Welcome to the first featured website of Creative-Le Studios, a new series of posts to give my (Dan Le) personal review of the site, what it accomplishes for me, and how I expect it to do in the future. Career Tipster is a new blog out in the world, but it’s not just your ordinary personal blog or graphics blog.  It’s in fact a career development blog geared towards other career professionals but also tips will be posted for the average job-seeker as well to improve their career.

As a little backstory, I personally helped bring Career Tipster to its feet by setting up the blog, redirecting the domains, setting up the hosting, and so forth.

Robert Starks happens to be a good friend of mine that I’ve been meeting throughout my days in school and after graduation.  He helped me on a lot of job findings and still remains to be my main career adviser that I would go to in order to get help on my resume, or get tips on how to advance my career.

He came up to me with the idea of coming up with a blog to help build his foundation in becoming a noted professional in the career development field.  From there, I set up a blog with a theme he chose, and simply gave him some tips about blogging and walkthroughs on how to use WordPress.

As a developer, I normally monitor my client’s site to make sure things aren’t going wrong, or random quirks that would be in the way.  And while doing so, I began actually reading the articles he started writing, and I took interest in what he had to say, and I find it inspiring, and motivational to try to apply it to my career as well.

His articles gives a lot of insight of how you can shape your career and also gives tips such as focusing your resume for employers.

One concept that I took into interest was the reverse job search where instead of always having to apply to places, or making resumes, looking at craiglist or the classifieds, you can actually have jobs look for you.  “Reverse Job Search” explains the reason why social media networks like Linked In, Twitter, and Facebook work so well for helping you find a job.  I recently watched a Tedx Talk (Basically Independent TED lectures and talks aside from the offical TED.com site), where a designer, Jacob Cass, talked about his wacky story of how he traveled from his hometown in Australia to a job in New York, then back to Australia, then back to New York in less than a year.  He stressed a really good point of how his personal foundation of himself which includes a website, twitter, portfolio, facebook, linked in, etc.. helped him in finding a job after he had lost his first one after he graduated.

I find it pretty humorous at the same time just fascinated when Jacob said that when he lost a job, he literally wrote a blog post title, “Your Help Needed: Looking for a New Job” and he stated that he was inundated with many people giving leads to jobs, and people giving job offers.  He eventually landed a job in NYC, and he still continues his personal foundation and building his audience and influence.

Career Tipster is on the quest to help people reach that level of foundation by giving tips about reverse job searching and self career development.  For anyone that’s into reading about new ideas on how to build your career or perhaps any career professionals want to chime in on the discussion about career development, head on over to Career Tipster to learn more.

Hi and welcome to my very first video tutorial here at Creative-Le Studios. This is part one of a series, that will cover my entire texturing process. Part one will cover the process I take when texturing a head model inside of Autodesk Mudbox. This is an intermediate to advanced level tutorial, I am assuming you know how to unwrap a model as well as import a mesh into Mudbox.

Throughout the process, I will utilize various programs such as Photoshop, Xnormal, and 3ds Max. I will also show how to create a normal map, ambient occlusion, and how to fix and correct errors that may occur.

The importance of good reference

One thing that is essential to my process is having tons of high-res photos, the reason being I will take these photos and piece them together to create a highly realistic looking model. Now, you may say that sounds easy but where and how can I acquire these types of high-res images? My favorite source and a number of the industry’s best use the website 3dsk. 3dsk however does require a fee to use their service; I will explain why it is more than worth it.

First off it is an investment, that’s right I will say it again it is an investment. You have the potential to make the money back you spent within a week just based off freelancing and side projects. The second reason, your competition is more than likely utilizing this resource, why handicap yourself? Another excuse I tend to hear is I don’t have money. So that means you don’t have money for video games, beer, etc either than right? In order to truly reach the level of mastery you must make sacrifices.

