Category: Tutorials

The humble sketchbook is greatly underestimated as an integral part of a designers working practice, certainly with those using a predominantly digital workflow. This old favorite shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s a great tool for any process. In the second installment of Core Art Skills, Ben Mounsey will show you why, and how to get the most out of your sketchpad.

Continue reading “Core Art Skills: Part 2, The Sketchbook”

In this week’s Audio Premium content, Toby Pitman waxes lyrical about the art of improvisation, and gives us some practical tips about how to develop our ability to improvise.

To learn more about what you get as part of Audio Premium, read this.

Whether your a stand up comedian or a musician knowing how to improvise is an essential craft. Although this article won’t teach you ‘how’ to improvise it will give you an insight into the thought process behind it and the tools you’ll need to start.

In musical terms ‘Improvisation’ is the process of performing or composing music in real time, on the fly, in the spur of the moment, off the cuff or whatever you choose to call it. Basically your making it up as you go along! This can include the creation of new musical ideas or a new interpretation of an existing melody or composition. The whole point is that it’s not preconceived but flows naturally from you as you play taking any direction you wish.

Table of Contents

• What is Improvisation?
• Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea
• It’s Not Just About Solos You Know!
• Ordered Chaos
• When In Rome!
• What Are You Trying To Say?
• Reading, Writing And Communicating With Other Musicians
• Teach a Man to Fish!
• Useful Tips and Exercises
• Conclusion

Existing Premium members can log-in and download. Not a Plus member? Join now.

ActiveDen aren’t the only ones broadening their horizons. Today sees the beginning of regular Microsoft Silverlight content being published on Activetuts+ and I’m thrilled to say we have Silverlight Evangelist Mike Taulty on board to help us meet demand!

This is the first of two screencasts (with the second coming tomorrow) demonstrating how to build a simple Silverlight 4 map application, using Visual Studio and the C# programming language. You’ll get a decent overview of the Silverlight workflow, and learn what advantages it has over …similar technologies.

Go on – check it out and let us know what you think!

Section 1: Setting Up Silverlight and Bing Maps

Scroll down to see a list of all the links in the text file that Mike writes in this tutorial.

Section 2: Calculating Walking Routes

By the end of this part, you’ll have created an app that lets users choose any two points on a map, and displays a route for them to walk between those places.

Resources: Useful Links

About Mike:

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: [email protected]: twitter.com/mtaulty

Where to download Visual Studio and the other software required for Silverlight development:

• Visual Studio 2010 ( free ‘express’ version ): http://bit.ly/vsWebExpress
• Silverlight 4 tools for Visual Studio: http://bit.ly/silverlight4ToolsForVS
• Silverlight Toolkit: http://bit.ly/silverlightToolkit

Working with Bing Maps:

• Bing Maps Control for Silverlight: http://bit.ly/bingMapsSilverlightSDK
• Bing Maps Routing WebService: http://bit.ly/bingMapsRouteService

How to fix the Web Service issue, if it comes up:

• WebService Issue: http://bit.ly/silverlightProxyIssue

Where to download Expression Studio: (You won’t need this till the second part of the tutorial, but feel free to grab it in advance )

• Expression Studio ( Expression Blend ): http://bit.ly/expressionStudioTrial

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow to learn how to use Expression Blend to change the design of your app.

Part two of our Silverlight Introduction tutorial. In this screencast, Mike shows you how to save your walking routes to disk, and how to improve your app’s design using Expression Blend.

In the first part of this Silverlight introduction, you learned how to use Silverlight and Bing Maps to create a simple web app for calculating walking routes between any two places.

Now, you’re going to let the user save these routes to their hard drive, and display them in a list so they can easily be loaded later.

And once the app is feature-complete, you’ll learn how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to improve the design of the app. In particular, you’ll see how to define two different “states” for the app, and generate smooth transitions between the two with a few clicks.

