Today I want to teach you how to make the stylish cartoon character drawings you see on the Hello World Program website. This technique can be used to transform any boring picture into a luscious, colorful cartoon. We’ll be using a free and open…
continue reading →Inking is the process of turning a boring old pencil drawing into a luscious black and white cartoon. Traditionally this is done with pen and ink, hence the term inking. We’re going to take inking into the digital realm with Inkscape. You should have…
continue reading →There are many ways to approach coloring in Inkscape. In this tutorial I’ll show you two methods that I like. Open up you graphic in Inkscape and lets get started. If you don’t have an inked drawing to work with, you might want to read the tutorial…
continue reading →The Lightworks for Linux beta currently has many issues with exporting videos. Exporting to DVCPRO100 (the Lightworks preferred format) will result in a video that doesn’t play in some players or plays back with strange black borders in others…
continue reading →I’m sure you’re an accomplished photographer. But even Ansel Adams missed the mark on occasion. In this tutorial I will go over three very easy and useful tools in GIMP you can use to perk up your pics: rotate, crop and the unsharp mask. First we…
continue reading →How do you make an awesome photograph awesomer? Cartoonify it! In this tutorial we’re going to learn how to make a cartoon from a photograph using GIMP. If you want to follow along, you can download this picture of Guido. It’s the image we created in…
continue reading →Lightworks hates all those fancy video codecs you so love to encode with. It is very picky about what it will deal with. Fortunately for us, avconv will let us convert to a Lightworks preferred format! So if you’re having difficulty getting…
continue reading →Lets say you have a video that is too long and you want to cut out a piece from the middle without having to bother with importing the video into an editor, making some cuts, then exporting again. Not only is this annoying, you’ll be unnecessarily…
continue reading →Let’s say you’re writing a series of tutorials on Blender and you’re using the PrintScreen key to take screen shots. PrintScreen is great, but it grabs everything. You probably don’t want your application dock appearing in every image. And you…
continue reading →Let’s say you’re writing a series of Blender tutorials and you’re using PrintScreen to grab screen shots. Unfortunately, this gives you a Pictures directory filled with massive images not optimized for uploading to, and displaying on, a web page. The…
continue reading →Video formats are terribly important for video editors to understand. They are also incredibly boring. So I’ll be as brief as I can while hitting the major points you should familiarize yourself with. Lets start with a dash of history. NTSC was the…
continue reading →Twitter is the social media site for robots. You probably have robot friends and followers and don’t even realize it! In this tutorial, you will write your own Twitter bot with Python and tweepy, and then set it loose in the world. First we need to…
continue reading →Now that you know how to set up a project in Lightworks, I’m sure you are dying to edit something, so lets jump right into this. Throughout this tutorial, I’m going to be editing the “Path to Adventure” episode. Follow along by downloading the assets…
continue reading →By default, Lightworks saves all of your projects in the “Lightworks/Projects” folder found in your home directory. With a Lightworks Pro license, you are given more control over your project spaces, allowing any location for your projects. This is…
continue reading →Now that you know how to set up a Lightworks project and have mastered importing video, JKL playback, and setting cue points, it’s time to get serious about editing. While there is a general process to editing, there are no hard and fast rules. My…
continue reading →Why do people use Twitter? Attention. Give them what they want with this simple Python Twitter Bot. We’ll be using Python and the excellent Tweepy library to search for tweets by key word and post a reply. If this is new to you, please see our…
continue reading →Sometimes you want to reach out to people who aren’t following you on Twitter. You could do this by sending one tweet at a time. Or you could automate the process and do it in bulk. In this tutorial, you will write a Twitter Bot using the excellent…
continue reading →Having grown up on Wallace and Gromit, Things That Go Bump in the Night, Moonwalker, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, stop motion animation is near and dear to me. I loved it so much as a kid that I developed a technique to make my own animations…
