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Art Related | ||
| 3dRender.com: Lighting Challenges Jeremy Birn is a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. Since starting at Pixar in 2002, he's worked on lighting for the movies The Incredibles and Cars, he also hosts the Lighting Challenges forums at CG Society. This is where you can get the files for his various challenges. |
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| 3D Total It all started in August 1999 as a project to make a simple 3D resource site... By July 2001 the site was seen by 100,000 visitors each month. The latest figures show a tremendous growth to over 1.5 million monthly visitor sessions. |
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| Animation Meat - A series of lecutre notes by Eric Larson and Ham Luske Animation Meat is actually a well rounded site in animation related matters, but I think this part of the site is worth pointing out since it's a series of lecture notes by Eric Larson and Ham Luske, two of Disney's Old Masters. |
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| Colors! Colors! is a simplistic digital painting application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect portable digital sketch-book. |
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| CGSphere The Sphere Project is a website dedicated to the evolution of technical and creative 3D sphere design. The purpose is simple; to create the most captivating and visually appealing sphere from their provided scene using your 3D program and renderer of choice. |
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| defcon-x Wood Textures Scanned with 720 DPI and black/white reference, no further adjustments have been done. The names are partially translated, for example color types, but the rest is basically german wood naming. All images where scanned from real wood plates! |
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| [E]vermotion An excellent resource for 3D models, textures, tutorials, architecture, etc. Evermotion creates and devolops products that help CG artists in making 3d visualizations by speeding up your workflow and enlarging quality level. |
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| HDRIMAPS.com Many HDRI images offered on the web have a similar look/style, so HDRIMAPS.com is exploring unique real-world environments during photo shoots to achieve unique Visual Effects within HDRI imagery. |
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| Itchy Animation Light Tutorial There seems to be very little information available in detailed form on a crucial subject for artists of all kinds: light in all the guises in which we encounter it on a daily basis. These on the other hand are some great pages on lighting. |
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| od[force]: - The worlds greatest Houdini resource For the past 10 years od[force] has been the premiere Houdini based resource site on the web. Bringing together users in a profesional and friendly environment has been their greatest achievement. |
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| Paul Debevec's Home Page This site presents most of the work Paul has been involved with in computer graphics, including research papers, computer animations, art projects, software, and educational resources. |
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| Threedy Forums The Threedy Forums are actually the forums from 3DTotal.com however I find these forums especially inspiring due to the speed modeling competitions hosted here. You learn a lot participating in one of these competitions, and the results are usually pretty nice to look at too. |
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Entertainment | ||
| Geekologie Geekologie is a geek blog dedicated to the scientific study of gadgets, gizmos, and awesome. There are a lot of shiny new things out there, and Geekologie is dedicated to finding every last one of them for you. |
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| Penny Arcade Penny Arcade, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik, is among the most popular gaming webcomics currently online. It focuses mainly on video games, the video game industry, and gamer sub-culture. New strips are usually posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. |
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| xkcd xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe, a Christopher Newport University graduate who worked as a contractor for NASA. It calls itself "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." New comics are added three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at midnight. |
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Music | ||
| All Power Tabs Archive // 25,000+ Guitar Tabs Power Tabs is a great piece of Software that plays midi, sheet music, and tab at the same time for learning guitar. All Power Tabs Archive is the largest accurate, detailed collection of Power Tabs. |
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| Dwelling of Duels A monthly (sometimes bi-monthly) competition for VG cover artists who play live instruments. The purpose is to provide impetus for artists to make songs by hosting friendly competitions with other artists, and to motivate artists to complete and release songs by having regular deadlines and monthly themes. |
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| Free Guitar Backing Tracks This is an excellent site where users may contribute their own backing tracks, or download tracks made from other users. Most of the ones I've downloaded are of quite good quality. |
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| GuitarBackingTrack.com This page contains free guitar backing tracks (BTs) for popular songs as well as jam tracks. The backing tracks can be played in flash format onsite or downloaded in MP3 format. |
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| Metroid Metal MetroidMetal.com is a place to celebrate the mysterious and hypnotic melodies from Nintendo's classic game series, Metroid. The Metroid Metal collection of songs is available for free on the songs page. |
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| OverClocked ReMix Founded in 1999, OverClocked ReMix is an organization dedicated to the appreciation, preservation, and interpretation of video game music. www.ocremix.org features hundreds of free fan arrangements, information on game music and composers, resources for aspiring artists, and a thriving community of video game music fans. |
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| ProgRock.com Online Radio An online radio station with a great selection of tracks playing around the clock. With over 20,000 songs to choose from on their advanced request system, I think you're gonna discover some great new music to buy. |
