Website Layout Toolbox Get the FlatPix UI Kit for only $7 - Learn More or Buy Now Laying out a website is obviously one of the most important parts of the design process. In this post we’ll feature a number of helpful resources, tutorials and articles for various aspects of layouts: Tutorials for Creating Website Layouts in Photoshop: These 20+ tutorials will show you different ways to design the layout of your site and each one takes a slightly different approach. How to Create a Sleek and Textured Web Layout in Photoshop Create a Nature-Inspired Painted Background in Photoshop Create a Professional Portfolio Design in 17 Easy Steps Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch Watercolored Design Studio Blog Layout Create a Web Design with Grungy Paper Chocolate Pro WordPress Style Layout Making the “Clean Grunge” Blog Design Website Gallery Layout Design Design a Fresh Blog Theme on the 960 Grid Company/Business/Software Web Layout Create a Business PSD Layout in Less Than 10 Minutes Design a Sleek Real Estate Website
UV Sets in Maya by Andrew Klein Linking to UV Sets with the UV Relationship Editor The purpose of this demo is to provide an educational framework for two common uses of the UV-Centric, UV linking, Relationship Editor. First of all, a little context: Why would we want to go through this trouble of establishing UV sets? What are some of the common uses? And, what is a UV set? Well, in general, UV sets are a function inside Maya which allow for the easy selection of UVs. Creating UV Sets that don't Need the Relationship Editor UV sets are created for the purpose of applying separate texture maps to different parts of a model, often as seen below, with the case of game-ready characters for a head and a body. Select the first group of faces, in this case the body, and choose "Copy UVs to UV set > Copy to New UV Set" option under the Polygons menu in the UV texture editor; call it Body. In this menu, return to map 1; you will again see both parts. You can toggle back and forth at any time with the UV Sets menu. Fig. 01 Fig. 02
Programming Methodology - Download free content from Stanford 60 Photography Links You Can’t Live Without « CameraPorn Create a Planet in Photoshop Hope you enjoy this tutorial, specialy written for photoshopcafe.com by raul bermudez ,elemento.1 Step 1 First start by creating a new document. I will recommend at least 1000×1000. Create a black background, then on a new layer do a perfect circle, (marquee tool & hold shift). Step 2 On the new layer fill the circle with the base color of your planet in this case Orange, you can pick any color you like Step 3 Duplicate it 2 more times and give the following names: Step 4 Disable your shadow layer for now and select your atmosphere layer, go to layer styles and enter the settings as shown here. Don’t forget to set the layer mode to “screen” Step 5 Now you should have something like this: Step 6 Now, we are going to add texture, please be creative take your own pictures (or find royalty free ones online) to create your planets. (Note that all NASA images are public domain) Step 7 We will use the orange texture at this stage. Step 8 If you followed the steps right you should have something like this.
Best Tutorials For Cinematic Visual Effects | Tutorials Advertisement Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book Inclusive Design Patterns, we explore how to craft flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort. It doesn’t matter whether you are a designer, a developer, an artist or an amateur learner – at some point you need to improve the quality of the original picture or video. In this post we present best vfx tutorial for visual effects in movies (with Adobe After Effects, 3DSMax etc.) that will hopefully teach you how to create impressive videos which can be used for your presentations or websites. Further Reading on SmashingMag: Link Best VFX Tutorials For Visual Video Effects Link The 007 Intro5 This tutorial shows you how to achieve the classic introduction of James Bond films using only basic After Effects plug-ins. Energy9 Create a complex energy scene with CC particle world in Adobe After Effects. Aurora Borealis Learn how to create the Northern Lights.
NormalMap What is a Normal Map? A Normal Map is usually used to fake high-res geometry detail when it's mapped onto a low-res mesh. The pixels of the normal map each store a normal, a vector that describes the surface slope of the original high-res mesh at that point. When a normal map is applied to a low-poly mesh, the texture pixels control the direction each of the pixels on the low-poly mesh will be facing in 3D space, creating the illusion of more surface detail or better curvature. Tangent-Space vs. Normal maps can be made in either of two basic flavors: tangent-space or object-space. Tangent-space normal map Predominantly-blue colors. Maps can be reused easily, like on differently-shaped meshes. Maps can be tiled and mirrored easily, though some games might not support mirroring very well. Easier to overlay painted details. Easier to use image compression. More difficult to avoid smoothing problems from the low-poly vertex normals (see Smoothing Groups and Hard Edges). Object-space normal map
Five whys, Part 1: The startup immune system Nivi · November 14th, 2008 “When confronted with a problem, have you ever stopped and asked why five times?” – Taiichi Ohno Summary: Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. This is a guest post by Eric Ries, a founder of IMVU and an advisor to Kleiner Perkins. Taiichi Ohno was one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System. When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. Ask why five times whenever you discover a defect. Here’s how it works. Why was the website down? Make five corrections. So far, this isn’t very different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Bring the site back up.Remove the bad code.Help so-and-so understand why his code doesn’t work as written.Train so-and-so in the principles of TDD.Change the new engineer orientation to include TDD. Making corrections builds your startup immune system.
