graphics cinema

95 Beautiful Business Card Designs

2010-07-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Business Card are commonly used these days to network with all sort of different people. Anybody who owns their own business should definitely have their own business cards. Even if you don’t own your own business that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have business cards. To expand yourself out in the working field, i suggest getting some personal business cards. This collection is aimed to inspire you to create your own. All of these cards were all hand picked based on quality and creativity from creattica. Go ahead and look around, and get those creativity juices flowing in your head.

Secrets of Successful Blogging Revealed

2010-07-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

Blogging redefines the future of the web and the internet. In fact, whether you like it or not, it gradually and continuously sets the trend in the websphere. Why do these happen? Well, hundreds of thousands of web sites today contain “blog” pages. Besides, another hundreds of thousands of web sites in the websphere are “dedicated” blog sites. With this overwhelming figure, it will be inevitable that in the future, blogging would become a widely accepted and highly paid profession.

Successful blog sites

Image by shutterstock

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Since the early conception of a web log (blog), several websites and content editors adopted the dynamic and challenging concept of putting a seemingly personal activities, communication threads, ideas and ideology, concepts and visions, and all related personal experiences and stuff for a public view.

Successful blog sites are definitely “dedicated” blog sites. This means that the websites’ contents and media are purely regulated and maintained by an individual or a group of individuals. The contents of these sites are by majority, concentrated and strategically categorized.

Other non-dedicated blog sites are basically corporate sites or even sites for web services and other stuff with a special link for blog sections. This further explains how blogging affects the corporate sector in terms of web contents.

Why blog anyway?

Image by shutterstock

Generally, there is no finite measure for the success of a blog site in particular or for any website for that matter. However, goals can be set prior to designing, conceptualizing, building, and putting a website to life. Thence, achieving these preset goals will eventually measure the blog site’s success.

These preset goals can certainly vary from one blogger to another. However, there are several goals why we need to build a blog site that is worth considering here:

Gain Popularity

The internet is a global opportunity for maximum exposure. This is the ultimate media where possibility for extreme popularity is boundless. Gaining the so coveted online appreciation is basically a measure of success especially for a blog site where the expected audience or visitors are not limited to gender, age or location. The more popular your site is, the more successful and effective blogger you are. Thus, bloggers aim to be popular among their respective trend or industry.

Online popularity however is so elusive and there are no definite criteria to measure when you actually achieved it or not. Moreover, several programs and web services are available to help a blog site gain so much popularity.

Build Reputation

Television broadcasters and channel newscasters in various stations that are known internationally, like CNN for instance, undeniably built a good worldwide name while performing their job with excellence. This is true with bloggers as well.

For instance, you are a skilled engine mechanic. You have gained several years of shop experience in your local community where you achieved excellence basically on engine repair. With just a simple blog about how you do things, how you diagnose engine problems, and how you successfully fix them and prevent them from reoccurring, thousands of people from all over the world who might come across your site may find your information very helpful.

From time to time, they will definitely visit your site in the hope of getting some help every time they get in trouble with their car engines. As a result, you will no longer be a local celebrity for engine repairs but a self-made authority as well when it comes to engine troubles.

Generate Income

Having a blog site is precisely an opportunity to build a passive income system. Basically, this income comes from advertisers in many forms.

Direct advertisers pay you in order for their ad to be placed on specific part of your site. On the other hand, several ad networks like Google, Yahoo and many others, can dynamically place relevant ads based on the content of your site by using their ad-generating script. With this scheme, your earnings will be based on ad impression and ad clicks.

Extend Help

One noble motive for a blog is simply to extend some sort of help to the online community. By spending a lot of times writing articles detailing a particular helpful procedure, thousands and even millions of people who ever come across your site facing the problem that you are blogging about, may be relieved of their pains and frustrations by simply following your instructions and stop their tiring and risky trial-and-error attempts. Posting self-made videos in your blog site describing how things are done are even greater ways in helping others who are faced with similar scenarios.

Whatever your goals in your blogging are, achieving those goals is every blogger’s ultimate goal. But in order to realize your goals, here are some tips that will surely help you achieve success in your blogging course.

Major Keys to Blogging Success

Image by shutterstock

Know your purpose

Prior to setting up your site with all your preferred design in mind, the very first and crucial part to decide is the purpose of the entire blog site. Will you be blogging about politics, health concerns, environmental consciousness, safety practices, IT trends, gadgets, entertainment, or any subject of your expertise?

These things define your purpose. This purpose defines everything. In order to be successful, your site should not talk about all these things at once. Focus on something that you are an expert of. You purpose will serve as your key guide in everything that you do with your site: from selecting a domain name, drafting a tagline or a site slogan, choosing the site mood, defining color swatches for your theme, or even in listing terms or keywords in your blog site’s taxonomy.

With a clearly defined purpose, you are on the right path towards blogging success.

Know your audience

You are blogging for other people and not for yourself. This is one major fact that should guide you while creating the contents of your site. However, the online community is composed of people with diverse interest and background. Sure enough, they differ not only in their geographic locations; they also vary in many areas like language preference, age, gender, culture and beliefs.

It is hard to serve this online community of total diversity. This is the major reason why you should blog for the right audience. You can then plan for the right target. Thus, if you clearly know whom you are blogging for and only consider them in writing your site contents, you can definitely play with their interests and feed them with the right information.

You cannot please everybody as the saying goes. But serving the selected few among the vast online audience is quite measurable.

Categorize

The internet is so full of information. With almost everything that pops out of your mind, try to ask a search engine about it and you will certainly be amazed on what the internet has to offer you. These search results are definitely influenced by how you build your site and write your contents.

Categorize the contents of your site. This would help you in building trust and confidence among your visitors. Don’t mess up. With the use of categories in organizing your site’s contents, your visitors will surely enjoy lingering in your blogs while navigating with your links.

Categories also help with search engine optimization. Like human beings, search bots find it easier to crawl and index your site especially when their algorithm can predict which data are placed where. As a rule, exerting extra efforts in building a highly categorized blog site pays off since your visitors would definitely have a better user experience.

Be interactive

With the advent of the new web technologies, it is now easier to manage a dynamic blog site. Today, content management systems offer bloggers a wide array for interactivity.

An interactive blog site fully engages its visitors. This would mean success from the blogger’s point of view since an engaged visitor simply means guarantee for future revisits. Interactivity in a site means keeping visitors for a longer stay and keeping them from coming back in the future.

If your blog site has these interactive features, it is not enough though. Putting a bunch of contents and leaving them for your visitors is not a good practice. If your site is interactive, you should be interactive as well. This is to keep your site appear alive and up-to-date. How? Well, there are many simple ways:

• moderate your forum sections regularly

• answer inquiries promptly

• Feedback on comments promptly and regularly

Be specific

Blogs are built to inform. This information could be persuading, enhancing, teaching or entertaining. However, you would lose its essence when you wander. Hence, effective blogging should be precise and specific.

Blog entries or article contents should speak only about a single subject. This is to avoid misleading visitors from one point to another. This is also to prevent them from being bored that would eventually lead them to the exit door.

So the rule is: be specific so your visitors will be engaged with your blogs and they will keep visiting your site from time to time.

Be on time, all the time

The world is changing fast. So are the areas or subjects you are blogging about.

One way of getting a high ranking for search engines is to have regular posts at seemingly regular intervals. This is because search bots are logging your blog site’s activities in their e very crawl. The more active your site is, the more frequent these bots crawl and re-index your site’s contents, and the higher your site’s ranking is among search engines.

Increase your buffer

In order to post blog contents at a regular interval at all times, you should consider having a content buffer. This is especially useful for blog sites that are maintained by a single blogger.

A content buffer is a set of blog entries ready for posting at a scheduled interval. This is to ensure that content is posted regularly in order to keep your site’s activity index high. For instance, if you normally post 5 blog entries every day, then raising your content buffer to 10 blog entries is achievable and reasonable enough. This is a two-day buffer. Thus, in unwanted cases when you fail to write contents, you still have 2 more days to spare.

Design matters

A plain text filled site is dull, boring, and dead. This is because out there in the websphere are plenty beautifully designed websites waiting to be explored.

When a person surfs the internet, it is likely that he or she prefers to browse beautifully crafted sites over those that are plain and ugly. Your site may be full of informative and highly engaging contents but it will lose its value when it is not coupled with a catching design.

Explore with colors in your themes. Utilize engaging photos to attract visitors. Indulge in handy flash animations to promote dynamism. Present your blog site beautifully to stay competitive.

Know SEO

It is impossible to reach everyone online and ask them to visit your blog. Generally, majority of your unique visitors will be coming from a search engine like Yahoo or Google searching for some keywords that literally lead to your site link. Thus, the higher ranking your site gets from leading search engines, the higher your chances are from getting people to visit your site. This is why you need to consider Search Engine Optimization.

In order for your site to be optimized for search engines, you should consider the following:

• choose the right combination of keywords for your contents

• use descriptive tags in all posts

• always provide an alternate text for your images

• post your blog site’s links in different websites and forums

• don’t spam

Build Lists

Email marketing is a common way to promote a site. Your blog site is not an exception. Try building a mailing list for your site updates. This is normally in the form of newsletters where visitors can subscribe to keep them updated.

