Research Resource Discovery

Maya and 3ds Max are two of the most widely used commercial software packages for 3D graphics. Artists and studios commonly leverage the strengths of both toolsets, resulting in production pipelines that use more than one package. Whether you're switching to one of these programs, using both at the same time, or simply need to move assets back and forth, this course illustrates invaluable techniques and best practices for integrating these two powerful Autodesk applications. Aaron F. Ross shows how to manage assets, harmonize the interfaces and preferences, and transfer data, materials, and scenes, making the transition between Maya and 3ds Max as seamless as possible.

The process of remediating a PDF—making sure its structure and tags are compliant with accessibility guidelines—is far from straightforward. The techniques outlined in this course will help you manage complex layouts and add advanced features like security, form fields, and links, while keeping PDFs accessible to users with disabilities. Author Chad Chelius shows how to work with tables, create PDF forms, and add links and security, with Acrobat, Word, InDesign, and LiveCycle Designer, addressing the remediation issues that go beyond the everyday.

Affinity Photo is a powerful but approachable image enhancement program that is being embraced by a growing number of photographers. In this course, instructor Steve Caplin covers advanced techniques that can help experienced users get more out of this powerful photo app. Steve goes beyond the essentials, explaining how to restore hazy images, work with advanced blending controls, convert images to black and white, sharpen the edges of an image, and more. Plus, he shares how to boost your productivity by setting your own keyboard shortcuts and creating macros.

Affinity Photo is a powerful but approachable image enhancement program that is being embraced by a growing number of photographers. In this course, instructor Steve Caplin covers advanced techniques that can help experienced users get more out of this powerful photo app. Steve goes beyond the essentials, explaining how to restore hazy images, work with advanced blending controls, convert images to black and white, sharpen the edges of an image, and more. Plus, he shares how to boost your productivity by setting your own keyboard shortcuts and creating macros.

Take an in-depth look at using the Android Espresso library to write Android UI tests. In this course, Chiu-Ki Chan tackles advanced topics in Android Espresso testing, including intents, hermetic test environment, and IdlingResource. She covers incoming and outgoing intents, dependency injection, Mockito and Dagger, and more. If you're an Android developer interested in implementing automated testing as part of the development lifecycle, this course can help to equip you with the techniques you need to write repeatable UI tests.

Stretch your interactive design skills by learning new techniques and features that can help you enhance your prototypes even further. In this course, learn how to create advanced animated states and interaction models in Framer, and improve your prototyping process for mobile apps. Emmanuel Henri walks through how to set up design files in Sketch and import files into Framer, and then demonstrates how to use advanced animation features. He also shows how to create complex interactions, and add sound, videos, and SVG animations to a Framer prototype.

How deeply have you thought about your brand? Is it intentional, or just an afterthought? What does each component—your logo, your website, your service, and even your culture—say to customers? Advanced branding means thinking about what distinguishes your company from the rest, and incorporating it into every single touchpoint of the business: design, messaging, marketing and PR, and company vision. Learn what branding really is, how it works, and how you can build and maintain a more competitive brand, in this course with marketing expert Brad Batesole.

Explore best practices for researching, developing, visualizing, and managing your brand, and learn about incorporating your brand throughout various customer touchpoints and keeping tabs on your brand as your company grows.

Deals are won and lost in the nuances of communication and relationship building. To be successful, business development reps must learn to pivot and build value in a variety of customer conversations. In this course, join Lisa Earle McLeod and Elizabeth McLeod as they share strategies that can help experienced reps take their communication and negotiation skills to the next level. Learn how to get into the right mental space for strategic conversation. Discover how to engage sophisticated customers through high-level questioning and body language, as well as how to negotiate without damaging a relationship or descending to the lowest possible dollar. Plus, learn how to keep your value top of mind with your buyer after you make the handoff.

Deals are won and lost in the nuances of communication and relationship building. To be successful, business development reps must learn to pivot and build value in a variety of customer conversations. In this course, join Lisa Earle McLeod and Elizabeth McLeod as they share strategies that can help experienced reps take their communication and negotiation skills to the next level. Learn how to get into the right mental space for strategic conversation. Discover how to engage sophisticated customers through high-level questioning and body language, as well as how to negotiate without damaging a relationship or descending to the lowest possible dollar. Plus, learn how to keep your value top of mind with your buyer after you make the handoff.

Capture One Pro is a powerful photo-management and raw-format conversion program. In this course, photographer Derrick Story—who uses Capture One Pro to manage his own photography business—zooms in on the photo management features of the program. He goes into the advantages of choosing a session or catalog, and helps you decide which option best suits your work. For those who go with the catalog option, he also helps you decide between a managed or referenced catalog. Learn about integrating sessions and travel catalogs into your master libraries, using the Folders panel to control how your images are organized on the hard drive, filtering your images using star ratings, color tags, and key words, and more.

