CartoonSmart 3D?! What's this...

When long-time student, John Nyquist asked if I had plans to teach Blender lessons, I said "huh? Blen-what?". So John explained to me what Blender was (er, an unbeliveably FREE 3D Program) and then showed me some of his samples, I said "John, how 'bout YOU teach this course!".

So CartoonSmart now has a new instructor AND hopefully many more lessons to come with John behind the helm. The first Blender lesson is an obvious one, "Basics of Blender". And slated in the near future will be a few more basic courses in the various aspects of 3D. This first course got as far as Modeling and Shading. (see the pic below)

If anyone wants to visit John's site, and contact him with some lesson suggestions or kudos for stepping up to the plate on this new subject, his web home is http://www.nyquist.net

Also if you haven't yet downloaded and installed Blender, it takes about about 2 minutes. Seriously. Visit http://www.blender.org/ for the details.

And lastly, consider buying his lesson here! CartoonSmart tutorials never really make big fat profits, but we will be donating some percent toward the Blender developers in the not-so-distant future.

Thanks.

Actionscript 3 Darts Tutorial!

Darts anyone??

So I finally got around to creating an Actionscript 3 game. Actually I've got a few more in my secret stash, but this one is now in the "taught" category. So its a pretty typical Flash dart game. Grab a dart, release when the floating target is over a number, and hope you released in time. Some features I added (that I noticed were missing in most Flash dart games), you can control both the speed of the target area, as well as the location of the board. So by adjust some sliders (pic below)....

...you can control how the board moves across or up and down the screen.

Also I figured most people would want to take a shot at creating their own variation of the usual dart scoring. So the second part of the tutorial starts off by demonstrating the scoring for a "Round the Clock" dart game, then with a few slight modifications, I show how to add in a "501" scoring setup. All within the same game / coding framework, so when students want to customize the scoring, they should be well prepared for how and where they need to do that in the Actionscript documents. And speaking of which, this lesson teaches using all external .as files. Little easier to keep up with what code is where.

Anyway, here's a final pic of the game. But why the heck are you still reading this blog. Click anyone of these images to go actually play it, and consider buying the lesson.

Later playa's!