A fan of Drake's music, Thank Me Later or just like the way the album art was done? This tutorial shows you how to go step by step to create the same kind of effect using the free photo editing software GIMP.
Including a teleporter scene in your science fiction movie? This tutorial shows you how to use a compositing effect so you can replicate the look of the Star Trek transporter. It's fairly easy - all you need are three separate, easy to work with layers.
Create your own realistic looking custom camera shake effect! Camera shake makes the film look like the cameraman is unsteady, an effect which can be used to create a documentary or a more "in the moment" feel for your film project. Rather than using the premade node in Eyreon ...more
There's still about eight months before the final chapter in the Mass Effect series comes out, but some trigger happy fans are already building replica costumes and prop weapons to celebrate the upcoming release. BioWare themselves recently commissioned some of these projects, ...more
Replicate the Predator-style video camouflage in After Effects by using displacement maps. This uniquely stunning and groundbreaking visual effect has been seen countless times in film and television to show video camouflage, invisibility, heat distortion, holograms, and stati ...more
Light boxing is a pervasive technique in advertising, used to draw attention to the featured product. You can replicate this effect in Adobe Photoshop. Starting from a blank document, this tutorial walks you through the process of creating your own light box effect.
Going into the detail of a particular shot of Times Square, this tutorial focuses on a tiny billboard graphic which represents an ad for an iPhone. This tutorial shows you how to achieve the right sideways tilt effect to replicate a billboard for your own Photoshopped cityscape.
Ever wanted to replicate the effect of writing text in a circle or other shape? You can set up a path for your text to follow using the GIMP free image software. This tutorial shows you a straightforward technique to achieve this effect.
This tutorial will work for most any 3D rendering program, such as Houdini, 3ds Studio Max or Maya. Learn how you can replicate the dynamic look of fire, smoke and explosions. Create digital fire and other fume effects with your computer.
This tutorial shows you how to replicate a popular Hollywood technique. It can be difficult to get the camera projection look with an actual camera, but Adobe After Effects has an easy alternative. Turn any 2-D still image into a dynamic 3-D clip.
Create your own effect of a light box in Adobe Photoshop. This is an exceptionally detailed tutorial which shows you how to start from scratch (not a photograph) and create the light box effect you can use to replicate the look of neon lights.
Green screens are clever devices that have saved movie studios millions of dollars in production fees because of their ability to let you tack on any background you desire digitally. Replicate the high-quality green screen keying used in many movies by watching this tutorial ...more
Love the look of animated 35mm film? It can be tricky to really replicate this effect, but it's nevertheless possible. This tutorial shows you how to use Adobe After Effects to create your own clip of 3-D animated film footage. Part 1 of 3 - How to Create a dynamic, 3-D moving ...more
Love the look of the new Discovery Channel cubic animation? The Greyscale Gorilla is here to help! After several months of experimenting, you can now benefit from his hard earned wisdom! Using Cinema 4D, you can make your own copy of this effect.
This Houdini 10 user's guide offers a look at how CHOPs can be used to replicate animation from one object to many, or more precisely to vary that animation. Whether you're new to Side Effects Software's popular 3D production program or a seasoned graphic artist just intereste ...more
Why make a flip book? Because all animation – even stick-figure Flash animation and multilayered, highly technical 3-D effects – is built on, and can benefit from, the basics of the craft first developed by artists working at the beginning of the last century. And while fancy ...more
If you loved The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, then listen up— there's been a new discovery found hidden within Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting— the Mona Lisa. An Italian researcher named Silvano Vinceti sparked a new controversy over the world's most famous painting w ...more
Movie theater light can sometimes be difficult to replicate, since it is always dark and you have to reproduce the effect of the flickering lights coming from the screen. Here's a great lighting trick you can use to replicate the effect of movie theater lights.
You can replicate the effect of the hand-tinted photographs of the 1920s and 1930s within Photoshop. Start with a grayscale black and white picture, and then use the techniques outlined in this tutorial to get your own hand-colored effect for your digital images.
A laser light show is possible to replicate with the diffraction grating effect. Different laser effects can be created using a variety of materials: small motors and diffraction grating pieces, and mirrors. It's possible to create searchlights, crystal balls, spring patterns, ...more
Create an effect which looks like a piece of paper is peeling off the page and then dropping from the screen. This tutorial shows you an easy and quick method to replicate this common and eye catching effect in Adobe Photoshop CS5.