Every time you create a newsletter issue and send them to your mailing list on a scheduled basis, it is guaranteed by Pareto’s Principle that 80% of the subscribers will take a peek of your site updates and 20% will ignore them. Or it could also be the opposite. But nevertheless, you get visitors back on your site.

Social networks can help

Image by shutterstock

With the advent of social networks like Facebook, Friendster, and many other that are known to man, you can leverage your marketing of your site. The idea is simple. Get connected with a bunch of enthusiasts in the social network and regularly post updates and links of your blog site. Surely this will produce another set of unique visitors.

Moreover, when promoting your blog site through these social networks, you should always consider their respective Terms of Services so as not to violate their rules.

Tips to Choose the Best Wordpress Theme for Your Blog

2010-07-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Many people know that blogging is one of the important characteristics of the new web trends and web 2.0 technologies. It allows any individual or company to build active friendly relations between the publisher of the blog and the readers. Blogging can be used for many purposes such as expressing your own ideas and spreading it to the world or promoting your company and using it to support your business by building better relations between you and your readers.

Recently, blogging business is proved to provide profits and becomes one of the methods to drive revenues through the web. Most bloggers are not developer or designers. They are just talking about what they think or what they love to talk about. Blogging is dependent on a Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress or MovableType … etc.

These blogging CMS solutions provide an easy method to blog for non-technical internet users without requiring reading any developing tools; one of the most used CMS solutions for blogging is Wordpress . Since most Wordpress blogs have similar features based on the CMS, choosing the best theme is one of the most important tasks to make your blog attractive and to serve the content well. Although you can create the theme through custom design, there are advantages to getting a ready-made theme, especially for bloggers that don’t have experience in design or developing. Using a ready-made theme is also cheaper than a custom-built theme.

In this article, we will learn how to choose the best theme for your blog and what themes will suit your blog best.

Why Wordpress?

Although there are other blogging systems, Wordpress provides an optimum blogging solution due to many reasons such as:

It provides a free solution for blogger that seek a way to give their voice and ideas a place on the new web trends.

Wordpress is an easy to learn and use solution that needs little training. All you have to do is to install it and navigate through it to start blogging on the web. As a designer with no coding experience, I was able to get started very quickly.
Wordpress is an open-source solution. When you search for Wordpress resources, you will find a huge number of themes, assets and tutorials to use Wordpress and how to customize it to your needs.
Wordpress is compatible with many servers and you can find it ready to install on many servers by default. It can be used with most servers on both cheap hosting and expensive hosting packages.
You can fully customize Wordpress by adding features or modules through variety number of Wordpress plugins that are everywhere on the web.
These reasons promote Wordpress to be the best CMS solution for blogging for both professional bloggers and casual bloggers who write as a hobby.

What are you blogging about?

Choosing your blog topic is based on two factors, the first is related to you and your capabilities and the second is based on the needs of the market . When you first think of creating your first blog, you have to think about your capabilities, what can you excel in and provide useful information to the readers and interact with them regarding? For example, many graphic designers think about creating blogs to provide design tutorials and articles related to a certain field. Actually, it can be a method to gain profits and promote designer skills as described in my article Quick Guide for Freelancers to do Well in Recession.

The idea behind choosing a topic that you can cover well is that blogging is a continuous process, you need to post on a regular basis to keep the relation between you and your readers. You also need to provide unique resources and ideas to your readers which are useful in their life and career.

The second factor is related to the market and how many users take interest in your blog topic. The more popular topics drive more traffic to your site and give your blog a better chance to gain traffic and revenues. Popular topics can have many competing blogs in the web, but you still have the chance to drive more traffic to your site by providing unique ideas and topics that are not covered anywhere else.

Also, you can search for the topic you would like to blog about and see its popularity and how other bloggers cover this topic. When you find some topics, you can see how people search for it and its searching volume using Google Keyword tool.

What services will you provide in your blog?

Before choosing your blog, it is very important to plan what services you will add to your blog because you will need to find the best theme that also works well with the user interface of your services. For example, if you plan to add a discussion forum to your blog, you need to choose a wider theme that can fit as a container for your forum

Choose your blog theme

Wordpress is similar to other CMS systems when it comes to the design of the site , it is based on design templates which are themes. Choosing the theme that suits your site topic is very important for the success of your blog and will help you in using the right functions to serve your content and readers as well.

Some Wordpress themes are suitable for company sites that are based on Wordpress, others are more suitable for heavy content blogs such as news and technology blogs. After choosing your blog topic, you can search for the themes that suit your blog through a huge number of themes on the web. Some themes are free and can be downloaded with a simple mouse click and others are paid which must be purchased. Below are some resources for free and paid themes that you can start with:

Free Wordpress themes:

http://wparchive.com/

http://www.freewpthemes.net/

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

http://www.themes2wp.com/

http://www.skinpress.com/

http://www.woothemes.com/category/themes/free/

http://www.themelab.com/free-wordpress-themes/

http://www.templatesbrowser.com/wordpress-themes/

http://www.themesplice.com/

http://www.themewp.net/

Paid Wordpress themes:

http://www.premiumwp.com/

http://www.freshsites.com/wordpress-theme/

http://www.studiopress.com/

http://www.elegantthemes.com/

http://www.nattywp.com/

http://themeforest.net/

http://www.woothemes.com/

As we mention above, you have to choose the theme that fits with your blog topic and its amount of content. Here are some examples of Wordpress themes that are suitable for specific blogging topics.

Corporate Wordpress themes

These themes are suitable for corporate sites where most companies provide pages about their services and products as well as a blog to provide direct communication with the readers. The below themes are designed for corporate sites that also provide a blog

Portfolio Wordpress themes

Portfolio sites focus more on the images and work examples along with the blog capabilities. So, portfolio sites include the ability to showcase work.

News and magazines Wordpress themes

These blogs include a lot of information that require frequent updates and display a lot of content on the homepage. These themes suit larger amounts of content.

Clean style Wordpress themes

If you like to give full focus on content, these types of themes include a very light amount of graphic elements and design to let the reader concentrate more on the content.

Design Wordpress themes

Designer and design lovers seek not only design content, but also love to see creative site designs or blog designs that provide them with unique experiences when they visit the site or the blog.

Personal blog Wordpress themes

These include the common functions and structure of the blog as we all know it; it does not include specific features or special design that is directed to a certain type of reader. These are suitable for most blog topics.

Conclusion

Blogging is a very successful business and a great hobby to express yourself and spread your ideas to the world. Building your blog correctly and updating it frequently can turn it into a center point for web readers to get resources, ideas and information from you. Good planning is important to turn your blog into a successful experience that you can surely enjoy and benefit from.

Creative Image Coloring Photoshop Tutorial

2010-07-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

Creative Image Coloring Photoshop Tutorial

It is the time for a new how-to tutorial. Today’s Photoshop tutorial is about coloring an image using the Hue and Saturation and mask features in Photoshop. There are many methods that you can use to change the color image in Photoshop, but the Hue and Saturation are two of the methods that allow you to do the coloring easily and fast..

When you use the Hue and Saturation feature through the Adjustment layers in the Layers panel, you can give each part of the image different color. On another meaning, you can use the Adjustment layers in Photoshop to change the color of each element in the image separately.

However, in this tutorial, I have an image of a girl squeezing an orange. I will change the orange color to have multiple colors and change the girl mouth color to reflect the hue of the orange juice spilled colors in her mouth. Let us start by seeing how the images look before the effect and after the effect below.

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In this tutorial, I used images from Shutter stock photos for the girl holding an orange and an image for an orange juice splash. Below are the images that are used in this tutorial.

Image by shutterstock

Now, let us start by coloring the orange in the girl’s hand with different colors using the Adjustment layer with Hue and Saturation option.

Step1

In this step, we will color the left side of the orange with a violet color by following the steps below:

Open the girl image
In the Layers panel, click on the Adjustment layer icon in the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Hue/Saturation
In the Adjustment panel click on the Colorize icon to give the whole image one hue color scheme
Change the Hue value to 286, Saturation to 82 and Lightness to +38.

Step 2

The above step will change the whole image color to violet. However, we need only to change a part of the orange. So, we will create a mask over the image to hide the violet color on the whole image. Then, we will reveal only the part that we would like

to show using the brush tool as following:

Select the mask thumbnail in the Adjustment layer
Fill it will a black color to hide the adjustment effect from the whole image.
Select the Brush tool and change the color to white
Start painting using the Brush tool over the part that you would like to reveal in the orange. The result should be as below:

Step 3

Repeat the above step to create a green part in the orange by using different Hue/Saturation values. Set the Hue to 89, Saturation to 73 and Lightness to +13. You can extend the green hue to color the orange juice drops from the orange to give it more realistic effect. The result should be as following:

Step4

Create another part with red color using the above steps and set the Hue to zero, Saturation to 84 and Lightness to +19. You can also display some red hue on some spills and over the girl face to give the impression, as if she were having some of the red juice on her face.