Texturing the head

All right so end of my rant. I’m just using the projection tool in Mudbox lining my images up accordingly and filling it in. Also I like to toggle flat lighting (left click and toggle the flat lighting switch on and off) to get a good view of the texture. I will create a 2048 texture map that will later be re-sized in Photoshop (to ensure it can meet the requirements of the game engine).

One important thing to note: I always apply a white material on my model before texturing, ensuring the most accurate results.

Without further ado here is the video enjoy!

Hoped you enjoyed the video. Please give us feedback below on the comments section; we love to hear from the community here at Creative-Le Studios! Make sure to check back for part 2!

Spring cleaning anyone?  It happens once again, and for most of you, you may call it a designer’s nightmare, while others may think it’s a nice refresh.  As for me, I enjoy redesigning, recoding, and restructuring my personal sites and communities.  Although this is probably the 5^th time I’ve done this, it never gets old as I always find that I’m still learning in terms of trying to create an atmosphere that I hope you guys can appreciate and find it easy to use, while hopefully giving you an easier time to navigate and get lost on the site (in a good way).

How the thought of redesigning (again) came to be?

To be simply honest, one of the things I’ve always strived for was minimal design, and I finally achieved a layout that I personally liked and used it for my own portfolio and blog.  A few weeks later, I liked the layout so much that I decided to just clone it for Creative-Le Studios and add/subtract from it.  As a result, design and development time decreased, and fixes become easier for me.  In addition, I’m slowly consolidating or rather trying to make it known that Creative-Le Studios is more of an extension of my brand and identity as Creative-Le.  (There are a few disputes running in my head of figuring out a new name for the publisher of my future online endeavors, but at the moment that’s in the backburner)

What’s new, what’s changed, what happened?

Structure wise, I tried to keep it the same from the old one with things like social media buttons being easily visible and categories being listed for your convenience.  I’ve added a sliding header as well.  Normally, I don’t like too much motion in a site, but I’ve learned to love their ability to show information that I want to show as well as catching your attention for a few seconds to check something out.

As you can see, I’ve turned the studio site to also incorporate a site rather than be just a blog.  There’s an about page, services page, and so forth.  I wanted to house the Creative-Le Studios Network onto the site so that the audience can see it as well as helping the members of the network get exposure.  (And hopefully giving us more projects to do *hint hint*)

The site got smaller in width by about 50-60 pixels, but I’ve been able to still accommodate both the content and sidebar without cramping things too close together.

Other than small details like rearranging widgets, and adding more content, the blog in itself is the same and will continue its tradition of posting tutorials, resources, freebies, and inspiration to everyone that visits this site.  (With the occasional post drought, but hopefully that will be fixed in the future)

What’s next for Creative-Le Studios?

Our next goal is to keep doing what we do here, and be inspired while helping inspiring others in the online art and design communities.  We hope everyone enjoys the new design, and new material that we will be pushing, and to share this site among your network.  Feel free to contact us for any suggestions, feedback, bug reports, or if you want to contribute a guest article.  We’re open to many things, so don’t be afraid to give us a message.

Lately one of my favorite things to incorporate in my artwork is typography.  I can’t say as decent as most designers out there, but I do like adding words and manipulating them in a way to give the piece more meaning and definition.  In this tutorial, I’ll be taking you through a walk through of how I created this poster I made for someone special as long as showing a few techniques that I used to create this piece and other pieces that I have made in my graphics career.

The Concept

I first saw a graphic piece on Flickr one day and it basically had a heart with a bunch of words filling it.  From there I got inspired to do my own version by using the name of that special person and then making a heart from the words that describe her or my feelings about her.  Along with just the typography, I’d also put images that describes her personality and finally capture it as what I see in my heart.

Step 1 – Making the Background

The background simply consists a gradient using a yellow-light blue-dark blue color scheme.  As you can see, I made the center to be light to give hint that the center will be the main focus of the piece.  I found a stock of a sky that filled the vertical area well and set that to soft light while masking a few parts that I didn’t like (mainly the edges of the piece since I wanted to have some parts faded out and other parts more prominent).

