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The Raleigh Durham Adobe User Group consists of Adobe product users living in or around the Triangle area of North Carolina. The Triangle spans the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. It also includes RTP (Research Triangle Park), which is the largest research park in the world and home to over 100 research and development organizations.


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August Meeting - Papervision 3D and Maps with Flex

on Aug 6 in Meetings

4 Comments »

Meeting Time: 6:00pm on Tuesday August 26th

Location: Railinc Corporate Headquarters, 7001 Weston Parkway, Suite 200 Cary, NC 27513


We had a great showing in July for our first RDAUG/Triangle User Experience co-meeting!  In August, we'll be teaming up with the TUE yet again!


RDAUG will be presenting on Papervision 3D.

Papervision3D is a realtime 3D engine for Flash. This means you can import 3D models, create a 3D scene and make it completely interactive using regular Actionscript 3 with the help of the PV3D framework. We'll talk through the basics, give you enough information to get you started, and then we'll show how to use the open source/free 3D package called Blender to create some simple 3D assets for Papervision. We'll also show you how to use Photoshop CS3 Extended to edit you're textures.

And then, the Triangle User Experience will be presenting on Flex and Maps. Working with Google, Yahoo, MapQuest, and ESRI maps within Flex applications. - presented by Adrian Pomilio


Please RSVP for this meeting by commenting in this post, thanks!



Getting Productive With RDAUG!

on Aug 6 in Meetings

3 Comments »

Hello All,

I'd like to first take this opportunity to welcome Troy Stratton as the RDAUG co-manager.  Troy's been very active within the group, and wants to see us grow, so I'm glad to be working with him!  In fact...I'm copying his notes on what we are shooting for in RDAUG between the monthly meetings.


Anyway, we're really excited regarding the turn out and the discussions we had during our last meeting.
It is now time to start gathering topics that people want to learn and projects people would like to start up as an incubator system.   During our meeting, we talked about hack night, incubator projects, and learning sessions (hands on training, homework assignments, mini meetings).


1) Hack Night:  we need to know how many people are interested in this topic and what night works for everyone... include topics you would like us to cover such as Actionscript Array Collections
2) Incubator Projects:  if you are interested in having people work with you on a project... let us know.  There were many interesting projects brought up during the meeting, and we are sure there are many people willing to jump on the projects with you, but the group needs to know what projects are available to work on.
3) learning sessions:  please let us know what you want to learn or if you have an area you feel comfortable teaching.  We need your input to know what we should be discussing at our meetings, like "What currently works for you and what doesn't," since we are in an experimental stage.  Based on your input, we will know if we should break this area down to mini meetings, user group topics, hands on training, etc, but we need your input to make it happen.

We heard several topics of interest in the last meeting including Flex, Illustrator, and Ajax, and I'd like everyone to know that our group has a Lynda.com account.  I can't give you folks the login info, but I can take requests for tutorials and lesssons from the site. Lets get this ball rolling.  We are very eager to meet everyone again, learn more, and just have fun.  Please comment in this post if you'd like to request a topic for a hack night, request a lesson from lynda.com or otherwise, have a project you'd like help or feedback with, etc.


Regards,  
Ben & Troy


July Meeting - Starting out with Fireworks / Project and Learning Incubator

on Jul 16 in Meetings

16 Comments »


Meeting Time: 6:30pm on Tuesday July 29nd

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE!  DUE TO A SCHEDULING CONFLICT WITH THE LOCATION, WE CAN NO LONGER HAVE THE MEETING ON THE 22nd.

 

Location: Railinc Corporate Headquarters, 7001 Weston Parkway, Suite 200 Cary, NC 27513


Join the Raleigh Durham Adobe User Group and the Triangle User Experience for the first of many shared meetings!  Presenting first will be Ben Farrell and Eric Coker taking you through the basics of Adobe Fireworks CS3.  Eric will specifically be covering image exporting, and Ben will be covering a basic workflow from Photoshop to Fireworks to Dreaweaver or to Flex.  For those of you who don't know, Fireworks is the best program you've never used - it saves loads of production time if you can integrate into your workflow properly, and we'll show you just how to do that, along with some basic features.

Next, as our groups join forces and meet, we'll be asking those with an idea or a desire to learn speak up and let us know what's on your mind.
The "Project Incubator" is our idea to get innovative ideas out there and get skilled people together on these innovative ideas.  Here's how it works....You present an idea you have for a project, let us know what your goals are and if you'd like to make money on it or just bask in fame for doing something very cool.  As a group, we'll ask you questions, offer our critiques and concerns over how to meet goals, what wrinkles lie ahead for your plan, etc..  At the end of the meeting, we'll all socialize and see if people would like to help you on your project or vice versa.  It's like a support group for future web/software inventors and renown artists!

If you're just starting out, and are a little shy to talk projects - maybe your a beginner and are still learning, we'll also host the "Learning Incubator" portion of the group.  Here we'll be asking those with a desire to learn a particular subject to speak up.  We'll try to put some groups together to learn a subject, and hopefully we'll put groups with a volunteer instructor.

And lastly, we'll be providing one lucky winner with a software prize worth up to $2100.  If you present a project idea to the incubator, or offer your expertise to lead a group to learn a particular subject, we'll give you a raffle ticket to win the Adobe software prize.

Please RSVP by leaving a comment in this post!  You're also welcome to leave other comments or suggestions in this post.

 



Flex 4 SDK - Gumbo

on Jul 16 in News (Adobe & RDAUG)

No Comments »

One of the odd things about an open source project is the abiliity to watch progress as it happens.  Despite the fact that its not like christmas morning anymore when the product drops, it is nice because you can keep tabs on it at every stage.


Of course Flex 4 SDK is open source, and you can download an early release right now.  It's available here

Geek Glue is calling it a beta, but it hasn't even reached a milestone yet on the opensource page, so who knows what it is.  To read more about it, the same Geek Glue article is a good read. Watch the video on this page to get a sneak peek at the skinning improvements - its pretty cool!

 



Mini-Meeting: Texturing your 3D models using Photoshop CS3 Extended

on Jul 13 in Meetings

1 Comment »

Hey everyone!  So our last mini-meeting was small but successful.  It was just Troy, Iris, and myself.  Troy showed us the basics of using Papervision3D, while Iris showed us the basics of using the free 3D software called Blender.  We can't wait to present on this stuff in August! 

But in the meantime, I did some research and figured out a pretty good workflow to texture my Blender models using Photoshop CS3 Extended.  Iris asked me if I wouldn't mind showing her sometime soon how I did it.  And of course I'm more than happy to share, but wanted to share with anyone else who's interested as well.

So!  I'm going to pick a time and place.  If any interested folks don't like it, I'm more than happy to change it, just leave a comment in this post so we can discuss.  My choice is Thursday night at around 7.  I'll offer up my house at 706 Cross Timbers Drive in Durham.  I know lots of folks live in Cary or Raleigh, and I'm more than happy to come to you - so if that's your preference feel free to tell me your chosen time and place.

To recap - we'll be learning two things.  The first is prepping your 3D models with a texture and UV map.  And then the second is importing a 3D model into Photoshop 3D extended to edit and preview the texture.  Comment in this post if your game!



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