Step5

Add another blue part with the values Hue 211, Saturation 90 and Lightness +25, so the result is as below:

Step6

Now, we will change the mouse color to have one of the colors in the orange, for example, the violet color. You can do this as below:

While the girl layer is selected, create a new Adjustment layer using the Adjustment layer icon in the Layers panel and set it to Hue/Saturation
Change the Hue to 271 and Saturation to 78
Using the same idea that we applied above, create a mask on the adjustment layer and fill it with black color. And use the Brush tool to paint over the areas that you want to color. In this example, we will color the mouse except the tongue as we will color it with the green color as seen below.

Step7

Repeat the above example to give the hair a green color as you can see below.

Step8

Now, we will add some more of the colored juice flow by using part of the second stock image. In this image select the flowing juice part and copy it our example document.

Step9

Select the white areas around it and remove juice flow and delete it. Also, make the juice flow match the area between the orange and the image below. You can also flip it horizontally to fit more with the area and edit it as below:

Step10

Select the orange flow layer and Choose Adjustment> Hue/Saturation from the image menu to change its hue to meet with the green color in the orange.

Step11

Applying the above concept to color the image elements, add different colors to the flowing juice to have more than one flowing colors as below.

Now, we reached the end of the tutorial steps and you can download the Photoshop source file for this tutorials with the layers by clicking the button below.

Conclusion

Photoshop is a real powerful tool to edit images and add effects on it. However, the Hue and Saturation feature enables you create many effects on the whole image or part of it. In this tutorial, I want to show one of the image editing tips in Photoshop that we can do it using the Hue and Saturation color adjustment.

Finally, I hope you like this tutorial and would love to hear your comments and ideas about it

Top 15 SEO Blogs To Follow If You Want To Brush Up Your SEO Knowledge

2010-07-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

Top 15 SEO Blogs To Follow If You Want To Brush Up Your SEO Knowledg

For all we know, Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, is used for obtaining the right keywords when we search for something on the internet. But only few of us know is that SEO is used in obtaining rankings for a site under relevant keyword phrases.

SEO has several uses not only in business, but also in making research at school, or at work. Admit it, if this was not invented, you would really be having difficulties in searching and of course, a good SEO means, you won’t be having difficulties and the saves you time looking for what you want.

Following are some of SEO blogs that I consider in the top 15 of my list. And after you go through with them, the more you will appreciate about SEOs.

Seomoz

Seomoz is a website that offer tons of SEO tools and information. Some of the tools are free, and some of them require premium subscription. Their SEO blog is updated frequently and you will always find quality articles over there.

Seobook

SEO Book is not only a blogging site, but also offers certain training programs, not only to web professionals, but also to marketing professors. It also offers exclusive community forum as a value added service. Try this out!

Small Business Search Marketing

This Small Business Search Marketing site is designed for small businesses that want to compete with big businesses in terms of advertisements and promotions of their products and services at low costs. So if you’re one of those beginners, this is really helpful to you.

Bruce Clay Inc

Bruce Clay Inc., offers different kinds of SEO services such as trainings and consulting services. It caters not only to small and medium businesses, but also to large multi-national companies. You can check this one out to find out more about this site.

TopRank

Top Rank Online Marketing Blog has introduced search engine marketing and optimization since December 2003, together with other digital marketing and public relations topics. This site has been promoting and giving tips for certain SEO topics that can help you in improving your own businesses and can compete with other competitors.

SEOchat

SEO chat has forums and chat tools, that will guide you for more information how to configure your websites and learn new ways in configuring your website. From this, you can also interact and join with the forums that you are interested in.

Cre8pc

This site is not only in specializing SEOs, but is also relating it to other website-related informations that will optimize and improve your website. This is a very useful tool so check this out!

SEO by the sea

In SEO by the sea website, not only this offers Search Engine Optimization services, but also Internet Marketing, Consulting and Research services. If you want to improve and make your website look professional, this website is the one that you need! So try it!

Mr-seo

This is one of the best Search Engine Optimization websites that will help you in improving your website. It offers articles, tips, and strategies of online marketing. You really have to see this!

Phoenixrealm

Phoenixrealm is not only an SEO informative website but also a web design news for begginners and intermediate web designers. In this website, you will find informative and useful tips and informations for Search Engine Optimizations that will be very useful for you.

Neuromarketing

This is one unique website where not only does it talk about web marketing, but also about sciences, particularly brain research and ethical dilemmas. Check this out and see for yourself!

Best SEO Blog

Best SEO Blog is a latest search engine marketing website with new tactics and techniques in making your website marketable. This website has great authors who have been writing articles about Search Engine Optimizations. See it for yourself!

Quantum SEO Labs

Quantum SEO Labs is a simple website for Search Engine Optimization for serious webmasters and designers. When you open this website, you will notice that it talks more about business, and when we say business, that includes marketing your website and making profit out of it, right?

Search Engine Roundtable

With Search Engine Roundtable, you will find the most interesting topics about Search Engine Marketing that will help you save time in looking for what you really want to find. See for yourself and you would know that this is one of the best SEO blogs you’ll ever know of!

Traffick

Traffick’s first name was “PortalHub” and as it grew to reinvent, it changed its name to “Traffick”. This started as a hobby only and became a more useful website helping businesses to earn more profit and be competitive in the search engine market.

Photoshop Displace Filter

2010-07-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

-We are going to use the Displace Filter to map one texture to the contours of another image.

-Example is wood mapped to a person's face.

20 Amazing Tools and Software for 3D Designers

2010-07-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

3D is a very large field in the computer graphic industry. Actually, it has its own empire inside computer graphic. 3D has alot of specializations and fields that is concern with every topic related to create a 3D content such as modeling, light, texturing and rendering…etc.

The 3D industry has alot of 3D tools and applications that vary depending on its usage and focus. For example, you can find tools that only specialized in modeling and other tools that can help you create a complete 3D project but you need to depend on other tools to finalize.
The following is a collection of some of the most popular 3D design packages, for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Most of these programs are very complicated for the beginner and also very expensive. However, it is a good idea to think for the best software to start with and read reviews from different experts about it before taking the decision to purchase it.

3D Studio Max

It’s a tool of choice for quickly generating realistic characters, seamless CG effects,

jaw-dropping games, and top-quality film and television content. Enhanced toolsets

enable you to create your 3D environment the way you want, manage complex scenes,

and take advantage of improved software interoperability and pipeline-integration support.

SoftImage

Softimage is a 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and compositing solution optimized

for artist efficiency. The Autodesk Softimage 2010 release boasts accelerated performance,

greater data handling, the Autodesk Face Robot facial animation toolset,

as well as new tools to help manage scene complexity.

Maya

Autodesk Maya 2010 software is the first release to unify the Autodesk Maya Complete 2009

and Autodesk Maya Unlimited 2009 feature sets, advanced matchmoving capabilities,

and high dynamic range compositing into a single affordable package. Also included for a

complete CG workflow are 5 additional mental ray for Maya batch rendering nodes and the

Autodesk Backburner network render queue manager.

LightWave 3D

LightWave is a complete modeling, rendering and animation system. Used extensively in

broadcast television production, film visual effects, video game development, print graphics

and visualization, LightWave is responsible for more artists winning Emmy Awards than

any other 3D application.

Cinema 4D

CINEMA 4D’s intuitive interface and logical workflow make it possible for those new to 3D

artistry to dive in and be productive quickly. CINEMA 4D’s state-of-the-art architecture

means it is always the first to benefit from new technologies and advancements For those

artists whose work demands more than the basic application, MAXON provides numerous

seamlessly-integrated modules.

Poser

Professional 3D Figure Design & Animation software. Poser Pro offers quickly animating with

pre-rigged characters inside of host applications such as Autodesk’s 3ds Max and Maya,

and Maxon’s CINEMA 4D. And professional-level application integration as well as a 64-Bit

render engine and network rendering support. The industry standard COLLADA data exchange

format combined with content built specifically for Poser Pro.

Zbrush

ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry

with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush

offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. With an arsenal of features

that have been developed with usability in mind, ZBrush creates a user experience that

feels incredibly natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist within. With the ability to

sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows you to create limited only by your imagination.

mudbox

Digital sculpting and texture painting software gives modelers and texture artists the

freedom to create 3D digital artwork as if they are working with clay and paint. Designed

by professional artists in the game, film, television, and design industries, Mudbox combines

a highly intuitive user interface with a powerful creative toolset of stencils and brushes to

help create ultra-realistic 3D characters, engaging environments, stylized props, and more.

Houdini

Houdini is a powerful 3D modeling and animation application used by professional 3D artists

from around the world. Using a production-proven node-based architecture, Houdini makes

it easy for artists to generate high-quality art that is easy to update as the needs of your

project evolves. Houdini now supports export of models and animations to .dts for use in

Torque Game Engine (TGE) or Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA).

RealFlow

RealFlow is a ground-breaking, state-of-the-art fluids and dynamics simulation tool, developed

by Next Limit Technologies for the simulation of fluids, water surfaces, rigid bodies, soft bodies

and fibres. The elements of the simulation use physical properties to control their behavior and

can interact with each other and react according to impulses, forces and accelerations.

Massive

Massive is the premier simulation and visualization solution system for generating and visualizing

realistic crowd behaviors and autonomous agent driven animation for a variety of industries,

including film, games, television, architecture, transportation, engineering, and robotics. Using

Massive, an animator, engineer or robot developer designs characters with a set of actions and

reactions to what is going on around them.