Screencast: Route Lists, File I/O, and Design

Resources: Useful Links

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: [email protected]: twitter.com/mtaulty

Where to download the Expression Studio trial:

• Expression Studio ( Expression Blend ): http://bit.ly/expressionStudioTrial

In the second part of our invaluable, in-depth series looking at smoke and fire simulation techniques within Blender 2.5, Gottfried Hofmann shows us how to create fire! The incredible (and let’s not forget, completely free) result could be used as a flamethrower, dragon breath, a rocket trail…the possibilities are endless!

Techniques covered in this second video include :

• How to correctly set up the particle system.
• Using a second voxel data texture along with the dissolve setting to fake fire.
• Learn how to adapt the particles to the domain divisions.
• How to avoid a few more common pitfalls!

So let’s get going!

Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

The Screencast Key Status Tool used in this tutorial is available here.

This tutorial is Day 2 in a series – Go to Day 1.

Don’t miss more CG tutorials and guides, published daily – subscribe to Cgtuts+ by RSS.

As you may have seen or heard we’ve got a new editor doing the rounds at Cgtuts+, Matt Brealey.

Kaleb had to finish his duties with Cgtuts+ at the start of May after successfully landing a position with EA as an Environmental Artist, well done! We’d like to thank Kaleb for the incredible work that he put in with Tuts+ over the last year, including the launch of the Cgtuts+ Premium Program, join us in wishing him all the best with EA!

Final words from Kaleb

Thanks to all the readers whose devotion and enthusiasm has made Cgtuts the amazingly involved and supportive community that it is today, to all the authors whose incredible talents and tireless efforts are responsible for making Cgtuts the unparalleled resource that it has become, and to Envato whose unwavering vision and limitless generosity have made it all possible. I’ve truly enjoyed my time here at Cgtuts, and I’m certain that it will forever be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

Introducing Matt Brealey

In the hunt for a new site editor we were lucky enough to find Matt Brealey, an established author for Cgtuts+, here’s what he has to say.

Hi everyone! Firstly I’d just like to echo Aaron’s words in thanking Kaleb for the amazing job he’s done for the past year. I’ve personally been visiting the site daily for almost that entire time simply because it was run so consistently well and the tutorials were always outstanding. He has certainly set the bar extremely high for the coming few months, and I wish him nothing but the best for the future. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to Envato for even considering me as a possible replacement.

Cheers!
Matt

Say hello to Matt in the comments below and feel free to let him know what you’re after!

Light-mapping for the Unreal Engine used to be an extremely tedious process, as it could only be prepared in an external program such as Max or Maya. Well, thankfully there is a solution! In the first of our Unreal Dev Kit tutorials, Jarlan Perez walks us through how to first prepare a model, and then setup light-mapping entirely within the UDK itself.

In the RefFiles.zip file you will find two folders : package and scene. Both the start and end file for this tutorial have been provided inside the scene folder.

Step 1

Let’s get started. Launch the UDK and opening up the LightMapping_Start.udk located inside your scene folder. This is a very simple scene consisting of a subtracted cube and a single spotlight as shown below.

Step 2

Go ahead and open up the Content Browser and load the LightMapping.upk package located in the package folder, as shown below. Inside you will find two static meshes, a cube named base which we will be using for the floor where our shadows are going to be projecting, and a circular tube shaped mesh named tube which will be the mesh casting the shadows.

Step 3

Select that base mesh and drag it over to your scene.

Step 4

Next we’re going to drag the tube into the scene. Make sure that you leave a reasonable amount of space between the two meshes so that we can get a pretty clear shadow in the final scene.

Step 5

Let’s go ahead and test the lighting and see what we get. Make sure to turn off the Use Lightmass option, as simulating GI will greatly reduce your build time and at this point we don’t really have much use for it! Use the settings shown below :

Step 6

You should get something similar to the image below. We’re currently getting extremely soft, subtle shadows, and why are there no shadows on our base mesh? That’s what we’re going to explore.

