Hey Jim,

It looks pretty quiet on this site these days.

I love your illustration of the Triumph. May I ask you about your process? What do you start with when you do a 3D illustration? Do you start with a CAD model, you you freehand in Illustrator?

I am wondering if I should chase the dragon of ...

I've had a couple of projects where clients supplied vector output from CAD (probably SolidWorks).

So far I've always redrawn/traced it with the Pen in Illustrator. It just makes for a cleaner basis for whatever I'm doing from there.

A quick and dirty method I've used is selecting everything and ...

The more I use Composer the less I like it.

Not only is it slow, it's also got cumbersome interface. Doing any sort of transformation makes me stabby. I think it works well if you are working in relatively small assemblies, but once you get into complex models it just churns. I do what I need to do ...

Nice stuff jhatch.
Will always be room for 2D! If not, they could get rid of me and the engineers could just output SVGs and call it a night. In my current role, I start with 3D source, export to AI and clean up from there. 3D programs are still very limited in their ability to do nice line art ...

...bump...
come on people!

Just started a 12 month contract in the solar business. I'm hired as a technical writer, but I think they will likely lean heavily on my illustration skills. There's still a lot of use of photographs (poor) with numbered callouts. The mechanical engineers work in SOLIDWORKS, so the tech writing team ...

I just tried an EPS and got an interesting result. While the resolution looks crisper, it looks like it dropped the shaded hatching I had. I think will stick to PNG for now and make sure I save as 300 dpi and not to down-sample when I convert to PDF.

Thanks James. I'm starting to get the hang of it, but still probably doing more than I need to do. I imagine doing anything like "ants marching" along a path only requires a handful of frames. Your photo-voltaic animation comes to mind. Imagine the more you can do in Illustrator before bringing into ...

Update:
I think I'm getting this. I've created my original looping animation path. I then duplicate the layer, each time offsetting the frames by two or three until I get all my little marching ants. If I knew more I'd be able to do this on one Layer, but this is a good start.

I'm wanting to animate some particles or liquid moving through some tubing.
Basically think of it as "marching ants" selection in Photoshop.
I will be using Flash, so any help or links would be appreciated. This should be pretty easy.
Just wondering if I can use some sort of motion tween or I have ...