Vue

Vue 8 Infinite offers an all-around combination of unequaled scenery creation power, advanced

rendering & full-featured animation tools. Render your projects in rich, natural environments, with

hyper-realistic atmospheres and lighting. Vue 8 xStream environments seamlessly blend with your

3DS Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave or Cinema 4D scenes and animations. Access the power

of the world’s leading 3D scenery technology directly from within your favorite application!

Blender

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, has a relatively small installation size

available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Blender’s features

include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, cloth and softbody dynamics, modifier

based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing

system and Python for embedded scripting.

Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp Pro 7 is a suite of powerful features and applications for streamlining your

professional 3D workflow. Includes: SketchUp Pro 7: Create, modify and share 3D models.

LayOut 2: Create professional documents and presentations. Style Builder: Create custom,

sketchy-edge display Styles for SketchUp. Build models and add them to the 3D Buildings

layer in Google Earth and Google 3D Warehouse – A searchable, online repository of 3D

models where you can find anything you need and share your models with the world.

Modo

Modo delivers the next evolution of 3D modeling, painting and rendering in a single integrated

and accelerated package for the Mac and PC. And now, modo is a true end-to-end solution

that includes true 3D sculpting tools, animation and network rendering! More than just features,

modo is a truly elegant integration of technology, raw horsepower and refined workflow.

Daz3D

DAZ Studio is a free, feature rich 3D figure design and 3D animation tool that enables anyone

to create stunning digital imagery. This is the perfect tool to design unique digital art and

animation using virtual people, animals, props, vehicles, accessories, environments and more.

Simply select your subject and/or setting, arrange accessories, setup lighting, and begin

creating beautiful artwork.

Swift 3D

Swift 3D is the only 3D software to directly integrate with Flash through the Swift 3D File

Importer and SmartLayer Technology and exports to Microsoft XAML. Swift 3D’s toolset

and interface allow anyone to quickly create 3D content, while providing a full set of

advanced tools to grow into. Swift 3D is a powerful, easy-to-use 3D solution that delivers

high-quality results for an unbeatable price.

Bryce 3D

Make your scenes more realistic by combining imported animations with your Bryce 6 scenes

to create seamless productions of environments populated with human figures, animals and

other characters. Bryce 6 is the ideal 3D software addition to your image editing toolbox.

Now it is easier than ever to add artwork created in Bryce in conjunction with common image

editing programs to merge photos and 3D artwork for an unlimited degree of creativity.

Strata 3D

Strata, the company adding the power of 3D to the designer’s toolset, today released Strata

Foto 3D CX 2. This new version of Foto 3D makes it even easier to create 3D models from

photographs, allowing the use of image sets taken from video as well as still images. Foto 3D’s

patented technology has revolutionized model creation of real-world objects and version 2

takes this technology to another level.

Form Z

Form·Z is an award winning general purpose solid and surface modeler with an extensive set of

2D/3D form manipulating and sculpting capabilities, many of which are unique. It is an effective

design tool for architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, animators and

illustrators, industrial and interior designers, and all design fields that deal with the articulation

of 3D spaces and forms.

Intro to Mental Ray car paint and Unwraping

2010-07-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

Intro to Mental Ray car paint and Unwraping

-Mental Ray Render

-Mental Ray Materials

-Par paint material

-Unwrap UVW modifier

-Unwrap Tools

-Creating vinyls for the car in Photoshop

Animating A Run Cycle With Biped

2010-07-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

Animating A Run Cycle With Biped

-Create a run cycle with biped in 3D studio max.

-You will use the copy and past for poses.

-You will use Euler and Workbench to change the tangents of the biped animation.

30 iPad Applications You Should Have

2010-07-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

The idea behind iPad is that it takes your computer desktop to a new mobility concept when you have the freedom and space of computer screen merged with the mobility of mobile devices that you can take every where and use easily with multi-touch screen concept.

However, there are some applications that everyone use every where such as watching the news, videos, follow your friends’ twitter updates, take memos and more. You can easily install these applications on iPad and start taking it every where with you. Actually, iPad is suitable for such applications that its usage requires mobility and frequent updates. The iPad apps below includes some of the essential applications that are everyone use regularly.

Dragon Dictation

Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon® NaturallySpeaking® that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages. In fact, it’s up to five (5) times faster than typing on the keyboard.

World Atlas HD

Designed specifically for the iPad, National Geographic’s World Atlas HD puts our best maps in the palm of your hand.

Dictionary.com

This iPad dictionary and thesaurus includes more than 500 000 words and difinitions, and you can shake iPad to get randam words.

KAYAK Flights

KAYAK Flights brings the fast flight search functionality of the KAYAK web site to an app specifically made for iPad.With KAYAK, experience the best flight search in the world, right in your hands.

Brushes

rushes is a popular painting application designed from scratch for the iPhone and iPod touch. Paintings produced with Brushes have appeared on the cover of The New Yorker on numerous occasions. It has now been redesigned to take full advantage of the larger screen offered by the iPad. Featuring an advanced color picker, high quality brushes,

SketchBook Pro

If you love to draw and do sketches, this iPad version of Sketchbook can help you sketch drawings easily with your fingures.

eBay for iPad

Now, you can buy and sell through iPad using this eBay application.

Desktop Connect

This is an important application that allows you to connect to your computer from any where in the world using your iPad.

Bento for iPad

Organize all the details of your busy life in one iPad app! Bento for iPad comes with 25 ready-to-use database templates that can be easily customized to organize virtually any type of information you have.

Voice Memos for iPad

This application lets you take voice memos and add text to it.

iDisplay

iDisplay lets you display your computer screen on iPhone or iPad.

Netflix

Netflix on your iPad. Just download this free app and you can instantly watch TV shows & movies streaming from Netflix.

ABC Player

See you favorite ABC shows and videos on iPad.

iBooks

iBooks is an amazing way to download and read books. iBooks includes the iBookstore, where you can download the latest best-selling books or your favorite classics – day or night.

Yahoo! Entertainment

Get an interactive Program Guide that lets you plan your TV viewing, watch up-to-the-minute video, plus get handpicked news and entertainment with Yahoo!® Entertainment on your iPad™.

Pandora Radio

Pandora Radio is your own free personalized radio now available to stream music on your iPhone or iPad. Just start with the name of one of your favorite artists, songs or classical composers and Pandora will create a “station” that plays their music and more music like it.

NYT Editors’ Choice

Enjoy the award-winning journalism of The New York Times with the unique functionality and navigation of the iPad.

USA TODAY for iPad

The latest news stories, scores, weather and photos you’ve come to expect from USA TODAY are now available on iPad.

AP News

AP News is a breaking-news experience only for the iPad.

BBC News

Get the latest, breaking news from the BBC and our global network of journalists.

Bloomberg for iPad

Bring the power of the most trusted source for financial information to your iPad, along with tools to help you analyze the world’s markets.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences.

NewsRack

NewsRack is a full-featured RSS reader for iPhone and iPad with a unique interface.

Feeddler RSS Reader for iPad and iPhone

Feeddler is the most popular RSS reader for iPad and has been picked as a top iPad app:

AccuWeather.com Free for the iPad

The only weather application you’ll ever need for your iPad! Get detailed current conditions, a 15-day forecast, hourly weather details, radar, AccuWeather’s exclusive lifestyle forecasts, and weather videos.

TweetDeck for iPad

TweetDeck is an amazing way to staty connected with your Twitter follower. Now, you can use TweetDeck on your iPad.

AIM for iPad

AIM is redefining social networking – add a location to your status, post to your favorite social networks or chat directly with your Facebook friends. Get updates from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and more.

IM+

Porefessional version of AIM that let you connect with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Gtalk, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Myspace and more.

Loopt Pulse

Loopt Pulse on the iPad lets you explore places to go and things to do with your friends.

SCRABBLE for iPad

And finally, add some fun to your iPad by adding Scrabble game for iPad.

Photo Manipulate Tutorial Using Photoshop

2010-07-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

It is time for a new Photoshop tutorial; today’s tutorial is for a photo manipulation trick that is used in ads and posters. In this tutorial, we will see step by step how to put a giant baby in the middle of New York streets playing with part of the Chrysler building.

In this tutorial, we will be using Photoshop’s basic tools such as the new Quick Selection tool in Photoshop CS5, masks, and adjustment layers to create this effect. Also, we will use the Color Match feature to give all the images the same color tone for the background. The final result of the tutorial should be like below

As usual, let’s check the images that are used in the tutorial before going into the tutorial steps. These images are from Shutterstock.

Image by shutterstock

Image by shutterstock

Image by shutterstock

Now, let us start with the first step in our tutorial that I hope you enjoy.

Step1

Open the kid’s image and select around the kid using the quick selection tool. The new quick selection tool provides an easy method to select objects with accuracy and better results. Select the Quick Selection tool and drag around the kid and you can increase or decrease the size of the selection brush using the Ctrl+ { and Ctrl+} (Cmd +{ and Cmd+} in mac). Some times, the selection goes over parts that you do not want to select. However, you can switch between the plus and minus icon on the top Properties bar to add to the selection or remove areas from it.

