BLOG
Learn How To Use Your V-Ray Physical Camera
Play with the camera controls found in the "Creative Zone" of an EOS Digital SLR. Here, you can really dictate the outcome of your photos and get the effects you want. Your shots will appear below where you can review, get feedback and compare the settings you used.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Locking Transforms For Blueprint Modeling
Previously, I showed you how I model in 3DS MAX Design by creating a high resolution bitmap, using a DirectX Shader. Well, once you get your blueprints in place, you need to lock them down, so you don't accidentally mess things up.
I want to slide the plane back and forth, but only on one direction, and never up or down. It's very easy to accidentally nudge something slightly, so locking things down is very important.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Texture in Computer Graphics
The feel of an object's surface - its physical texture - depends on the degree to which it is broken up by its composition or treatment. The more broken, the rougher the texture. This not only determines how we feel it, but also how we see it. Rough surfaces intercept light rays, producing an often irregular pattern of lights and darker; glossy surfaces reflect the light more evenly, giving a less broken appearance. As we see these patterns of different values, our memory of touching surfaces with similar characteristics then triggers a tactile response or sensory reaction. Thus, we can predict an object's feel without ever touching its surface.
CG Grass
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
DirectX Shader for Blueprint Modeling in 3DS MAX
DirectX shaders are slow in 3ds Max, especially when they are applied on a lot of objects, so use them sparingly. If you want to model from a print, but don't need the high quality background, you can use this blueprint modeling technique
Now, here is how you lock your planes from getting moved.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Blueprint Modeling
Typically, my projects start with PDF's. Today, I am modeling a roof to a custom home, so I thought I would take the opportunity to record my screen. The process is straightforward but isn't thoroughly documented any place. I hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions, please comment. Is your blueprint image not clear enough? There is another way to model from a blueprint, and it using a Directx shader.
Now, here is how you lock your planes from getting moved.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Aerial Perspective
Far-off objects don't just appear smaller as they recede, they also become less distinct, with little visible detail, paler colors, and reduced contrast of tone. This is known as atmospheric, or color perspective, and is the primary means of creating the illusion of space in a rendering. Tiny specks of dust in the atmosphere cause colors and tones to become paler in the distance, where objects have exceedingly little distinguishable detail. The colors also become "cooler", with more blues, grays, and blue-greens.
As far as I know, and for the most part, there isn't a render engine that can produce this natural phenomenon. So, take some artistic liberties in post production, to bring your exterior renderings to a whole new level, by using levels and curves, to achieve the color perspective effect.
Color Perspective
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Artist's Tip - Compare Shapes and Directions
It is important to compare shapes and directions when you draw. Usually people see objects in isolation; for example, landscape is seen as first one tree, then another, and then a background. As an artist, you need to learn how to see and compare all these features simultaneously, and use background features as a check for shapes.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Multimedia Projects with Brian Wood
Acrobat 9 Pro has the ability to integrate JavaScript, multimedia, and Flash within interactive PDFs. In
Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Multimedia Projects, Brian Wood teaches web developers, graphic designers, and anyone else how to use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. He shows how to create visually exciting PDF presentations, documents, and interface elements for distribution on the web, on CD/DVD, and via email. Brian explains the difference between embedded and linked media elements and shares several JavaScript examples that relate to all aspects of multimedia. Exercise files accompany the course.
Topics include:
- Working with the new Flash CS4 video integration Embedding and linking to all types of multimedia Creating links, buttons, and other navigation systems Integrating layers and buttons for web page-like effects Adding sounds to complement embedded video action Using buttons and bookmarks to interact with layers
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
What is freelancing?
In this course, author and seasoned freelancer Tom Geller shows you how to prepare for a transition to freelancing. Begin by taking a look at your career goals, the systems that will support you, and proper ways to plan for success. Find out how to marshal your resources, refine your portfolio for presentation to clients, and estimate your costs to avoid any surprises on the financial front. Plus, discover how to create invoices, manage your books and taxes, expand your client base with marketing, and grow your business.
Topics include:
- What is freelancing?
- Defining your career goals
- Funding your startup
- Getting licenses, permits, and insurance
- Setting prices
- Finding work through agencies
- Getting referrals
- Working with time and project management tools
- Increasing your rates
The whole course can be found here
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Movement
Architectural Illustrators can use the shape, along with the other element form, to generate visual forces that direct our eyes as we view the rendering.
Many shapes, such as the triangle, have a general body movement that points in one specific direction. Obviously, not all shapes are equally important in contributing to movement, for some provide more of a directional force than others. Compare, for example, the 'forceful" rectangle to the "stable" but less directional square.
As a general rule, the longer the shape, the greater the directional force.
The "forceful" triangle
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Our Emotional Sensitivity To Shape
Our emotional sensitivity to shape is demonstrated by the familiar Rorschach (inkblot) test, which was designed to aid psychologists in evaluating emotional stability.