continue reading →Now that you’ve captured all of your stop motion animation frames with Entangle, it’s time to compile your images into a video. You should have a folder located at ~Pictures/capture that is chock full of images labeled “capturexxxxxx.jpg”. This is…
continue reading →If you followed the basic timeline editing tutorial, you should now have a very rough assemblage of clips on your Lightworks timeline. When creating an assembly edit, it’s best to cut for audio and not be too concerned about how the video looks. This…
continue reading →It’s hard being popular: everyone wants to follow you on Twitter but you don’t have time to follow them back. You could get an assistant or you could automate! In this tutorial, you will write a Twitter Bot with Python using the excellent Tweepy…
continue reading →So you’ve read the tutorial on creating stop motion animations with Entangle and avconv, and now you want to make some animations, but you haven’t got one of those fancy digital cameras. No sweat! You can transform an ordinary scanner into your own…
continue reading →That wily Mr. Waldo is off on another one of his adventures. This time he’s taken refuge somewhere in the Linux file tree, and it’s up to us to figure out where he went. There are two excellent bash shell commands at our disposal: find and locate. I…
continue reading →What do you call those people who don’t follow you back on Twitter? Celebrities? News outlets? Using the Python tweepy library, we will write a bot to easily unfollow non-followers from the command line. First, log in to https://dev.twitter.com and…
continue reading →Trouble is afoot in “the_doughnuts” directory. It seems our friend Homer Price has built himself a newfangled, automatic, doughnut-making machine, and he can’t get it to shut off! On top of that, Ada Lovelace lost her diamond bracelet in the batter…
continue reading →This Blender tutorial demonstrates how to create a Superfriends-style starburst animation. We created this sequence for our series, Superusers: The Legendary GNU/Linux Show which I strongly encourage you to watch if you are interested in Linux, free…
continue reading →This tutorial demonstrates how to create animated GIFs from a PNG sequence using ImageMagick and the command line on Linux. What you are seeing is a seizure inducing animation that we created for our series, Superusers: The Legendary GNU/Linux Show…
continue reading →The 2D shape effect in Lightworks is used to superimpose simple shapes (rectangles and ellipses) on your footage. It is found under the “Mattes” category in your effects selection. This effect could be useful when making very simple titles…
continue reading →Suppose you’ve got an awesome video that nobody is watching and you want to create animated GIFs from excerpts of it so that people are forced to see your genius in action. But how do you extract images from a video? You’re in luck! Using the super…
continue reading →For this Linux/Unix bash shell tutorial, we have an extra special field trip planned in the “Petting Zoo” directory. Seatbelts everyone! Lets take a look around. Use the “ls” command to list the directory contents. Llamas, turkeys, and bison, oh my…
continue reading →The learning curve for Blender is notoriously steep. Add Cycles to the mix and you’re more or less rock climbing. What’s for dinner? Node spaghetti. Mmm. Blender Cycles is intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be kicking back…
continue reading →While Lightworks has only been available to the general public for a few short years, this award-winning editing suite has been servicing film industry professionals since the early 1990s. Being at the forefront of the digital film editing revolution…
continue reading →The best way to learn Blender is by getting your hands dirty and working on a project. In this Beginner Blender tutorial series, you will model and animate a robot, create a simple scene and render a final video. You’ll be creating a simplified…
continue reading →Your robot is looking good, but that default gray is a bit drab. In this chapter you will learn how to apply Blender materials and shape keys to brighten up your robot. If you’re just joining us, you will want to start with Part 1, Beginner Blender…
continue reading →Let’s bring our robot to life! We will do so with bones. Yes, bones. And bones are what make up armatures. In Blender, rigging is the process of connecting an armature to a mesh to make it move. In this tutorial, you will be rigging Blender armatures…
continue reading →In this chapter, you will learn how to key frame a Blender animation by adding an audio file to your project and syncing your robot’s movements to the sound. you’re just joining us, you will want to start with Part 1, Beginner Blender Tutorial: How…
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