Step2

Convert the selection by choosing Select > Inverse to select the kid only. You can refine the selection by clicking the Refine button in the Properties bar.

In the Refine Edges dialog box, increase the Feather to be 2 px and the Shift Edge to -20. These values depend on the size of the document and how you want the selection to look.

Step3

Copy the kid to the street image and place him on the ground as in the image below

Step4

The kid colors are not matching the street image’s color tone. However, we will use the Image > Adjustment > Match Color

In the Match Color dialog box, select the Source to be the current file and the layer to be the street layer. The results may not be as expected. So, change the fade value to make the kid’s colors fit well with the background tone.

Step5

Now, we will create the shadow of the kid on the ground. Make a selection of the kid layer and change its feather (Shift+F6) to 5.

In a new layer, fill the selection with a black color, and flip the black color layer and free transform it to fall like a shadow for the kid on the ground as the image below. You can reduce its opacity from the Layers panel to lighten the shadow.

Step6

After adding the kid image to the scene, let us add the crashed car behind him. You can do this by selecting the crashed car and paste it in the scene behind the kid.

Step7

Use the Match color feature to give the car the same tone of the street as we did in step4.

Step8

Create a shadow for the car on the group by repeating the same technique we used to create the kid shadow in step 5.

Step9

Since the car is behind the kid, we need to have a shadow for the kid falling on the car. Make a selection of the kid layer by clicking on the layer thumb while holding the Ctrl key (Cmd key in Mac).

Step10

Create a new Brightness and Contrast Adjustment layer from the Layers panel. Lower the brightness to make it darker and move it to the left to fall on the car.

Step11

Use the brush to draw over the Adjustment layer mask to remove the unwanted dark areas as in the image below. You’ll notice that I used this layer to create some shadows around the kid’s right leg as well.

Step12

In this next step, we will give the kid a toy to play with instead of the cell phone. We will replace it with part of the Chrysler building. I googled to find the best angle for the Chrysler building that suits the angle of the kids hand and copied it to the kid file.

Step13

Create a selection around the kid’s left hand and fingers and Invert the selection. While the building layer is selected, click the Mask icon to display the kid’s hand over the building.

Step14

Remove the building bottom to appear as if it were lying on the boy’s jeans. You can do this by painting over the building mask to remove the unwanted areas of the building.

Step15

Use the brush with black color and 20% opacity to create a shadow for the building on the kid’s shirt and body. And create a new layer over the building and draw a shadow for the kid’s jeans on the building as well.

This is the last step in our tutorial. You can now follow these steps and apply it on different kids’ images with different actions and activities. The important point is to choose the best position and angle for the kid and the images that will be used in this photo manipulation.

Now, we reached the end of the tutorial steps and you can download the Photoshop source file for this tutorials with the layers by clicking the button below.

At the end, I hope you like this tutorial and share it with your friends. Do not forget to join our RSS feed to keep updated with the new tutorials and tips.

30 High Quality Rendered 3D Games

2010-07-04T19:46:00.000-07:00

Through the history of the 3D rendering technology, you will notice that the 3D render got more ability to create higher quality rendered models, shadows and light than the real time render used in 3D game industry. The main reason is that the real time render depends on the computer display card capabilities.

Nowadays, The computer display hardware improved too much to allow creating higher quality 3D games with semi-real objects and scenes. These are collection of 30 best 3D games with different types, including action, shooters, strategy, racing, etc.

Modern Warfare 2

FIFA Soccer 10

BiggameHunter2010

Gears of War 2

Mass Effect 2

LostPlanet

Dead Space Extraction

BioShock 2

DiRT 2

Fight Night Round 4

Need for Speed SHIFT

Dragon Age: Origins

Tomb Raider: Underworld

UltimateAlliance2

Blur

The Sims 3 High End Loft Stuff

Batman

Fallout 3

World in Conflict

Prototype

4×4: Hummer

Age of Empires III

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

Left 4 Dead 2

Darksiders™ – War & Ruin

GTA IV

World of Warcraft

MaxPayne3

Silent Hunter 3

MidnightClub3

Light Casting through a Window

2010-07-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

Create a scene where Light is cast through a window

-The light will pick up the colors on the glass and cast the colors on to objects

-Create light rays that also pick up the color from the windows

-Mental ray as the render

-Mental ray materials are used

-Mental ray light is used

width="700"

height="544"

border="0"

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"

wmode="window"

allowfullscreen="true" quality="high"

flashvars="file=http://www.traptcg.com/sites/default/files/LightCastThWindow_371.flv&image=http://www.traptcg.com/sites/default/files/LightCastThWindow_371.jpg&rotatetime=3&autostart=false" />

75 Amazing Colorful iPad Wallpapers For Your Desktop

2010-06-26T19:10:00.001-07:00

75 Amazing Colorful iPad Wallpapers For Your Desktop

wallpapers for both desktop and iPhones. Now, it is the time to share iPad wallpapers. The iPad screen resolution is 1024 px by 768px at 132 pixels per inch (ppi). However, it fits with the old 4:3 desktop screen resolution. There are some new amazing collections of wallpapers for iPad that meet with different screen directions. Here, I have categorized each group of ipad wallpapers according to its type such as nature wallpapers, macro wallpapers, Apple wallpapers, abstract and 3D wallpapers. I hope you enjoy these collections and share it with your friends and iPad fans.

You may be interested in the following modern trends related articles as well.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

Here is a list of 75 Amazing Colorful iPad Wallpapers For Your Desktop. Enjoy!

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Cinema 4D Finally Brings 3D to Motion

2010-06-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

Cinema 4D Finally Brings 3D to Motion

Here’s How To Do It

Click to play audio / video »

Cinema 4D’s friendly interface and robust motion graphics toolset have made it the tool of choice for creating 3D motion graphic elements for title sequences, bumpers, interstitials, and the like. And it’s ability to export multipass renders as well as 3D data to After Effects have made it easy for After Effects users to integrate 3D into their projects. Well, with release 11.5, Final Cut Studio users can finally do the same, because Cinema can now export 3D data directly to a Motion project. By taking advantage of Motion’s real time render engine and Final Cut Pro integration, you can now create professional 3D projects or even Master Templates for your projects.

There are a few tricks to getting Cinema 4D to play nicely with Motion. In the video, I step through the workflow for preparing a Cinema 4D project for Motion, and then preparing the Motion project, swapping in video elements, adding text, and finally creating a Motion template that you can use in Final Cut Pro.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

50+ Creative and Beautiful Business Cards Design for Inspiration

2010-06-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

50+ Creative and Beautiful Business Cards Design for Inspiration

Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. Traditionally many cards were simple black text on white stock; today a professional business card will sometimes include one or more aspects of striking visual design and creativity.

There are several hundred known collections of business cards, especially antique cards, celebrity cards, or cards made of unusual materials. But we collected some Unusual, Creative and Beautiful Designs of Business Cards to inspire you which is not easy to forgot.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

Here is a list of 50+ Creative and Beautiful Business Cards Design for Inspiration. Enjoy!

50+ Creative and Beautiful Business Cards Design for Inspiration

by coreylittle

by Areil Barrios

by Tactix Creative

by XtrDesign

by crezo

by Romi Dumitrescu

by S0LANGE

by Laachi

by Collis

by mitch2004

by boxcarpress

by S.M.A.S.H. founder Robert Fields

by geneoh

by MooseDesign

by alvito

by kpucu.com

by dioxyzone

by paralexLX

by paradoXroga

by Mr. Caesar

by Electrician

by synaestheta

by black_kat1

by 5MILLI

by marcosfelipe

by goofymne

by Dalash

by kpucu

by apricot-dreaming

by wingless730

by ardcor

by alivepixel

by solo-talent

by j4yzk

by muriloVM

by Bradley Emmons

by msimus

by pontochave

by FUFURUFO

by Angelique Toner

by Sweet Olive Press

by Bernard Hellen

by Adam LoRusso

by Jacob Ward

by Flipp Advertising

by Miles Mungo

by Brigada Creativa

by Luxecetera

by This is Pacifica

by Erich Hartmann

by Aaron Kanters

by Impresa Creative group

by Taste of Ink Studios

by Designer Foo

by Utopia 365

by Pinkograf

by Osvaldas Valutis

by Areil Barrios

29 Mind blowing 3D Photorealistic Models

2010-06-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

While learning or working in the 3D field, it is a good idea to get inspired with others artwork. This gives you more experience and fuel your mind with new ideas and imagination. Creating photorealistic models give you the ability to test your skills and the 3D tools capabilities as well.

Also, trying to create real 3D model is a big challenge for many 3D experts. In this post, a collection of 29 photorealistic 3D models that us done on different 3D tools such as 3Ds Max and zBrush and finalize the scene through Photoshop effects.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

We Are Not Alone 2

This is a work of Damien Canderle did while beta testing Zbrush3. He tried to make another alien using some of the new features. He wanted to make it as real as he could.

The Sun Light of Forest

This is Weihua Wei last work for Aokistudio , which is fantasy forest ,all the scene is done in 3Ds Max only few effects in combustion.

HH-60G PAVE HAWK MEDEVAC

This model is done by polymodeling in 3Ds Max 8 from photo references and scanned blueprints from a plastic model kit.

