Does anyone know of a program that gives you something like Mayas space menu or Modos pie menus ( https://www.mars-inc.net/modo/img/pie_menu.jpg ) that I can assign shortcuts/macros and then have them customisable for any current program.

(a bit like the wacom menu but better)

haha, what else?

http://www.rainlendar.net (download the lite version, it's all you need !)

Ah yeah, maybe this : If you're looking for an good and simple agenda on your computer desktop. I'm using it for a while now and I didn't miss a birthday, rendez-vous or phone call for a long time

dds thumbnails in windows
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/d...il_viewer.html

speaking of which... psd images magically are thumbnailed recently. I don't remember doing anything special?
is this an adobe update? or vista update? ( late night adobe fairies @ werk while I sleep to ease my search burden? )

Dont know if this has been mentioned before:

Faogen fast and easy way to create ambient occlusion! it costs $69.95 but there is a free trial.

http://www.foxmarks.com/

Foxmarks, a free extension for Firefox, synchronizes your bookmarks with an online database so it's easy-peasy to keep your bookmarks synched across different pc's

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10

Adblock... not really directly connected to work... but does make the internet feel less cluttered.

SequoiaView


This is a very handy program when your trying to find out what is taking up space on your harddrive

it shows you in graphical tree format what your storage looks like and allows you to access the folders with a few clicks

Just don't let anyone see your large red porn rectangle.

I still like milkshape very much, because it's an easy app to learn and suitable for lowpoly modelling. If you want to port something to an old game, it still has important plugins. I also like wings 3d, but I still need to learn the interface.

Milkshape (EUR 25 or USD 35)
http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/

Wings 3D
http://www.wings3d.com/

3 D Coat - Awesome (and dirt cheap) all in one sculpting, retopo, uv and painting app. Weekly alpha builds of version 3 have all the good tools in them like voxel sculpting etc. and can be found in the forums: Latest Alpha Builds
Runs great on mac but really flies on a 64 bit vista machine using cuda.

Scribbles - Stumbled onto this one while waiting for Sketchbook Pro 2010 to be released. I needed something cheap that would run on my mac. Fave features: infinite canvas, which is awesome for concepting, resolution independent zoom, so your image is always crisp and unpixelated. Main tools like pan, zoom and color pick are bound to ctrl/command/alt keys for easy compatibility with cintiqs and intuos tablets.

Line Form - Great vector toolset, especially the brush to curve tools and stroke adjustment palette. Can be used for inking and sketch cleanup.

What would people recommend for free or open source back up software for your PC? Maybe one with a built in recovery tool via burning a cdrom that points to the backup disk? IN case of complete system failure. Also, that can emulate partitions on your backup disk to backup an entire system.

MapZone
Great tool to create tillable textures over different nodes like in Mayas Hypershade

OXYnary: Last week both my PCs (mostly Windows) broke on me and I used a Linux Mint Live CD that I had recently downloaded so that I could get to the files I had yet to back up, connect to the internet and find some ways to fix windows and use some media files. It did it all with no installs or tweaking needed.

It didn't fix my system but it helped me to do so. I may actually do a dual boot with it so I have a "plan B" with me at all times.

FreeCommander (free)

Better alternative to Windows explorer. Has built in support for .psd/.tga thumbs, dual pane layout, tabs, FTP, bookmarks and you can save "layouts".

For example I have a saved several different layouts so far which does;
1: "default" layout with 2 panes directed to my 2 most used directories
2: "FTP" layout that puts my local portfolio folder on the left pane and my FTP server on the right pane (it can also synchronize or compare the files from the 2 panes). This has replaced my old FTP program (which was WinSCP, also free)
3: "thumbnail" layout that maximises the program, puts it into single pane and thumbnail view for converting the whole explorer into a thumbnail viewer.

Each layout has its own hotkey (Alt+1-9)
You can also right-click to access the bookmarks (favorites), saves space compared to windows explorer favourites - and they're also hotkeyed too.

Free web-based color scheme generator, best one I've tried yet.

Think of it as color theory training wheels...It outputs to Photoshop swatch files too.

http://www.colorschemedesigner.com

A lead told me about this a few days ago and it ROCKS!

1)make a layer in photoshop, name it UV and select som layer beside UV
2)record a new action, name it Hide UV
3)without clicking on any layers, click the little eye next to UV
4)repeat the steps with an action named Show UV

so as long as you name your uv layer "UV" you can toggle it on and off with the press of a button. This could be something universally known but it makes me all giddy.

Neat, but I don't get one part. How do you assign it to a toggle? The closest I can get is something like ctrl-F2 to hide, ctrl-shift-F2 to show.

That's a nice trick but as long as you export your UV's as paths, you can toggle them with ctrl-h.

true that, I made a sloppy-ass script to toggle any layers named uv, uvs, or prefixed with tgl_ a little while ago. it's kinda slow since it checks for any instance within the base level or a rather than just one, but sometimes that's necessary. If you don't want that you can just change the 2 variables in the script so it just searches for the first instance or doesn't search within layergroups

www.funkybunnies3d.com/Downloads/uv_TGL.jsx
you can drop it in program files/adobe/photoshop/presets/scripts and next time you open photoshop it's in the file menu or hotkeyable.

I just discovered probably the best web browser ever, K-Meleon. It does pretty much everything FF does, but 2+ times faster! Less memory usage too.
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Originally Posted by pior

I just discovered probably the best web browser ever, K-Meleon. It does pretty much everything FF does, but 2+ times faster! Less memory usage too.
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

I'm a huge browser whore, but that one does nothing for me. I picked a heavy page I never visit, so firefox wouldn't have it cached: ign.com. Firefox was 5-6 seconds, K-Meleon was 16-17 seconds.

Plus I can't live without my mouse gestures, adblock plus etc.

hehe I just got 4 secs in KM and 14 secs in Firefox on IGN as well :P But my machine is aging so maybe that's why?
It just feels less sluggish to me somehow

Anyways! To each his own!

For me K-meleon is on par with Opera, but way faser than FF. Did the same test with IGN. Opera got 8 secs, K-meleon got 9 sec and FF 25 sec.

StrokeIt

For extra mouse gesture support, across all programs in windows (ideal for browsers like the previously mentioned K-meleon, and Google Chrome which I use)

Great for 3D Max/photoshop (with pen) too, extra bunch of easy-to-access hotkeys \o/

I know the latest update was in 2005, but its still a fine piece of software and I've had no problems with it (the UI could be improved though )



And;
Q-Dir

Another windows explorer-alternative. This one has 4 panels and most of the usual stuff that explorer-alternatives have, and imo is the best free one available.

Originally Posted by Snowfly

Free web-based color scheme generator, best one I've tried yet.

Think of it as color theory training wheels...It outputs to Photoshop swatch files too.

http://www.colorschemedesigner.com

This is great, ideal for setting up a colour scheme for a portfolio. ALso great to change a scene's atmosphere. Question is which colour scheme do I choose, so many possibilities.

livemocha.com it's some sort of language learning community. so not really art related. but it's really great for learning. there are various courses from beginner to advanced. you can submit your excercises and have them corrected by other users. chat with them with an inbuild translator, etc. it's really doing a great job. doesn't take forever to learn like in school...