Step 7

Every single static mesh that is imported into Unreal has its own unique UV set that is used to apply textures. To get the desired, lightmapping effect that we’re looking for we’re going to have to make a brand new UV set that will be used to save the shadows of your Lightmap. As you can see this object only currently has one UV map or channel.

Step 8

To create our new UV map, first go to Mesh > Generate Unique UVs, as shown below :

Step 9

This will open a small submenu for UV generation. Since these UV maps are only going to be used for capturing shadows, there is no longer any need to export your models to an external program in order to create a new UV channel.

Unreal reads UV channels starting from 0 (e.g. the very first UV channel will be Channel 0.) We’re creating a new map in addition to the existing one, so make sure to set the UV channel to save results to dropdown to 1.

For now, leave the Limit maximum stretching (0-1) at the “0.500000” default value. That’s seemed to work great for me in the past, and I really never found much of a reason to change it. When you have all of the settings in place, as shown below, hit Apply.

Step 10

Let’s take a look at our results. You can clearly see that Unreal has created a 2nd UV set, and now we just have to let Unreal know that we’re going to be using this new UV set for light-mapping.

To do this, go to the field titled Light Map Coordinate Index and set that to our new UV set’s channel, which was 1.

Now we have to set up the resolution for our light maps. Go to the field titled Light Map resolution and set that to 512, which should give us pretty good looking shadows. (If we need to increase shadow detail in the future, we can always double this value to 1024.)

Step 11

Now there’s just one thing left to do – let the engine know which of the meshes we want to receive shadows. The reason we select specific meshes (and don’t just calculate light-mapping on everything), is to prevent unnecessary processing and save on overall build time. For instance, you could have 50 of the same Meshes in a scene but only want 10 to have very detailed light-mapped shadows. You would designate these 10 items to receive shadows based on your UV map, and the rest would be calculated using Unreal’s default shadow system.

Designating light maps is very simple. Right click on your object and bring up its properties (or you could use the shortcut F4.) Click the StaticMeshActor label, and then in it’s properties section, click the StaticMeshComponent label.

In here we’re only going to be adjusting two things; first of all we want to make sure that Override Light Maps is checked on, and then we want to set the value for the Overridden Light Map field to match the resolution of our UV map, in our case 512.

Step 12

Now hit the Build Light button and use the same settings as in step 5 above. Your final image should look something like that below :

And that’s how to set up light-mapping using only the UDK! I hope this demonstration was helpful, and if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments below!

Don’t miss more CG tutorials and guides, published daily – subscribe to Cgtuts+ by RSS.

I think one of the primary reasons behind web based tools and services not gaining prominence in the early years of internet was due to the fact that there was only one major browser – Internet Explorer. IE had more than 90-95% of market share at that time. But many developers never liked the browser.

The introduction of Firefox around 6 years back, the rise of Google and the subsequent web 2.0 era  has assured people that “the cloud”  is the future. As a result, today we can find solid web-based alternatives for almost any desktop program out there.

There’s even a cloud-based operating system by Google, called Chromium, in the works.

But are we comfortable with staying in the cloud most of the time? Do you love using online tools more often, or do you think their desktop counterparts are more efficient?

Traditionally, summertime means kicking back with a cool drink and escaping to the beach. But some people actually use this time to get ahead, taking advantage of a lighter workload to plan for the rest of the year or tackle long-neglected projects.

Both approaches have their merits.

Obviously, it’s nice to slow down and smell the cool ocean breezes so you can return to work relaxed and rejuvenated. That said, beaches and other vacation destinations are crowded this time of year, so it may make sense to save vacation time and forge ahead at work to show your boss how committed you are. As a self-employed writer, I’m planning to do a little of both this summer.  I may be taking a few half days to catch up on reading –  but otherwise it’ll be business as usual.

What do you plan to do this summer? Will you be observing half-day Fridays, as they do in many companies? Maybe taking a week off for some fun in the sun? Or will you keep things at the status quo?