Unleashed Fury

Done with 3dsmax,Zbrush,Protoshop and rendered with Vray. Final touch and putting all together done with photoshop.

Guildenstern

Martin Krol started this models low rez cage back in December using Clay 3D,he thought that he would take the model a little further, so he gave him a ZBrush pass. So he spent about 5 hours on that, and touched it up in Photoshop.

Song Hye Kyo

Song Hye Kyo, Korean Actress. created in m3Ds Max by Max Edwin Wahyudi.

Street of Memories

Air so fresh and cold just like it can be in the city after rainy day sun is low and strong so you have to close your eyes a little bit to see something.

Mantra

Thomas Juul Krahn created Mantra just before his fifteenth birthday, Dec, 2002. A study in lighting and composition. He just wanted to make to the viewer go “Wow” and say: “That’s where he want to go!”.

Dark Knight`s Revenge

Alessandro Baldasseroni made this one just for fun , mainly ispired by that marvelous short film which is “Batman – Dead end” by Sandy Collora, hope you like it!

Grand Space Opera Runner-Up

This image was entered for the Grand Space Opera Challenge.

Backtokado

The early concept is from a painting he made for his student movie in Valencienne France.

Ferrari 250 Gto

Zoltan Sostai decided to model a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. He hopes the image speak for itself.

The Joker

This is a version of The Joker inspired by an Alex Ross’ ilustration…

Luna

Nebi Yikaroglu maked this work for his friend. Her name is “Hilal” and Hilal’s mean is “new moon” in Turkish and Arabic. Rendered with Brazil rs and he used some Photoshop filters.

Louvre1622 by Night

The historical background is as fake as possible since he had no document showing this area.

Audi A6

This picture the automobile does not move. Therefore there is no driver and effect of movement.

The Tower Bridge

This almost real 3D image is for the Tower Bridge in London. Although the artist based on a small image, but the results are great.

Honda NSX Raybrig

This is Brainspoon first attempt to model a car. He used the Tamiya model kit as reference.

XRAY T1 EVO2

This amazing model is for Michal Szabo and it shows a very skilled details.

Evening and Day Scenes

This Cherenko studio wonderful modeling experience looks so real that you can hardly remember it is a 3D.

Breeze of The Past

The work consists of an old office room in good condition, still in use even now

Centaur Statue

This stunning zBrush model is based on a drawing for the centaur statue that has a museum background. The artist edited the final render in Adobe Photoshop.

Junk Scout

Taehoon Oh was inspired by the Japanese animation, “Howl’s Moving Castle”. The model is done by using textures to give the look of Junk Scout.

Scout Crew

This is the second (and final) piece of a small sci-fi series focused on some distant military conflict somewhere far away. Modeled in 3Ds Max, rendered in Mental Ray. Textures, part of the post FX, painting, compositing and additional corrections made in Photoshop.

AirFormulaOne

This model is render via 3Ds Max 2009, V-Ray and finalized with Photoshop.

Captain America

Sven Juhlin had the urge for a superhero and tried to find one that had not´t been done to many times. So he decided to go for Captain America.

Werewolf

Sven Juhlin is specialized in character/creature modeling for games, movies and toys.

Girl on a chair

This is a sculpture modeling for a girl setting on a chair.

Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV

This is the copy of great statue Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV – oryginally perfected sculpted by Giovanni Bernini for Wersal

1000+high quality free grunge-textures-icons-brushes-and-fonts

2010-06-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

1000+high quality free grunge-textures-icons-brushes-and-fonts

The unity is one of the important rules that you have to consider when creating new design for website,

interface or application. However, when you plan for website design, there should be a good library in hand or you can reach to make the website design unified to one style.

When you design grunge style website, you will need some resources that can help you achieve the total unity of the site such as grunge textures, grunge icons, grunge brushes , grunge effects and grunge fonts.

Grunge Site Planning

After preparing your content, you have to put your ideas as a plan for your design. For instance, you have to plan which resources is the best to use and works fine with other resource. If you need, you may put on yout design and time plan the possibility that you may need to create a resource from scratch.

This second step is to put your ideas on a paper and start selecting the suitable resources that meet with your idea need and requirements.

Start to Play

First, things may not go like you plan in your mind and some resources may not fit well in the real computer design, so it is a good idea to spend some time playing with different resources to set the best combination of resources to use. Use these resources to build a mock-up for your design as a whole and then have another look to see if things really fit with each other in the design.

Finalize Your Design

Share the mock-up with your client or friends to get other ideas about how the website is user friendly. Also, you may need to ask people to see if the design really support the content not covering it, this is the common problem when designer care much about the design without considering the content, this make the site lose its main idea.

Here Are the 1000+ Resources for Your Library

Now, I would like to share with you more than 1000 high quality grunge resources that you can use for your site such as grunge textures, icons, brushes and fonts that I hope you enjoy it. And if you are one of the fans of the grunge style,

Lets start with those amazing grunge icons that can be used to promote your site in social networking for with grunge style that fit with you grunge site design.

Social grunge icons (6 icons)

108 Free Retro Grunge Stripes Social Media Icons (108 icons)

108 Retro Grunge Stripes Social Media Icons

PNG format.Free for personal and commercial use – no attribution nec.

Black Ink Grunge Stamps Textures Icons Social Media Logos (154 icons)

154 Black Ink Grunge Stamp Texture Social Networking Icons.

Deviantart, Devmarks, Drupal, Friendster, Gtalk, Izeby, Joomla, Meneame, PF Buzz, Script and Style, Skype, Soundcloud,and more .

Grunge Warning Stripes Social Networking Icons (154 icons)

154 Grunge Warning Stripes social networking icons.

Amazing collection of the Grunge Warning Stripes social networking icons.

Set of social grunge icons (14 icons)

14 high quality social grunge icons.

format: PNG

Size: 16 x 16 | 32 x 32 | 64 x 64

Free Grunge Style Social Bookmarking Icons (6 icons)

6 high quality web icons .Old grunge icon set modified by Outlaw Design. Composed of grungy looking social bookmarking icons.

High Quality Free Grunge Textures

Textures are important in the grunge style design, it gives you the old style effect. Here are some high quality textures that will help you create your design easily and fast.

The Dead Marshes

This texture was created using different photographs and different layer blending modes in Photoshop.

TEXTURES 69

Nargothrond

This texture was created using different photographs and different layer blending modes in Photoshop.

Grungy Watercolor Textures (4 Textures)

Grungy Watercolor Textures and a Layered PSD.

Season of Winter

Use This 296

Grunge Background Textures (5 Textures)

5 x background textures of the grunge variety.

Grunge Texture 1

Luminous Grunge Textures (4 Textures)

4 LUMINOUS GRUNGY TEXTURES- JPG Format

SIZE 1200×1200

Nice scratchy, grungy textures- but with a luminous wash of pearly, opalescent colors- creating an interesting contrast between the distressed, grungy quality of the texture & the whimsical colors.

3 Grunge Textures from FreeStockTextures.com

3 hi-res grunge textures: concentrate, wall, rust, peeling, wood… Hope you find them useful.

File Type: JPG

Size: 4752 px by 3168 px

License: Free for Personal and Commercial Use

Grunge Fonts

Along with the grunge texture and icons, fonts can help getting a real grunge effect on your site by choosing the suitable font for this purpose. Here are a collection of grunge friendly fonts.

Grunge or not

Bleeding Cowboys

SMUDGERS

Hacjiuza Dirty – Free Font

A grunged old ugly gothic font, with originally handwritten letters. Inspired simply from old blackletter writing, Meant to look off and sort of wacked out.

Chic Decay

The Last Soundtrack

Incinerator

bobsmade font

A Bite

Cheap Stealer

Grunge Serifia Font OTF

28 Days Later

Loserboi Grunge

Hawaii Lover

Grunge

here are some free grunge brushes

Grunge Brushes

The brush .abr file is in a .zip file. Use 7zip of Winrar, or other extracting application to extract the files and upload them into Photoshop. They were made in Photoshop 7.

Light Grunge PS Brushes (15 Brushe)

14 Hi-Resolution (2500×2500) Light Grunge Texture Brushes. Made from Concrete, Wood and Fabric Textures.

Free to use in personal and commercial projects.

Brushes for PS: GRUNGE

7 Assorted Grunge-Rust Brushes

seven (7) assorted grunge/rust brushes made in Photoshop 7.

Grunge brushes 9

60 Brushes in this set

sizes from 316px to 724px

those brushes have been made using Ps7, as usual

grunge brushes (36 grunge brushes)

Urban Grunge Brushes

Grunge brushes

24 brushes

Grunge Brushes , Cracks

Grunge , Gracks and Burning Edges Brushes

ocTanes Motion Grunge Brushes

Works for PS 8.0 and up!

Grunge brushes

10 backgrounds grunge brushes…dust, dirt…

Grunge Brushes

18 high quality grunge brushes, made with photoshop CS2

Grunge Wreath Brushes

Ewanism Brushes- Grunge

65 Grunge Brushes (medium-large).ZIP includes .ABR and image pack of .PNGs

gRUNg BRUSHEs

Incredible Maya Tutorials

2010-06-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

Maya is one of the amazing 3D tools that lets you create such incredible characters, 3D scenes and animation especially for professional production. This is the first post about selected tutorials about some Maya tips.