Sharpen Photo Like a Pro in Photoshop There are a hundred ways to improve your photos using Photoshop photo editing. In addittion to color correction, the other important aspect of photo editing that you should be looking at is how to sharpen images. Photoshop offers you extraordinary degree of control over the sharpness of your image. One built-in option is to use the Unsharp Mask filter, which has been present even in the older versions of Photoshop. With the introduction of Photoshop CS2, however, Smart Sharpen filter which gives better results and greater control over the Unsharp Mask filter becomes a favorite of most users, especially photographers, to sharpen images. Interested? First Step: Convert your photograph from RGB or CMYK to Lab. Second Step: Open the channel palette. Third Step: Choose the channel There are three channels: L stands for lightness which is what you get when you convert to grayscale; A is Red to Green, B is Blue to Yellow. Fifth Step: Convert the image back to RGB.
Make a Planet This tutorial should step you through making a simple, yet realistic-looking planet using Adobe Photoshop 7, and ONLY Adobe Photoshop 7. We're working small here, so keep in mind that the larger you work, the harder the planet will be to create (just a bit more work as size increases). To complete this tutorial and match what I'm showing you in the sample images, you'll need this image for a texture, so save it in a safe spot, we'll get to it in a moment. A thank you to Kyle Nervik of Bougal.com, who helped me figure out how to best relate my methods to a general audience by being my development guinea pig (sitting on AIM for over an hour, listening to me argue with myself, and offering suggestions). Subscribe to our newsletter and get useful tutorials and huge bundles with design freebies once in two weeks: Get Notified of New Posts Via Email Start with a plain black image, 500x500 pixels. Fill it black, and leave the marquee active (do not deselect). This is now our "planet" layer.
Outstanding Website Background Guide: 60+ Impressive Resources | Noupe Topics Start » Design » Outstanding Website Background Guide: 60+ Impressive Resources Design Outstanding Website Background Guide: 60+ Impressive Resources April 19th, 2009 by Noupe Editorial Team FacebookTwitterGoogle PlusPinterestStumbleUponWhatsAppLinkedInXingE-Mail Web designers compete to impress visitors with distinctive and appealing visual elements. In this post you will see how web designers carefully created background images to achieve their goals in engaging and facilitating the design elements and content. We have hand-picked different background image trends and tutorials you can use to create an amazing background images for your upcoming website design. As always when you’re dealing with freebies, be sure to read the owner’s instructions and license info. Great Tutorials for getting the perfect Background – Ultimate Guide for Creating High Quality Textures A step by step guide for creating amazing textures. – Create an Awesome Background Using Patterns – Realistic Stone Texture 2lip
Four-Way Tiling October 2010 (this is derived from a post I made on the Spiral Graphics forum) Four-way tiling is a texturing trick that allows a texture to be rotated 90° and/or flipped on adjacent polygons, but still tile with itself. The texture is edited so that each of the four edges will tile with each other. The benefits of this are to hide the tiling artifacts from features that repeat again and again across the surface, and it allows the artist to use less texture memory because they don't have to use multiple textures for the same effect. I found the 4-way-tiled edge needs to be very thin to minimize the Rorshach effect, and it often needs hand-editing, to mask in more in some areas than in others, so for example a certain mirrored feature can be extended further into one corner than in the others. It might be better if you break up the mask with a noise function, creating a rougher edge. Original texture, that tiles in the traditional way (made with Filter Forge) Result:
30 free programming eBooks - citizen428.blog() Since this post got quite popular I decided to incorporate some of the excellent suggestions posted in the comments, so this list now has more than 50 books in it. BTW: I’m not very strict on the definition of “ebook”, some of them are really just HTML versions of books. [UPDATED: 2012-01-18] Learning a new programming language always is fun and there are many great books legally available for free online. Lisp/Scheme:Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic ComputationHow to Design ProgramsInterpreting Lisp (PDF, suggested by Gary Knott)Let Over LambdaOn LispPractical Common LispProgramming in Emacs LispProgramming Languages. Ruby:The Bastards Book of Ruby (suggested by Dan Nguyen)Clever Algorithms (suggested by Tales Arvelos)Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in RubyLearn Ruby the Hard WayLearn to ProgramMacRuby: The Definitive GuideMr. Erlang:Concurrent Programming in ErlangLearn You Some Erlang for Great Good