Want to replicate that cool effect when you can watch Christmas lights flash in time to music? It's easy! You'll need a set of speakers, an outlet adapter, excess power cord, a solid state relay and, of course, Christmas lights! Once you've gotten all your project pieces assem ...more
If you love eating Chicken Tandoori in your favorite Indian restaurant, then this recipe is for you. Learn how to make Tandoori-Style Chicken at home. Tandoori refers to the super-hot clay oven used to cook a lot of Indian bread and meat. You probably do not have a tandoori ov ...more
Here's a useful technique for any animator to be able to pick up - give your anaglyph animations a 3-D look. To replicate this, you will need Flash, After Effects and Photoshop, or programs that can accomplish similar animation tasks.
Show your Canadian pride! You can turn your playercard in Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer into a Canadian flag. This tutorial shows you step by step how to replicate the famous red and white maple leaf effect in the emblem creator.
There are dozens of modifiers available to a designer working with Blender 2.5 to get the effect you want. This tutorial covers the array modifier - a way to replicate a single object and modify them as a whole, such as an array of pillars.
Cross processing is an old photography technique where the actual film is developed using the 'wrong' chemicals. It can add a unique color variation, like giving your subject green-tinted skin. It's possible to replicate this cross processing technique using Adobe Photoshop, a ...more
Check out this tutorial on how to create heat displacement in Apple Shake 4.1, a 2D and 3D compositing suite that will help you with visual effects editing. This video shows you how to create heat displacement in Shake 4.1, resulting in a very realistic picture. The method is ...more
In this video we'll see how to create one business card on the page and then using the Transform Effects we'll replicate the card multiple times up. This is a really slick way to make something once and have it repeated on the page as often as you like. The beauty of it is tha ...more
If you're looking for a cool way to add text to your videos, like for an opening sequence to a film where the credits are displayed, embedding the text directly into the scene is the way to go, especially if you like the hit television show "Fringe", who used these kind of emb ...more
Watch shader writer, Mario Marengo, explain spectral wavelength and how to utilize it within Houdini. This presentation was recorded at a Toronto Technical Evening hosted by Side Effects Software. Shaders generally work in RGB color space. This is limiting when trying to repli ...more
Starting with a basic line drawing, this tutorial shows you how you make a project in Adobe Photoshop that looks like it was drawn with a pencil. Then the tutorial goes into how you can use a few techniques to play with the lighting in your figure for maximum effect. Part 1 of ...more
Try beat boxing to make percussion sounds using only your mouth. Follow this Howcast guide to learn how to make basic beatbox sounds. You Will Need * Rhythm * A mouth Step 1: Create a kick drum Make the kick drum sound by expelling pressurized air through your mouth. At the ...more
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play with us on our free server. Do you need an extra boost in your game of PVP? Do you feel unapologetic to creepers? If you enjoy feeling like a madman, then this build is for you. After all, the only thi ...more
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. Minecraft is all about big ideas, but we all too often forget the details. Small changes in block type, positioning, or layout can transform builds from mundane to beautiful. Wheth ...more
You're sitting in front of your grandmother's Windows XP machine that has the worst infection you've ever seen. Safe mode? No dice. Restore points? They're compromised. Even worse, all of the files are hidden and none of the executables will run! This leaves her computer in a ...more
If you take two flat mirrors and place them front to back and look at them, you can see an infinite number of reflections. While this is a self-replicating pattern and can be somewhat mesmerizing, it isn't anywhere as interesting as looking at the chaotic scattering of light t ...more
Sometimes an iDevice is best used for idle, pointless fun. Today's segment of Making Art on Your iOS Deviceis a mixed bag of time-wasting cool effects and random, but useful art-making tools. Below, 10 apps for creating anything from erratic hand-shaken digital effects to your ...more
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. VoxelSniper is one of many very useful world editing plugins available to Minecraft servers. In my opinion, it is one of the best and certainly the most used of all server side plug ...more
Take It On Many critics of Traditional Martial Arts (TMA) base their criticisms on the training methodology of the “old school.” Kata and pre-arranged partnered sets, they say, don’t prepare the trainee for anything “real.” The approach of TMA, they continue, is based on assu ...more
Injection is an attack vector that involves breaking out of a data context and switching into a programming context through the use of special characters. These characters are significant to the interpreter being used, but not needed for the general user input being asked for. ...more