Once you have a firm grasp of lighting for different types of video production scenarios, it's time to start concentrating on creating the appropriate mood and atmosphere. While the location and production design play key roles in setting the cinematic mood, lighting—more than almost any other factor—can really create the ambiance called for in the script.

In this project-based course, producer, DP, and educator Jem Schofield of theC47 guides you through three different production scenarios: a narrative scene, a commercial project, and a corporate project. As in his original course, Cinematic Video Lighting, Jem doesn't just talk at you about lighting concepts, he appears on set with a crew, taking you through each project scenario and breaking down the creative decisions that helped accomplish the look and feel of each production. He goes into the equipment, space, and of course, the lighting setups for each project.

Routing dictates how your organization's information (and the rest of the world's) gets from point A to point B. And it's the responsibility of network professionals to get routing right. So join Lazaro Diaz, as he takes you through advanced topics and techniques in Cisco routing, from configuring RIPv2 routes for smaller networks, to EIGRP, advanced distance routing, and OSPF, a more complex protocol that brings many more features and greater flexibility to your network. You'll be able to practice configuring all of these protocols using the Packet Tracer demo environment and Lazaro's detailed tutorials.

Learn how to implement advanced Go microservices. This course covers platform and framework anatomy, service discovery, microservice configuration, and communication options. First, learn about relevant frameworks and libraries, while also becoming familiar with the elements of a cloud native application. Next, see how Docker and Kubernetes can be used for containerization, composition, and orchestration. Then, find out how to use Consul or registration, lookup, central microservice configuration, and microservice discovery. Finally, watch as communication options are demonstrated—implementing synchronous RPC style communication using a binary protocol, and implementing two forms of asynchronous communication using RabbitMQ or Kafka.

This course was created and produced by Packt Publishing. We are honored to host this training in our library.

In photography, a color-managed workflow makes it easier to obtain consistent-looking color in every phase of the process: when you're editing photos on screen, printing them on an inkjet printer, or having them printed by a commercial lab.

In this course, Joe Brady builds on his Color Management Fundamentals course, focusing on color-management issues of specific interest to photographers. After a review of digital-color concepts, the course explores creating color profiles for each device in the digital photography workflow, from monitor to printer, to camera. Joe demonstrates the tools and techniques behind color profiling, even covering tablets—ideal for photographers using iPads or Android tablets as wireless remote controls.

A diverse and fascinating array of factors influence even the simplest buying decisions. Understanding the driving forces behind why your customers buy from you—or opt for a competitor's product—can empower you to reach key consumers. In this course, join thought leader Michael Solomon as he takes a deep dive into the internal and external forces that influence consumer behavior.

First, learn the importance of consumer behavior in helping us understand when, why, and how purchasing decisions are made. Michael shares how factors such as color, shape, and sound influence our perception of brands and products. He discusses gender identity and products geared towards different genders, as well as how consumer lifestyles, values, and attitudes affect product preferences. Michael also goes into external influences on consumer behavior, covering how groups make decisions and how ideas spread. Finally, Michael explores the role emotion plays in purchase decisions, and how you can structure messages to maximize persuasion.

A diverse and fascinating array of factors influence even the simplest buying decisions. Understanding the driving forces behind why your customers buy from you—or opt for a competitor's product—can empower you to reach key consumers. In this course, join thought leader Michael Solomon as he takes a deep dive into the internal and external forces that influence consumer behavior.

First, learn the importance of consumer behavior in helping us understand when, why, and how purchasing decisions are made. Michael shares how factors such as color, shape, and sound influence our perception of brands and products. He discusses gender identity and products geared towards different genders, as well as how consumer lifestyles, values, and attitudes affect product preferences. Michael also goes into external influences on consumer behavior, covering how groups make decisions and how ideas spread. Finally, Michael explores the role emotion plays in purchase decisions, and how you can structure messages to maximize persuasion.

Once you've mastered the basics of programming in C, you can concentrate on writing more efficient, more functional code. In this course, Dan Gookin offers some tips to help you extend your C programming skills. Learn how to read and write main function arguments, build more useful variables, and work with arrays and structures. Plus, get tips on generating pointers, and take the practice challenges to test your learning along the way.

The handmade nation is growing rapidly. Whether you are a blogger or a hobbyist, or thinking about taking the leap and becoming a professional crafter, you should know not only the basics of digital photography and product staging, but also the tips, tools, and tricks that professionals use to get the most compelling shots. In this workshop, Megan Andersen, aka Radmegan, shares advanced techniques for craft photography, diving deep into camera settings, composition, and staging. Learn how to use different lens options and effects, shoot outside or in low light, and work around common frustrations like greenish-yellow hues from fluorescent lighting and distracting reflections on shiny surfaces. The course doesn't just cover photography though—Megan also looks at image editing with Adobe Photoshop, discusses online portfolios and books, and shares lots of cool projects to help you have fun while you're learning.