By using the knowledge that some shapes are inevitably associated with certain objects and situations, the architectural illustrator can set the stage for a pictorial drama.
Whether viewing inkblots or artwork, our response to shape is often primitive and subconscious. Some shapes convey fairly common meanings. Square, for instance, frequently utter perfection, stability, solidity, symmetry, self-reliance, and monotony. Similarly, circle may suggest confidence, independence, and/or confinement; oval may suggest fruitfulness and creation; stars could suggest reaching out.
So, you can use shapes to express a emotion or mood, in your architectural renderings. Afterall, isn't that what we are trying to do?
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Resizing An Image in Photoshop
let me give you a little advice.
If you're going to scale up an image, and if you are going to give it a higher resolution, do it this way, Go to Image > Image Size, set that resolution to an even multiple of the original.
So here I have started with 72. So I am going to set it to 288, four times the 72, and I am going to choose a special method, Nearest Neighbor. Notice that it says preserve hard edges.
Remember Nearest Neighbor when you have screenshots because that's the way to go. When I click OK, look, it's nice and sharp, it has a nicer resolution.
What I do sometimes if I want to make sure that my editor isn't going to freak out, I'll go back to Image Size-- sometimes people freak out when they just see the 288-- I uncheck Resample Image, I change that Resolution to 300.
What that means is that it's not making new pixels, it's just making the existing pixels a little bit smaller. When I click OK, nice and sharp, and I haven't lost anything. That's your overall goal, you don't want to lose any information; you want to maintain detail.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
A Look at the Meaning in Colors
Today’s infographic comes to us from The Logo Company and gives us a look into the choice of colors worn by the logos that we see every day. Do you want your company to give off a sense of excitement or boldness? Red might be the color for you then. How about if you want your customers to feel like your company is trustworthy and dependable? You might want a nice, light shade of blue in that case.
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Color Managed Workflow
If you've ever had printed out a page on your desktop Inkjet printer and held it up to the monitor, chances are you've been a little disappointed at how far off the printed output is from your monitor. Well, it's a common heartbreak, and that's because your monitor and ink on paper are two very different realities. And if you compare your screen and your Inkjet print to the final printed piece, you may very well be looking at three rather different versions of your job.It's really maddening. So what you do you hang your hat on? Well, the solution to this problem is to have a fully color managed workflow. But that can be expensive, kind of confusing, and a bit complicated to implement. If you want to fully pursue the color managed workflow, you have to invest in expensive equipment to profile your monitor and all your printers. But if you don't want to go that far, you can still improve your monitor substantially by using the colorimeter, Now, you can expect to pay from $200 and up for a colorimeter. The way it works is the colorimeter and its software combine to send color signals to the monitor.The colorimeter reads the values and then compares them to an internal ideal value. And then it sets up a Reference File that's called a Profile, that's used to control the output of your monitor. Now, if you're part of a work group that produces a lot of work for print, it actually might be worth hiring a color management consultant to come in, profile all of your equipment for you. They'll use their own sophisticated equipment to set up your monitors and printers without you having to make the investment in that equipment. Now, they'll probably recommend that calibrations and profiles be updated periodically, especially if you add new equipment. Now, in color-critical environments, for example in printing plants fresh profiles are often generated just after new ink is installed in a printer, if that printer is being used for generating proofs.
You should also consider the lighting conditions in your work area. If you have ever gone to a printing company to view proofs, you've probably stood in a viewing booth that's specially constructed for optimal viewing conditions. It may even be a stand-alone room. It's usually painted a neutral gray, and special lights are installed. You may have heard them referred to as D50 or 5000 K lights, and that refers to their color temperature, the K if you care, stands for Kelvin, and that's the temperature measurement system. So why is 5000 K chosen? Well, it's supposed to mimic the temperature of sunlight at high noon. The higher the color temperature, the bluer the light source, and as you go below 5000 K, lights get warmer. For example, the household incandescent bulbs around 2800K. Now, those official viewing sources can be really expensive, but I am going to let you in on a little secret. You can come very close by using fluorescent bulbs from the hardware or home improvement store. Just make sure it says 5000 K or D50 on the bulb. Now, I realize that it's true that your final printed piece is going to be viewed under a wide variety of lighting conditions, from kitchen fluorescents to candlelight, to incandescent living room lamps. So why pick a particular color temperature for viewing? Well, it's for consistency. There has to be some constant to ensure color accuracy, especially when you're judging color corrections from one proof to the next or you are looking at a press proof. You might even avoided wearing clothing that could reflect on the monitor or on a proof that you're viewing with the customer. Now, maybe that's why we all wear black and gray, it's not because we're stylish, we're just being color correct.