The original iterations of the Terminator film franchise have served as the inspiration (via the heads-up display of the T-800) for future augmented reality dreams, so it is fitting that the current crop of AR gives the latest installment in the series a promotional boost. Wi ...more
For enterprise augmented reality platform makers, remote assistance apps represent one of the greatest opportunities to show off the power of immersive computing. These apps enable experts to guide front-line workers or customers with AR prompts and other content in the field ...more
Boomerangs are perhaps the quintessential story tool on Instagram. Surprisingly, there's never been much to them — point and shoot, and your subject plays forward and backward in a never-ending loop. Perhaps its prolonged simplicity inspired Instagram to give Boomerangs a bit ...more
On Tuesday, on the one-year anniversary of the announcement of its AR Camera platform, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg revealed at the company's F8 developers conference that the platform will be extended to the company's Instagram and Messenger apps. Users of the In ...more
Andre was enjoying the carefree life of a 12-year-old with his friends, riding his bike and playing sports, like all kids that age. Schoolwork wasn't hard for him, and his grades showed that. Then, the headaches began. He lost vision in one eye, symptoms that drove his famil ...more
At IFA in Berlin today, Sony introduced the latest models of the Xperia line, with new features in tow that should appeal to creators of augmented and virtual reality content. The Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact both carry the Motion-Eye camera that can capture video at 960 frames ...more
A new study casts real suspicion on the possibility of life on Mars. Why? It seems the surface of the planet may be downright uninhabitable for microbial life as we know it. Over the years, and with research into life on other worlds, visions of extra-terrestrials and "little ...more
The search for a cancer treatment that selectively finds and kills only the cancerous cells has just made a giant leap forward. A new study published in Nature Communications, by a group of researchers from the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute, Barcelona Insti ...more
Why? Tricks the eye into thinking the impossible is as simple a single chemical reaction. Categorizing this tutorial is one of the great challenges for an internet librarian: magic trick or science experiment? Our crew made our own hot ice lab, which in effect ruined the ki ...more
In the wild world of Snapchat lenses, this week was an especially good one for cool effects. Lens-crafters (really hoping I can get that name to stick) have gotten a lot better at making non-gimmicky lenses that allow you to interact with them in new and unique ways. New to t ...more
Natural remedies used through the ages abound, especially in Asian medicine. The willow-leaved justicia plant, found throughout Southeast Asia, has traditionally been used to treat arthritis, but scientists have just discovered it contains an anti-HIVcompound more potent than ...more
The Maze Runner tells the story of an unpredictable maze designed to kill. If you're looking for a Halloween costume that's both dark and deadly, the film offers a great option. With its cast of mostly male characters clothed in plain, well-worn clothes, creating an awesome T ...more
Specialized cells in the lining of the gut may provide a key to preventing an infectious brain disease caused by misfolded proteins. Don't Miss: Syphilis: An Old Disease Returns with a New Drug Resistance We can easily imagine white blood cells attacking foreign germs in th ...more
The launch of Android 4.4 KitKat alongside the Nexus 5 was met with much fanfare from Android enthusiasts. Unfortunately, if you don't have a Nexus device or are still awaiting the 4.4 update, you may feel a bit left behind. If you have a carrier version of the HTC One, 2013' ...more
Filmed in what appears to be a single continuous shot, war film 1917 is now the front-runner to conquer the Best Picture category of the Academy Awards after bringing home the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the drama category. To commemorate the occasion, film buffs ...more
Mobile augmented reality company Snapchat now has a special option for romantic message exchanging this Valentine's Day, a day which, incidentally, happens to be the first one in 116 years where Sweethearts, the original heart-shaped candy, will be unavailable for purchase. T ...more
Young girls, especially those who live in areas where HIV is epidemic, like sub-Saharan Africa, are particularly vulnerable to becoming infected with HIV. A vaginal ring containing the antiviral agent dapivirine has been shown to decrease the chance of developing HIV-1 in adul ...more
HIV-infected people who are treated long-term with antiviral drugs may have no detectable virus in their body, but scientists know there are pools of the virus hiding there, awaiting the chance to emerge and wreak havoc again. Since scientists discovered these latent pools, th ...more
The search for the causative agent of colony collapse—the mass die off of honey bees throughout the US and Europe—has escalated with increasing confusion lately. Everything from pesticides and stress to viruses and mites have been implicated, and some researchers think that ma ...more