Step 2 – Main Content

Here I began creating the main focus of the piece which is the typography part.  In terms of design difficulty, all I had to do was make a heart shape and adding a gradient and stroke to it, and then I began filling in adjectives and adverbs.

The hardest part of this was actually coming up with the words that I felt, as well as wording and placing them in a way that the words would fit inside the heart shape.  In addition to just having text, I experimented with different opacities to make some words more prominent and kind of give the eye a tease of jumping back and forth between what words pop out.

Step 3 – Decorating your main focus

In this step, I simply added embellishments by finding stocks of flowers, and leaves to surround the heart to give it background of some sort.  By simply masking parts I don’t need and rearranging layers, I can make the heart look like it’s been enraptured in the foliage.

Step 4 – More Decoration

I brought in more stocks in particularly a lion, parrot, and a lime to give the piece more color, and different depths of photomanipulation.  Again, I masked out parts that shouldn’t be shown, and in addition, I found that using the old “Duplicating the layer and giving it a blur and setting it to soft light/hard light” to be quite useful in making the pictures more vivid.

Other than that adjustment, all the pictures so far are on normal blending mode since I didn’t want the stocks to blend with the blue background.

Step 5 – Starting to Add Details

I begin to add details by adding some splatters, and some inkblots stocks that I’ve had.  I wanted to add more depth into the piece and so one way to do that is to simply give objects in the scene a shadow to show that there is a distinction between that object the background.

You can use either the “Drop Shadow” option within the Blending Options of the layer OR what I do is add my own shadows by making a new layer behind the object that I want to add a shadow to and brush behind the objects with a “Soft Round Brush” with black and played around with the opacity of the layer and erased any unnecessary bits that didn’t flow with the piece.

Step 6 – Adding more depth and decorations

Now I began to add more to the piece by adding a polaroid background behind the heart and more splatters.  I introduced some more text on the bottom of the polaroid by choosing a font and setting the opacity down.  The splatters were simple to integrate as they were on white background and so I set the blending mode of them to multiply to show the splatter, and the white background is simply gone.

Step 7 – Faded lines

A technique (if you want to call it that) that I started to use was making lines and bars of different colors and masking them with textured brushes to give a faded out look.  It works well in abstract and grungy pieces and doesn’t make the piece harsh by having the masked parts.

As you can see below, all you need to do to make these type of lines is to have shape/layer of anything, and give it a layer mask and use a textured brush to mask some parts of it away.

Step 8 – Adjustment Layers and Scanlines

As we get closer to the end, I decided that the piece needed some adjustment layers to bring up the colors and make the color brighter.  I added a Curves layer, and some Gradient Maps and set them to soft light.

In addition, I added scanlines to give the background some texture.  Scanlines are simply just patterns and I filled the background with it.  Below is a step by step process of how to create scanlines fast.

Step 9 – Colorful Light Flares

To top the piece off, I added some “Light Flares” to the piece to give lighting and more color.  You’ll find these among a lot of graphic pieces since they are quite popular and they do add more to the piece in terms of effects.

By simply making a new layer and using soft brushes of different colors, set the layer to screen or linear dodge, and notice how they add more color and lighting to a piece.

Conclusion – Final Result

Of course your piece may or may not look like this, but that’s not the point.  The main point is to show the simple process of making a graphic like this and showing some techniques that are used in them.  I hope you enjoy the tutorial, and subscribe and keep updated with Creative-Le Studios for more.

An unwrapped female head model ready to be textured for practice or personal projects. Continue reading to download and read more about it.

In today’s pack, we have a 3D Female Head Model made in 3D Studio Max created by Aaron Forney.

Like before, the download contains an OBJ and MTL file ready for texturing or for anything you can think of that doesn’t include breaking the terms found in the readme.txt file inside. Thank you for your downloads and support and check back again for another Wednesday Resource.

Download and Demos

Zip file includes – .OBJ, .MTL, .PNG, Read Me File
Download Link – Download Here

Download

If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for future Resource Wednesdays’, feel free to comment below.