Review of Geekatplay™ Studio

The Geekatplay.com website is a relatively new website chocked full of great free tutorials and products, especially for E-on Software's Vue. They also offer services for video production, graphic design, and web development. It, also, is comprised of very helpful people and great service.

I was first introduced to Geekatplay through their free Vue tutorials. Most of the tutorials are in video format while the first two are in print form. As of this writing (October 2007), there are 27 in all. One of the aspects that is unique about these tutorials is that they can be done without purchasing any products; however, one can purchase materials, called Booster Packs, to go along with them for very low prices. The Booster Packs cost $3.95 and will apply to a number of the tutorials. You can, also, purchase the Mega Pack which contains over 288 MB of material for $24.94. I purchased the Mega Pack and have found it to be an excellent investment. It includes all six Booster Packs plus additional content. Two other packs that I purchased and found had great content are: Robo World Pack and Building Construction Kit. Below is a very quick scene I constructed in Vue 6 Infinite using only content from those three packs. The content is good and you can have a lot of fun with it.

The Vue tutorials relate to Vue 5 and 6. They deal with a variety of subjects from creating brushes to negative lighting to cel shading. I had never played around with brushes for creating terrains before. Their tutorials opened a whole new avenue of exploration for me. The tutorials are beautifully presented and very clear. While I stated that you can buy the materials to create the specific tutorial, you don't have to because you can apply the information in the tutorials to the materials that you already have. But having a Booster Pack or the Mega Pack or one of the other packs is very helpful.

Below are some examples of screen captures of the final results of the Geekatplay tutorials. The first is from tutorial #20 Cel Shading. This one relates to animation and creating cartoon-like figures; however, I see many possibilities for it in still work.

The next example is from tutorial #15 Alpha Plane Forest.

The last example is from tutorial #17 Negative Lighting in Vue 5 and 6. This tutorial also shows how to use a brush to create the volcano.

If you have not been to Geekatplay, look them up. The tutorials are free, the products that I have purchased are excellent, and the service I received was excellent, also.