Tutorials

[Troglodyte]

Being a total newbie, I was wondering if there were any decent tutorials for using Opacity (apart from the walk through on this site remaking the Safari icon)?

The pen tool in particular is doing my head in....it might be obvious if you've used similar software before but I haven't and it's not.

[Jacob]

There are a few different kinds of resources available for learning more about Opacity.

You can see another video tutorial similar to the one for making the Safari icon here:
http://macapper.com/2008/02/19/opacity-video-review-and-giveaway/

You can also download a set of Opacity example images from here:
http://downloads.likethought.com/opacityExamples.zip

And of course you can also search for specific topics in the Help book included with Opacity.

As far as the pen tool specifically, you're right that it is essentially compatible with the pen tools from other similar tools, so this means you can learn the basics from tutorials for those tools, like this one for the pen tool in Illustrator:
http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/illustrator_pen_tool_exercises/

Let me know if you still have questions!

[janiner]

I am also perplexed by the pen tool, so I downloaded the Illustrator file from that last link you posted. Opacity can open it, but it's displayed with a checkerboard background (I think that's a translucent background?) that makes it impossible to read the exercises. I can't figure out how to turn it off. Help?

I also tried the UMass tutorial that the above one was based on; I got stuck on step 3 of the exercises, which is "curves with corner points". Opacity doesn't behave exactly like Illustrator, and I don't know enough about either of them to translate. Specifically, the exercise has you click and drag up, then click and drag down to form an arc, then alt-click and move the direction point from down to up, so you can make another arc going the same direction. Except that when you do the drag down, the direction point in Opacity is already pointing up, not down like in the exercise. Now what?

thanks,

janine

[janiner]

Ok, I figured out how to turn the background white (Inspector -> Image -> Background; change from Checkerboard to Color and set to White).

However, I can only do the first three exercises (the simple ones).

The trouble starts with the first Curves with Corner Points exercise. At first I couldn't do it at all, because clicking on the anchor point picked it up and moved it. I finally figured out that option clicking fixed that, but it doesn't change the direction of the curve as it apparently does in Illustrator. I end up with the first arc being round and the rest being twisted (half up, half down), both of which are wrong (it's supposed to be sort of an upside-down wave shape).

The next one fails also for the reason I mentioned earlier - the handles are already pointing up, so there is nothing to move to switch the direction of the curve.

Next one - as soon as I option-click to make the straight line, the arc I just drew distorts. And the lines that are supposed to be straight are not; they are arcs also.

The last one didn't work either but I didn't put much work into figuring out why.

I've read the help for the pen tool (that's where I got option-click from) but I'm stuck here.

[janiner]

One last thing... this could very well be an FAQ, but I wouldn't know because the search feature tells me that "pen tool" is too common and it won't search for it. It said the same about "tutorials", though oddly it does let me search for "tutorial".

It seems a bit perverse to not allow searching of common words - I can see that this would lessen impact on your server, but you are preventing people from finding information on hot topics.

Perplexed.

[Jacob]

Hi Janine. Sorry that you've had trouble with these tutorials. The main reason is that the pen tool in Opacity hides some control points in an effort to reduce clutter. Unfortunately, this behavior causes problems when trying to follow instructions in these kinds of tutorials, so I've removed it. You can download a beta version of Opacity 1.5.3 with this fixed from here:
http://downloads.likethought.com/beta.zip
Please try the tutorials again with this version and you should be able to make more progress. In particular, you should now see 2 control points when adding a curve to a pen vector.
Also, sorry about the problems with searching in the forums. Unfortunately, the forum software is a package that I didn't develop, but I'll see if there's anything I can do to improve this.

[janiner]

Thanks, but I bit the bullet and bought CS5, so now I have the real Illustrator to take through the tutorials. I'm sure this change will benefit other new users, though.