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| VGMix X VGMix is a community built around arrangements of video game soundtracks. Over the past six years, the site has taken several different forms, as they have learned what works and what doesn't, recovered from disasters, and grown as designers. |
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Online Libraries | ||
| The Moon Books Project For those who are not familiar with The Moon Books Project, the goal is to release classic literature onto the Nintendo DS using commonly available 'homebrew' software for the Nintendo DS. Everything here is completely legal, as all content from The Moon Books Project is in the public domain. |
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| PIXAR's On-line library -- by date Pixar's online collection of the whitepapers they've published at Siggraph over the years. |
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| Safari: E-Reference Library for Programmers and IT Professionals Safari Books Online is the only e-reference and e-learning content provider that contains content from all of the top four technology publishers - Pearson, Wiley, O'Reilly Media and Microsoft Press - and is the exclusive provider of content from O'Reilly and Pearson. |
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| Scribd Scribd is a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds. Tons of great documents are published here ranging from Super Mario Bros. sheet music to Practical Organic Chemistry. |
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Technical | ||
| Hard Forum: Benchmark Software A benchmark incolves running a program, or a set of programs, in order to assess the relative performance of a machine, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. This is a list of benchmark software that may help you figure out more about your [potential] machine. |
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| Extreme Tech: Build Your Own Render Farm At its core, a render farm is pretty simple: Seven or so machines on a network, a network-accessible storage location, a rendering app, and a queue manager. Putting it all together should be equally simple, right? |
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| Dive Into Python: Python from novice to pro Dive Into Python is a Python book for experienced programmers. You can buy a printed copy, read it online, or download it in a variety of formats. It is also available in multiple languages. |
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| Folding@Home The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery. Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. |
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| PDF Printer Adobe still refuses to properly support 64bit machines, so this is an alternative way of printing files to PDF format. |
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| StudioTax StudioTax covers the overwhelming range of personal income tax scenarios from simple tax returns to more involved returns for self-employed, returns with rental income and everything in between at the affordable cost of $0.00/return! And as a bonus their home page does not have pictures of happy good looking people pretending to do their taxes! |
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| Quicktime Alternative Macintosh is another company that refuses to co-operate with the 64 bit movement. Want to watch Quicktime Movies? Try this player instead. |
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| The Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD for Everyone! In the pages that follow, you'll learn EXACTLY what anamorphic widescreen on DVD is. You'll discover how it works and (more importantly) you'll learn why you should care about it. |
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Tutorials | ||
| 3DBuzz I'm personally very disappointed that this fantastic resource of knowledge has decided to no longer offer their tutorials for download and instead offer a streaming system, but maybe that's not an issue for you. If it is an issue, at least they have some great tutorial dvd's for purchase. |
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| Cubic Terragen Environment to HDR Map Tutorial These basic instructions are useful for taking a 6-face cubic HDR environment from Terragen and converting it to any other HDR panorama type--at least, any panorama type supported by HDR Shop. This makes it possible to create cylindrical or spherical HDR textures, or even LightGen light lists, all from Terragen scenes. |
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| Digital Tutors Recognized as the largest resource for free online training, Digital-Tutors delivers fun project-driven training for students, hobbyists, and professionals using creative software. |
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| Create your own HDR environment map in Maya/Mental Ray This tutorial shows how to create a HDR environment map for image based lighting from a Maya scene. This is a software only approach so no equipment is needed. Additionally, the latlong_lens shader can also be used to create environment maps for games, panoramic views etc. |
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| Jeff Wagner’s Old School Houdini Blog Jeff has been a part of the Side Effects support department for over eleven years supporting first PRISMS and then Houdini. That's an eternity in this industry. Over this time he has accumulated a vast amount of Houdini tips and tricks! |
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| PsiPog.net : A Guide to Dreaming This is meant as a general lucid dream (LD) walkthrough. Lucid dreaming is being aware you're dreaming while still inside the dream. This article covers general subjects, and doesn't go too in-depth on anything in particular. It covers dream recall, induction techniques, control, and substances commonly referenced in dream enhancement. |
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Web Design | ||
| Stu Nicholls | CSSplay | Experiments with cascading style sheets Stu Nicholls set up this page to experiment with CSS with the aspiration of helping newcomers to CSS and show old hands that it is more than just a mechanism for styling your documents. In most case the style is embedded in the page's head tags. |
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| StatCounter A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. | ||
| W3Schools Online Web Tutorials W3Schools is a web developer's portal, with tutorials and references relating to web development subjects, including HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript. W3Schools is free of charge, and is funded through text and display advertising. | ||