Note: Mastering Django Web Development was created by Packt Publishing. It was originally released on 1/28/16. We are pleased to host this training in our library.

Django is one of the world's leading web development platforms. This Python web framework makes your app building experience smoother, faster, and easier. It is a key feature behind the success of many start-ups across the world, including Instagram and Nextdoor. This course introduces next-level advanced concepts to help you build your own professional-grade Django applications.

Author Kevin Veroneau starts off by explaining how class-based views—a powerful, but often poorly understood feature—work in Django. Then learn how to create custom middleware to help organize frequently used code. Have you ever wanted to build a complete RESTful API? Find out how to do just that, starting with a basic read-only API and then adding key-based authentication to allow the full range of CRUD functionality. Plus, discover how to use model managers and the Q method to make it easier to get the data we need to our views and clients.

For the finishing touches, dive into the details of caching to improve application performance, and then add custom management commands to help automate routine tasks.

In this course, GRAMMY-winning recording engineer, producer, and mixer Ryan Hewitt explains his techniques for capturing drum sounds in one of the best recording rooms in Los Angeles, EastWest Studio 2. Utilizing the talents of A-list session and touring drummer Josh Freese (interviewed in the first chapter of the course), Ryan will demonstrate his mic choice and placements on Josh's drums, spending time on the details of the kick, snare, toms, cymbals, overheads, and room mic setups. Ross Garfield, the Drum Doctor, assists in fine-tuning the drum sound. Watch for a one-of-a-kind look at the pros at work.

Check out how Ryan prepared for Josh's session in the first course, Drum Setup and Mic'ing in the Studio.

This course teaches web site designers how to take their sites to the next level with a few advanced techniques and the free and open-source Drupal software. Author Tom Geller shows how to configure the most popular add-on modules; use *nix commands and an FTP program to manage a Drupal site on a web server; change its visual appearance using the latest graphical tools; automate and speed through common tasks with Drush; integrate with social media sites; and see how "supermodules" like Panels, Context, Rules, and Features open up new worlds of code-free development.

Drupal 7 Advanced Training was designed as a follow-up to Drupal 7 Essential Training and it also dovetails nicely with our other Drupal courses, such as Drupal 7 Reporting and Visualizing Data and Create Your First Online Store with Drupal Commerce.

While genre does not affect many mixing techniques, EDM (electronic dance music) has unique challenges. Artists want their songs to sound loud, wide, and heavy, without suppressing their unique texture or competing with the underlying rhythm. In this course, Colin Fisher teaches advanced mixing techniques specifically suited to the EDM environment. He'll touch on loudness and dynamics, headroom and gain, and processing with compression, limiting, and clipping, as well as show how to manipulate stereo and frequency placement like the pros do. The end result is a fat, wide, and full sound that will help your tracks break through.

Note: Mastering Express Web Application Development was created by Packt Publishing. It was originally released on 6/30/2015. We are pleased to host this training in our library.

Express.js is a fantastic JavaScript framework, but most people only scratch the surface. Express is perfect for developing APIs with performance in mind and, as a thin layer, it allows you to add any additional technology you want. Mastering Express Web Application Development introduces the tools and libraries you need to take your Express development career to the next level.

To start, author Michael Heap creates a new Express application, showing how to configure it and increase application visibility with logs. Explore Express along with various libraries that will help improve your development experience. Then take a look at technologies such as SSL and nginx, and work through deploying your application to production in a secure and scalable way. Michael also introduces some existing open-source Express projects and reviews how they are structured, to help you organize your own applications in a systematic way. By the end of the course, you'll be familiar with a wide range of new Express tools and libraries, all of which will help you deliver the best value to your customers.

Learn advanced FileMaker Pro development techniques to help you take your databases to the next level. In this course, author and FileMaker database expert Cris Ippolite walks you through how to secure your databases; share your databases on the web or network; and create intermediate scripts, calculations, and reports. The course also discusses using the Web Viewer to extend your databases, and more.

Take your Google AdWords skills to the next level by learning advanced tips and tricks that can help you get more out of the popular pay-per-click (PPC) tool. In this course, Adriaan Brits shares advanced techniques for using Google Analytics in your online marketing efforts. He covers auction insights, the Display Planner, and the AdWords Editor, and provides tips for tackling reporting and auditing at an expert level. Plus, he goes into mobile marketing, using automation, and opportunities with app and video marketing.