map, a fully functioning MindManager map with all of the content and links to external information,” Rasking said.
MindManager 8 for Windows is available at an academic discount price of $149.
Link via JMG Galleries
 Given some comments I’ve read with in my Lightroom 2 review “Adobe Lightroom 2.0 – First Impressions That Impress” and across the web I thought it would be a good idea to share some Lightroom 2 optimization tips I’ve recently found. Hopefully this information and the respective web sites this information was found on will prove to be helpful for those that have made the plunge with their Lightroom upgrade. With out further ado here are…
Photoshop Lightroom 2 is available at an academic discount price of $98.
What’s New in Vue 7 xStream and Vue 7 Infinite?
With over 100 new features and technology enhancements, the new features of Vue 7 would be too long to list here! (Plus, we wouldn’t want to spoil you the read 
Just to give a taste of what’s in the box, here are some of the great new features you’ll find in Vue 7:
- Full integration: Vue 7 xStream is now completely integrated into 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Maya and XSI. You can create environments using your standard application tools.
- Vue 7 xStream now works with all supported applications and renderers. You don’t have to buy another license to use xStream with another product/renderer.
On top of this, you will benefit from the following:
- Spectral II Cloud Technology,
- EcoSystem III,
- new Radiosity Engine,
- improved SolidGrowth IV plants,
- new Water Editor,
- new OpenGL engine,
- advanced object scripting,
- Collada file import,
- new natural algorithms,
- faster rendering (up to 4 times faster!), and much, much more…
Finally, both Vue 7 xStream and Vue 7 Infinite ship with an extended library of over 160 SolidGrowth plant species (some of which were previously only available through Cornucopia3D.com, retailing for a total of over $1,000).
The Vue 7 licensing scheme for educational licenses is now based on an annual subscription (licenses are valid for one year from the date of first activation). This annual subscription includes free upgrades to any .5 or full versions released during the subscription period.
Educational license pricing is as follows:
Expired Educational Licenses will continue to operate as PLE; this limitation is automatically removed (when the subscription is renewed), by simple re-activation.
Link via Digital Web Magazine
 The coolest thing about ScreenFlow is it lets you record your screen, and combine it with your Mac’s built-in iSight camera and microphone. Your screen capture is placed on one layer, and your iChat window is placed in another layer.
So you get a picture-in-picture effect, where viewers can see you actually using your product while you narrate. Other video capture tools let you overlay audio tracks, sure. But nothing beats video and sound. You can produce demo videos like Apple, and their iPhone guy (you’ll have to buy a black turtleneck and get yourself a manicure first). Of course, if you’re camera shy you can turn off the video capture.
Thanks to Apple’s native Quartz graphics system, the video capture is done in high enough resolution that you can zoom in, pan, and rotate the screen at a slight angle without any loss in image quality. You can even add drop shadows and reflections to your videos.
Screenflow is available at an academic discount price of $79.
Link via Google Watch
 Google late yesterday revealed that it has successfully implemented OCR (optical character recognition) technology to scan and convert a picture in a document created by Adobe’s PDF format into words. This renders these files searchable via the Web.
Google Product Manager Evin Levey noted in a blog post that prior to this development, scanned documents were rarely included in search results because Google couldn’t be sure of their content. “We had occasional clues from references to the document—so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes …”
Check out this query of “Steady success in a volatile world” to see the OCR in action. You can see a snippet of the content, with the full text presented after the “View as HTML” link.
Create PDF files with Acrobat 9 Professional available at an academic discount price of $149.
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