Facebook, Twitter and similar services can make connecting with your customers a breeze. It can quickly foster relationships with new clients and create a community around your products or services. But, having a true mastery of these platforms goes well beyond the simple ability to use them. It’s not that difficult to get a basic social media campaign running, but it is hard to build one that is actually generating revenue or visibility for your business. So, think carefully before putting a phrase like “social media guru” on your resume, or taking on a new social media initiative at work. If you don’t have true marketing skills, a commitment of real resources from your company and a solid chunk of daily time to dedicate, it could land you in a serious bind.

A day to learn, a lifetime to master

Services like Facebook and Twitter were designed with painstaking care (and millions of dollars) to be intuitive, so figuring out even the most advanced capabilities doesn’t truly put anyone ahead of the pack in terms of social media expertise. Social media involves connecting with people, not mastering software. In fact, stereotypes would suggest that software mastery is much more likely to land you in a behind-the-scenes, “computer nerd” position than a prominent, visible spokesman role for your company. So, unless you have social media successes that go beyond logging in and posting content, you’re somewhere in the middle of the social media skill spectrum along with the rest of us. Turning on a stove doesn’t make you a chef – even if you know every setting of the machinery you still need know-how, experience and creativity to make the most of it.

The misguided self-perception of “social media expert” can sometimes be a product of your surroundings. You may work with people who got the marketing work done “the old fashioned way” and seem to have little enthusiasm for (or understanding of) social media. To them, it’s a “fad” that’s not worth pursuing. But for most businesses social media is viewed as the “next big thing” to grow their business beyond expectations.

“Seeking Social Media Rock Star…”

“Social media” is at the tip of every hiring manager’s tongue. Thousands of recent job postings contain mandates for “social media expertise” and every business and group on the planet wants “Facebook integration” for their business and a throng of followers on Twitter to support them. Executives drop buzzwords like “crowdsourcing” and “blogosphere” into sentences that sound like radical innovations. The truth is, they want what they’ve always wanted; to sell more products, to gain more supporters, and to get more subscribers to their services.

Don’t put yourself in the precarious position of promising them some sort of “viral social media campaign” that is going to cause an explosion of interest. Ask yourself “Am I really a social media expert?”

• Have I helped develop a Facebook or iPhone application?
• Have I written marketing copy on a company blog?
• Have I put meaningful information on Twitter that has gotten significant attention?
• Do I have any tangible results from my social media efforts?

Another question to consider is, “Is my company really committed to social media success?” Many companies are not; they don’t allocate any time or resources to it and basically expect a near-instant, automatic surge of followers to spontaneously appear. Despite being a “top priority” in meetings and conversations, it’s conspicuously absent from accounting books and timesheets. If your company truly wants to delve into social media, make sure they mean it.  Then fit it into all of the necessary schedules, budgets and long-term plans.

Social Media Success is Mostly About the Product

Even if you really are a social media expert, you still might struggle if you don’t have a truly valuable product or service to market. The last thing you want to be doing is marketing an inferior item on the web. Contrast said it best, “If [a company] wants a million hits, followers, lists, comments, links, posts, friends, fans and re-tweets, then they should do something meaningful.” If the product is great, the “social media work” is hardly work at all. But if the product is less than great, all of your marketing turns to empty hype and you disappoint the followers you’ve gathered on the web.  More importantly, you disappoint the employers whom you promised viral success.

So be honest with yourself and your employers, and hedge their expectations. If you really are a social media rock star, the product is great and they’ve committed real resources to social media – then swing for the fences. If you’re just a typical social media user, the product is ordinary at best and there’s no tangible commitment…then don’t “tweet yourself into a corner” with empty promises.

Remember: Tweeting is easy; marketing is hard.

Think of the coffee shop as a community or networking opportunity. It’s likely that you will get to know other regulars – including the staff. It’s important to make a good impression.