If you want to delve deeper into color management, I'd recommend Chris Murphy's course for lynda.com that's called Color Management Essential Training, and Chris is also one of the authors of Real-World Color Management, which is sort of an instant classic on the subject. Don't be intimidated by the heft of the book. It's very readable, very understandable, and it's actually funny in spots--which is pretty amazing given that that's a technical and arcane topic. Now, while calibrating, profiling, and special lighting might seem like an awful lot of extra work, all those things together can go a long way toward giving you more realistic expectations of your final printed result.
Color Wheel
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Pixels, Image Size and Resolution – Basix
Are you new to Photoshop? Have you been trying to teach yourself the basics of Photoshop but have found the amount of educational material available on the net a bit overwhelming? As the world’s #1 Photoshop site, we’ve published a lot of tutorials. So many, in fact, that we understand how overwhelming our site may be to those of you who may be brand new to Photoshop. This tutorial is part of a 25-part video series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start working in Photoshop.
Photoshop Basix, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak includes 25 short video tutorials, around 5 – 10 minutes in length that will teach you all the fundamentals of working with Photoshop. Today’s tutorial, Part 3: Pixels, Image Size and Resolution will explain the theory behind how pixel images work. It will also explain a bit about the crop tool, image size and resolution. Let’s get started!
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Photoshop CS6 New Features with Deke McClelland
In this course, Deke McClelland offers a sneak peak at the new features in Photoshop CS6. He reveals the secrets behind the new dark interface, searchable layers, the powerful Blur Gallery, Camera Raw 7, video editing, and the Adaptive Wide Angle filter, which removes distortion from extreme wide-angle photographs and panoramas. Deke also covers the new nondestructive Crop tool, dashed strokes, paragraph and character styles, editable 3D type, and the exciting Content-Aware Move tool, which moves selections and automatically heals the backgrounds.
Topics include:
- Enabling auto recovery and background saving
- Filtering layers in the Layers panel
- Modifying multiple layers at once
- Applying layer effects to groups
- Working with the Content-Aware tools
- Redeveloping photos in Camera Raw 7
- Creating depth of field with the Blur Gallery
- Correcting wide-angle panoramas
- Filling and stroking shape layers
- Editing videos in the Timeline panel
- Previewing 3D shadows and reflections
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush with John Derry
Join John Derry, a pioneer in the field of digital painting, as he shows how to master the natural-media painting features introduced in Photoshop CS5 in
Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush. This course shows how to use the Mixer Brush, the Bristle Tips feature, and a new mechanism for blending colors in Photoshop to add beautiful, painterly effects to photographs, enhance artwork with paint-like strokes and illustrations, and paint entirely new art from scratch. This course also covers customizing brush characteristics and surface textures, applying keyboard shortcuts to paint smoothly and efficiently, and using a Wacom tablet to get the most out of Photoshop CS5’s painting features. Exercise files are included with the course.
Topics include:
- Understanding the axes of motion with a Wacom tablet
- Choosing a brush shape and Bristle Tip
- Adjusting brush angle
- Loading color and control the behavior of the Mixer Brush
- Modifying surface texture
- Simulating the texture of canvas
- Saving tool presets for brushes
- Creating a painting from a photograph
- Painting from scratch with the Mixer Brush
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Transforming a Photo into a Painting with Photoshop with John Derry
Learn to think like a painter and render images from photographs that look like they were created with oils or acrylics, using the latest digital artist's tools. Author and artist John Derry introduces the process of interpreting a photograph into a painted work of art. He begins by explaining his system of visual vocabularies, which describe how to replace the elements of an image with expressive painterly qualities, and also shares the custom brush sets and actions he uses to achieve these results in Photoshop. The course also covers working with filters, layers, effects, and more to add further detail and texture.
Topics include:
- Understanding that resolution is in the brush strokes
- Understanding the subject
- Removing lens distortions
- Using the traditional paint color swatch set
- Making shadow and highlight adjustments
- Simplifying details with filters and Smart Blur
- Cloning layers
- Using custom actions
- Working with canvas texture
- Creating physical surface texture effects
certificates of completion
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me
Transforming a Photo into a Painting with Photoshop CS6 with John Derry
Learn to think like a painter and render images that look like they were created with oils or acrylics, using the latest digital artist's tools. Author and artist John Derry introduces the process of interpreting a photograph into a painted work of art. He begins by explaining his system of visual vocabularies, which describe how to replace the visual characteristics of a photograph with that of expressive painting, and also shares the custom brush sets and actions he uses to achieve these results in Adobe Photoshop. The course also covers working with filters, layers, effects, and more to add further detail and texture.
Topics include:
- Setting up a Wacom tablet
- Removing lens distortions
- Correcting distracting image elements
- Making shadow and highlight adjustments
- Simplifying details with filters and Smart Blur
- Modifying color
- Cloning layers
- Using a traditional paint color swatch set
- Using custom actions
- Working with canvas texture
- Creating physical surface texture effects
- Painting with custom brushes
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, then why not:
Leave Comment | Subscribe To This Blog | Email Me