by Lois Kelly, Carmen Medina | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: June 2018 | ISBN: 9781492038344

MODO has found a strong niche in creating virtual product shots for use in advertising and marketing. By using MODO, you can create highly realistic shots of your products, reducing the need for product photography. In this course, Dan Ablan leads us through the workflow required to create such highly realistic 3D renders in MODO. Discover the optimal settings for modeling, sculpting, and rendering; learn how to model real-world packaging; work with UV maps, Photoshop textures, and other basic materials; and light the products effectively. Dan closes with an overview of rendering the final 3D images for print or preview.

by Ken Power | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: April 2018 | ISBN: 9781492037750

This course is a practical guide to constructing 3D buildings that can be used to populate video game environments. Author Adam Crespi starts with a gas station taken from a photograph—retrieving measurements and dimensions with modular blocking and planning techniques in Adobe Photoshop—and then re-creates the building in Maya with polygonal modeling and advanced texturing techniques. The course shows how to model elements such as walls, doors, and roofs, including stacking UVs on a texture sheet, and also sheds light on simulating real-world details like dirt, wear, and grime, using ambient occlusion and normal baking in a high- to low-poly workflow. The final chapter shows how to export the model to the Unity gaming engine for final cleanup and rendering.

by Camille Fournier | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: April 2018 | ISBN: 9781492037736

This course shows how to use Apple Aperture to quickly and efficiently create a slideshow to impress any audience, from family and friends to colleagues and potential clients. The course covers organizing and sorting slides; picking a visual theme and a music track; adding text, images, and video; inserting transitions between slides; and sharing a slideshow on the web, via Keynote or PowerPoint, and on mobile devices.

by Kim Rees | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: April 2018 | ISBN: 9781492037712

Join James Williamson, as he shows you how to create elegant menus, links, and buttons that help visitors navigate your site faster and more intuitively. The course covers creating structured navigation that is accessible and clean, styling links, and building horizontal and vertical menus with rollover effects. The last chapter reveals how to create stylish buttons with special effects and CSS sprites.

by Michael Brunton-Spall | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: April 2018 | ISBN: 9781492037699

Creating Photo Books with Blurb presents three separate workflows for creating and publishing books that showcase photographs using the Blurb self-publishing service. The course starts with an exploration of photo bookmaking in BookSmart, Blurb's free desktop software, then shows how to make a simple photo book in Bookify, Blurb's online bookmaking service. The course also covers Blurb's PDF to Book plug-in for use with custom books created in Adobe InDesign, as well as information on ordering copies of photo books and selling them in the Blurb online bookstore.

by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: June 2018 | ISBN: 9781492037538

Award-winning children's book author and illustrator Ed Emberley is truly a national treasure, having drawn nearly 100 books. The warmth of his family and his 17th century home are an essential part of his work. In this installment of the lynda.com flagship documentary series, we go to Ed's home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, to meet him and all of the members of his talented family, including his wife and author, Barbara; children, illustrators Rebecca and Michael; and granddaughter, recording artist Adrian Emberley. A generation of children have learned to draw using Ed's drawing books and we watch as a new generation puts crayon to paper. At 80 years young, Ed is pushing ahead and we meet with his team as he works on his newest iPad app—with graphic artists that, as children, learned to draw with his books.

by Devora Zack | Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. | Release Date: June 2018 | ISBN: 9781492037170

CSS: Page Layouts introduces basic layout concepts, gives advice on how to create properly structured HTML based on prototypes and mockups, and goes into critical page layout skills such as floats and positioning. Author James Williamson shows how to combine these techniques to create fixed, fluid, and responsive layouts. Designers are also shown how to enhance their pages through the creative use of CSS techniques like multi-column text, opacity, and the background property. Exercise files are included with this course.