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other tips and tricks that our readers may like.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

Making of Tidus

Making of the Prince

Making of the Joker

Dave K’s Poly Head Modeling Tutorial

Creating a Low Poly Dragon

Growing Flowers in Maya

Making of Sohrab

Modeling Morgane

Character Walk Through

Making of the Steam Master – Next-Gen Game Head

Facial Animation Rig for Delgo

Advanced Lighting Techniques

3DnuTTa’s Rim Design Tutorial

Making of Tiger Zoo

Making of Portrait of a Troll

Motion Capture with Maya Tutorial

Creating Realistic Glass Using 3 Different Materials

Making of Zhou Zhaung

If you enjoyed reading this post, there’s plenty more on the way.

30 Stunning 3Ds Max Character Modeling Tutorials

2010-06-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

3Ds Max is one of the commonly used application in the 3D field. Learning 3Ds Max not only helps you to create 3D projects, but also learn the 3D concept. You can use 3Ds Max to create 3D characters. Although there are tools that is specialized in only modeling, 3Ds Max is a good start to help you to understand the concept behind 3D modeling.

To get the most out of the modeling tools, you need to practice how to model different models and styles. 3D modeling tutorials can help you understand the different modeling techniques and how to work with the polygons and meshes of the model. Here are also other 3D tutorial resources that can help you learn more about 3D modeling:

These are not only character modeling tutorials but also complete projects of developing characters, with different styles and different modeling techniques. Including patch modelling, box modeling, Polygonal modeling, Low-Poly modeling,etc.

‘Clone Modelling – Video Tutorial’ by Mike Bauer

Making of 3D Girl – ELLA

Making of PhotoRealistic Actress In 3D

‘Box Modeling – Video Tutorials’ by Michael Bauer

NURBS Head Modeling

AFRO HEAD

‘Modelling, Mapping and Texturing a Creatures Head ‘

How to create a portrait from photograph

Making of Assassin by cozmo

‘Low-Poly Character Modeling and Texturing’

VIDEO Tutorial: Knight modeling

“Organic modeling – part 1-4″ by Eric Maslowski

‘Soldier’by Wesclei Barbosa

VIDEO tutorial: Roman soldier

Subdvision Body Model by Wiro

‘Making of the NS5′ by Ajdin Barucija

Model the Ironman Helmet

Video Tutorial: Female Body Modeling: Part 3

Model a Golden Jaguar Statue

Head Modeling

MAKiNG A SIDESHOW BOB BY JALO

Modeling of “Kreacher”

Making of 3D Asian Girl

Making of Klara Medkova

Making of Mrs. Pear

“Making of Sadmike” by Nikola Drincic

“Victorian Freak ” by Merlyn Lear

“Making A Toon Character Called ‘Geoff’

Modeling Joan of Arc by Michel Roger

Creating a realtime character for Project IGI

If you enjoyed reading this post, there’s plenty more on the way

20 Amazing Wordpress Plugins

2010-06-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

WordPress Plugins allow easy modification, customization, and enhancement to a WordPress blog. Instead of changing the core programming of WordPress, you can add functionality with WordPress Plugins. Here is a basic definition:

WordPress Plugin: A WordPress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or more functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress weblog, which can be seamlessly integrated with the weblog using access points and methods provided by the WordPress Plugin Application Program Interface (API).

Here is a great list of the most useful and most popular Wordpress plugins,Enjoy the list.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

All in One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). This plugin also helps you avoid duplicate content found in blogs. With this pack, you can easily modify and tweak everything.

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. setups your backups to occur at almost any imaginable frequency.

Contact Form 7

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.

PXS Mail Form

Creates a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. It is much more easy to contact with website author.

The current download is a new version that has some neat new features and better compatibility. It has a CC Sender option and no longer requires a seperate admin options file.

WP e-Commerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

bad SEO is caused by broken links and indexing problems. Redirection enables you to prevent Google Bots and Yahoo Spiders locking themselves in a loop. This plugin improves your site indexing and navigation by allowing you to create simple 301 redirects in order to avoid those pesky indexing problems.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Sidebar Widgets

It’s called Sidebar Widgets because it allows you to move things (widgets) around, in and out of your sidebar. A widget is something that you might want on your sidebar, such as a category list or the most recent comments or a link to your admin pages. There is even a widget that lets you type whatever you want in the sidebar, such as some HTML or Javascript code.

Get Recent Comments

This plugin displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP lightbox 2

Overlay images on the current page for WordPress. You can turn it on and all images are now working with it.

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like). From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags. At the complicated end, AJAXy search is included with the download (it may need some customisation to match your theme). At the simpler end, you can automagically have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes.

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

Adsense-Deluxe

AdSense-Deluxe is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress 1.5+ (including WP 2.0) for quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed. It was developed for my own use after an exhaustive search for a similar tool turned up nothing adequate.

Search Regex Plugin

Search Regex adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress. These go beyond the standard searching capabilities, and allow you to search and replace almost any data stored on your site. In addition to simple searches you have the full power of PHP’s regular expressions at your disposal.

Tweetmeme

The TweetMeme button plugin allows you to easily integrate the TweetMeme button into your WordPress blog. The plugin will put the button into both your content and your feed.

WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam

An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog!

Create a Out of Bounds Surreal Photo manipulation in Photoshop

2010-06-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

Create a Out of Bounds Surreal Photo manipulation in Photoshop

Photo manipulation is an art that requires a lot of patience along with the expertise in Photoshop. With our creativity and imagination, we can manipulate any photograph the way we want. Its all about how we use our imagination and properly understand the effects that can be achieved in Photoshop and other similar tools and employing them with a lot of experimentation.

I was browsing the website The Design Inspiration for some, yeah you guessed it, ‘Inspiration’ and I fell upon this rather amazing photo manipulation art that I immediately fell in love with it. The concept was great and the execution was flawless.

The concept had a very artistic tint of humor in it. I immediately sat down to create the artwork in Photoshop. The result was pretty impressive and so I decided to share it with you guys and I hope you like it and you can provide some suggestions too.

I’m not quite sure whether to brand this as a ‘Surreal’ artwork, but I think this is an interpretation of might have been a dream, but for the kitten, its obviously a nightmare.

Therefore, in this tutorial, I shall walk you through creating an awesome out of bounds photo manipulation. Here are the prerequisites that is required for the successful completion of the tutorial. I also have added the PSD file, in case you want to edit and tinker with it.

DISCALIMER :

This is not intended to act as a tutorial exactly, but just as a walk through on my interpretation of how this artwork was created. I do not consider this as my own. I have dropped in a line to the artist asking for his permission to recreate his artwork and I hope he obliges.

I have merely written this tutorial so that we can learn some really cool features of Photoshop and understand it better. If you have indifferences with my thoughts on this, please feel free to contact me.

For more information on copyrights of artists and their works, please read the document in Deviant Art : Copyright Policy

Before starting the tutorial. I am presuming that you are quite familiar with basic commands in Photoshop and hence I will clearly explain the relevant and most important elements or adjustments that I make and for all the minor details, I shall explain it in words without screen shots. I have presented them in a down-to-earth language so I’m pretty sure you will cruise through the tutorial. I hope you can forgive me for this lack of commitment However, I have tried my best to keep the tutorial as detailed as possible. This tutorial is mainly intended to highlight the advantages of the adjustment layers and how important they are while creating some intense photo manipulations. So, Lets move on.

STEP 1:

Download the Room Stock image and Paste it in your document. Now download the Picture frame and open the PSD file after unzipping it and paste the frame in your document. Using the Transformation Tool (Click CTRL + T), rotate the frame as shown below

Step 2: Adjusting the contrast of the Frame

The frame looks too bright and out of contrast to be fit into such a dark room. So, let us meddle with the brightness, saturation and pretty much everything.

First, Create a ‘CURVES’ Adjustment layer. This is can be done as follows. Below the Layer’s Palette, click on CREATE NEW FILL OR ADJUSTMENT LAYER, the small icon that looks like a circle (half black and half white) and select CURVES.

Now, adjust the settings as shown below :

ADDING A CLIPPING MASK:

If you notice, the entire image (including the room) has been adjusted but we want only the frame to get adjusted. So, we need to ALT + Click between the CURVES Layer and the FRAME Layer (this will add the curves layer as a clipping mask)

Alternatively, you can RIGHT CLICK on the adjustment layer and select ‘CREATE CLIPPING MASK‘.

The frame still seems a bit colorful, so let us add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in the same way we added the Curves Layer. Set the Saturation level to -53. After setting the saturation, add a Clipping mask for this layer too.

Now, the frame still looks a bit bright, so let us add a LEVELS Adjustment Layer. This layer darkens the dark areas even more thus providing a depth to the image. Use the following settings or you can experiment with it, until you feel you get the right one.

I also added a Exposure Adjustment layer, as I wasn’t satisfied with the result after the Levels Adjustment. This is not necessary but its left for you to decide

This is how the frame looks at this point of time.

Now, I hope you kept on clicking ALT + Click (Creating Clipping masks) after you added every adjustment layer. Take a look at my Layers Palette for reference.

STEP 3 :

Now grab the Shark Illustration and Open it using Photoshop. As you can see, we need to EXTRACT the shark from its blue background. There are so many ways to achieve this but I prefer to use the most flexible one, PEN TOOL. It takes a lot of time to extract the image from its background using the PEN TOOL but it is definitely worth it.

So, using the PEN TOOL (P) start creating anchor points around the boundary of the shark. Make sure the options it set to ‘PATHS‘. You can also use the Rubber Band Feature for an added advantage.

Once you finish creating a path around the shark, right click and select ‘MAKE SELECTION‘ and use 0.5 as feather radius. Now Invert the selection (SHIFT + CTRL + I) and press DELETE to remove the background.

Now, copy the shark and paste it onto our document. Now, we need to create the image as if the shark is coming out of the Picture Frame, so as to depict the ‘Out of Bounds’ Illustration. So, carefully place the shark as shown below

Now, obviously we need to remove the tail and the fin of the shark. So, using the PEN TOOL again, let us create the selection as shown below. You need to imagine how it will look when the shark is about the jump out of the frame I reduced the opacity of the shark image to get a better selection view.

Now, right click and MAKE SELECTION. Invert the selection(SELECT > INVERSE) and Click on ADD LAYER MASK (Below the Layer’s palette) OR you can also just delete the selection. Either way, make sure it looks something like this:

As you can see, using a layer mask, you don’t destroy the original image but just mask certain areas of the image. This is how my layers palette looks at this point of time.

STEP 4: Adjusting the Shark image

Now comes the tricky part. The one thing that makes any photo manipulation work awesome is the lighting and the contrast of the image and the elements. If these are perfected with precision, it will blend with the background seamlessly and will never look like it is manipulated.

As this is my first photo manipulation tutorial, I have tried a lot of experimentation and have narrowed down my choices to these adjustment layers and settings. If you think it can be improved, please let me know and I shall work on it.

Let us add a Hue/Saturation Layer with the following settings. Do not forget to add it as a clipping mask so that only the shark image is edited and not the entire document.

Now add Levels, Brightness, Curves adjustment layers with similar settings as shown below.

This is how my layers palette looks at this point of time. I also added a SOLID COLOR adjustment layer with a color : #131313 and set the blending mode to Soft Light and Opacity to around 30%. This will give a gray color contrast to the shark image

STEP 5:

Now, grab the cloud Stock image and paste it onto the document. Using the Transform tool, rotate the cloud image to match that of the frame.

Using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, create a selection as shown below. This is to create a landscape in the picture frame, so that to give an idea that the shark is swimming or something

Now, Invert the selection (SHIFT + CTRL + I) and delete the part of the cloud image which does not belong to the frame. Now, add a Gaussian Blur of around 8 px radius. (FILTER > BLUR > GAUSSIAN BLUR)

STEP 6:

Let us now create a drop shadow for the frame. Just double click on the frame layer and select DROP SHADOW and apply the following settings.

The shadow doesn’t look as realistic as it should be. Here are a few elements that are missing and which I spotted.

STEP 7:

1) To add another drop shadow on the left, I duplicated the ‘FRAME’ Layer and set the color overlay to black. Then, I added a Gaussian Blur of around 10px and slightly re positioned the shadow using the Transform Tool (MOVED IT)

2) I also did the same for the Shark as well, duplicated the SHARK Layer and added a color overlay of Black and applied a Gaussian Blur Filter and moved it a bit towards a left.

3) Using the BURN TOOL, I applied some burns on the frame near the area where the shark is about the leap

STEP 8: Adding the cute kitten

Download this Kitten image and open it in Photoshop and Using the PEN TOOL, extract it from its background. Make sure your path is a bit inside the boundary of the image you want to extract, to avoid unnecessary bits of background being extracted too. This process is similar to the extraction of the SHARK image.

Now, We need to adjust the lighting, contrast and stuff. We will add adjustment layers, just like we added for the SHARK and FRAME layers.

These are the adjustments that I made. You can follow the same as well.

This is how the image looks after the adjustments.

STEP 9:

Now, we need to add a shadow where the kitten stands and darken some layers to create a realistic lighting effect.

To add a shadow, click on the ELLIPSE TOOL and set the option to SHAPES and create an ellipse. Now, go to FILTER > BLUR > GAUSSIAN BLUR and apply a 5 px blur as shown below.

Now, Using the BURN TOOL and setting the range to MIDTONES, brush the part of the feet which is closer to the ground.

STEP 10:

Let us now add the water splash effect. Grab the Water Fall Brushes from here and load them onto your Photoshop document. Create a new layer and using the Brush Tool, add a water fall just below the shark. You may have to remove certain parts of the water fall using the PEN TOOL method we discussed above.

Now, Grab these Water Splash brushes and add some water splash in a new document to create the splash effect where the shark is coming out of the frame.

Then, download this puddle stock image and paste it on the document. Move it down so that it appears on the floor. Desaturate the puddle image, Set the Blending mode to SCREEN, and an opacity of around 50% and using a Transformation tool, change the perspective of the puddle to match that of the floor. Using the eraser with soft brush, erase certain parts of the image. Use the below image for reference

At this point of time, the image looks something like this:

STEP 11 : Playtime

Now, comes the interesting part in the manipulation. This effect was inspired from a tutorial written by one of my favorite artist, Constantin Potorac of PSDTUTS. It creates a montage appearance in easy steps.

If you want to know the terms of usage, please read this document on PSDTuts.

Click on CHANNELS in the layers palette. Select the Green Channel and press (CTRL + A) then go to Edit > Copy. Select the Blue Channel and go to Edit > Paste and then select the RGB Channel. This adds a very surreal appearance for the image.

STEP 12:

The image appears a bit bright, so let us add a level adjustment layer to rectify that. Use the following settings.

Create a new layer and add a BLACK to TRANSPARENT Radial Gradient to darken the corners of the room and to add a directional spot light effect.

Now, Merge all the layers (FLATTEN) by selecting all the layers and pressing SHIFT + CTRL + E and duplicate the layer by pressing CTRL + J.

Now, Its all about minor editing. Go to FILTER > OTHER > HIGH PASS and apply a filter on the dupicated image. Set the blending mode to OVERLAY and set the opacity to around 20%.

One of the main reasons, I have used the High Pass filter technique is because it works so well at sharpening images. Areas in the image which are not an edge are left untouched. The only areas that have sharpening applied to them are the edges, which is exactly what I need to give a detailed yet fantasy appearance for my image. Sometimes, applying the Smart Sharp Filter also works, but not as good as the HPF and moreover you don’t have to get confused with many options and parameters So this makes our job easier.

This is the final result. Feel Free to download the PSD and start editing and experimenting. Click on the image for a larger and a more detailed look.

Well, we have come to the end. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial as much as I did. This is my first tutorial on Photo manipulation, so there are bound to be some errors in the lighting and contrast as we can see clearly, it is not that perfect. But, still there are lots we can learn from this tutorial. I am open to any kind of suggestions and critiques. So, feel free to drop in your thoughts and opinions. Thank you

As this is a derived artwork, you are not authorized to resell, redistribute or claim this file as your own. Feel free to experiment with it and learn. Sharing is Caring so remember always to attribute to the original author. Thanks for reading this article.

30+ Useful Cinema 4D Tutorial Collection

2010-06-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

30+ Useful Cinema 4D Tutorial Collection

Cinema 4D is one of the common 3D tools that gives you capabilities to create 3D models, working with textures, effects and animation…etc.

Learning based on example and real how-to tutorials can help you learn fast about the new tools and features. Furthermore, you can use these tutorials to get inspired about new effect and tricks that improve your work and production.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create great looking line renders using extruding and deformers . Line renders are amazing looking renders that are often used on wallpapers or photo manipulations.

Creating a ball bearing using arrays

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a ball bearing using an Array Object. You will also learn about the use of the Taper object, Fillet option and Bevel function.

Modeling a car using blueprints

In this massive tutorial, you will learn how to model a car using blueprints, points and the bridge tool.

Basic Cinema 4D knowledge is required for this tutorial!

PyroCluster Tutorial: Cinema4d

Photoshop Paths to C4d

making a not so simple rim 2

Who want to learn to make this

C4D Molecule Shader Tutorial

with this tutorial, you can make molecules effect in C4D.

MiniTut Bodypaint

3d Grass in Cinema 4d

Cinema 4D: How to make grass using the fur tool, which is pretty cool!

Bart Simpson – Tutorial C4D

Jannis Labelle demonstrates modelling and animating a bird in flight

It is a tutorial for intermediate level users, you would need to know your way around the view ports, tools, the Attribute Manager and be comfortable with using Photoshop. Still, even as a beginner you will find a lot of information here, so with a bit of effort you should get going.

Modeling and Animating a Rat with HyperNURBS

In this tutorial, Sven Hauth demonstrates how to create a more complex character with Cinema 4D XL 6.1 or above, a kind of a rat on two legs. He starts with the modeling process, then creates a bone skeleton and finally animates a simple walkcycle. Basic knowledge of C4D is helpful.