Training Discovery

Understanding how to arrange the elements of a composition is critical to a successful final piece. Like the skeleton of a creature, composition is the foundation on which everything else rests.

This course will help to clarify best practices for developing any artistic or illustrated composition. Shaping the elements; marrying concept to composition; engaging the editing eye; achieving balance, unity, directional movement, and perspective; and exploring point of view and focal points are all topics covered in these lessons. Author (and professional artist) Mary Jane Begin also explores the major and minor pitfalls of a weak composition and explains the six compositional rules that lead to the best end results! See the steps in action in the final chapter, where Mary Jane designs a concept for lynda.com.

Then share what you've learned with the lynda.com community. Take the three challenges Mary Jane issues in the course and post your results to Facebook and Twitter, using the hashtag #learnatlynda. We can't wait to see your illustrations!

In this course, Pulitzer-nominated photographer Natalie Fobes takes viewers into the studio and on location to explore the many elements that combine to make an effective photo.

The course explores compositional elements that guide a viewer's eye, including the rule of thirds; leading lines, patterns, and curves; and depth of field. Natalie then details the roles of color and light in a photo. She shows how to work with the natural light in a room or outdoor location, and how to enhance it using reflectors, newspapers, a T-shirt, or whatever might be handy. She also shows some simple indoor lighting setups that can replicate the look of natural light.

The course continues with a look at movement and how a photographer can convey a sense of motion by blurring part of the image or freezing a fast-moving subject. Next, Natalie explores the concepts of peak action and the decisive moment—those split seconds that capture the essence or emotion of a subject or scene. The course wraps up with a discussion of the roles of planning and research in creating effective photos.

Before you can start helping others learn, you must be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to convey information in a compelling manner. In this course, learn how to effectively train in today's business environment. Ajay M. Pangarkar shares strategies and techniques for delivering high-quality workplace training that leads to better learner outcomes. He covers developing, planning, and delivering successful training sessions, as well as how to bolster your communication skills and overcome barriers to learning. In addition to preparing you to deliver training sessions, the skills covered in this course can make you more adept at public speaking, coaching individuals, and leading a team.

Before you start your first management role, it's important to prepare yourself for a shift in mindset and priorities. In this course, leadership coach, best-selling author, and consultant Roberta Matuson explains how to step into your new management role on the right foot. Roberta shares strategies to help you make the shift from focusing on your own performance as an individual contributor to focusing on the success of your team as a manager. She helps you address common hurdles such as how to manage your former peers, engage and assess your team, and prepare for your evolution as a leader.

LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) is a PMI Registered Education Provider. This course qualifies for professional development units (PDUs). To view the activity and PDU details for this course, click here.

The PMI Registered Education Provider logo is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Learn how to build randomly generated 2D maps for role-playing and real-time strategy games with Unity 5. Jesse Freeman focuses on the basics of random map generation by teaching you how to create island-based terrains, and works his way up into more advanced techniques such as resizing the map, decorating it, and eventually creating large-scale maps with individual continents. He'll add trees, mountains, dungeons, and castles to make the map more fun to explore. He'll also teach you how to create a camera script that scrolls around the map with the mouse, and set up autotiling to give the map's coastlines a more organic look. In the end, Jesse will show you how to build an authentic 8-bit style map generation tool—perfect for your next 2D RPG game.

In this course, join thought leaders Thomas Stewart and Patricia O'Connell as they share their novel approach to service design, and explain why providing a great customer experience must be a strategic choice that's woven into the fabric of your business—not slapped on at the end. Thomas and Patricia discuss what great service design can do for your organization, and how to identify and win at make-or-break moments in customer interaction. They also share how to enhance brand consistency by ensuring that customers get the same quality of service across your organization. To wrap up, they help you evaluate your own service design GPA (grade point average), and take your service design ideas from the drawing room to the board room.

Visual Studio is the number one tool for Microsoft developers, whether you're targeting mobile devices or desktops. Get comfortable in this full-featured development environment and learn how to create a variety of projects, from websites to rich Internet applications. Author Walt Ritscher helps you dive deep into the basics of creating and debugging applications with Visual Studio, including configuring Visual Studio to support C#, Visual Basic, ASP.NET, and many other languages.

Visual Studio 2013 is here, and like every release from Microsoft, it is chock full of great new features. This course gives web developers exactly what they need to know to get started, whether they're coming from older versions of Visual Studio or another IDE. To begin, author Michael Lehman shows you around the toolbars, menus, and components in Visual Studio, so you can invoke commands and navigate your code fast. He also tackles Microsoft's One ASP.NET strategy, a "web developer's buffet" designed to make web forms, MVC controllers, web APIs, and single-page applications all available to you in any type of project. Last, Michael covers how to debug locally, remotely, and on Windows Azure, and use one-click publishing and other web deployment methods to get your projects out the door quickly.

Explore the new features and updates available in Visual Studio 2017. In this course, Walt Ritscher walks through the key new features in this release, starting with a look at the integrated development environment enhancements like new support for EditorConfig. Next, he explores debugging improvements such as Chrome debugging support, and dives into navigation and IntelliSense improvements in the code editors. Plus, Walt investigates the Docker container support for ASP.NET core projects and goes over the behavior of the Visual Studio 2017 Installer.

Discover tips and techniques that can make working in Microsoft Visual Studio simpler, faster, and more interesting. In this weekly series, Walt Ritscher shines a spotlight on helpful shortcuts for Visual Studio. He dives into a variety of topics, including code programming tips, keyboard secrets, application development suggestions, and more.

Projects and solutions are essential to Visual Studio. In fact, you can't start coding without a solution file, which contains its own subset of projects with source code, images, and data. Find out how to create and manage your own projects and solutions in this installment of Visual Studio 2015 Essentials, with expert Walt Ritscher. Walt explores the relationship between solutions, projects, and compilers and shows how to link files, navigate the Solution Explorer, and change which project builds and debugs first by changing the startup project. He also shows how to debug multiple projects simultaneously and view classes and class members in the Solution Explorer.

You have many choices when you start coding in Visual Studio. Language is one of the most exciting. In this installment of Visual Studio 2015 Essentials, Walt Ritscher surveys the programming languages available, including C#, Visual Basic, C++, and F#, as well as some non-Microsoft languages that can be added to Visual Studio. Walt reviews the basic syntax of the four core languages and shows how to write a simple application in each one.

Choosing the right project type in Visual Studio 2015 provides you with the right libraries and tools for your project, whether you're creating a desktop application, mobile app, or web service. In this Visual Studio Essentials training course, Walt Ritscher guides developers through the most popular project templates in Visual Studio 2015, including console, desktop, web, and mobile projects in ASP.NET, Apache Cordova, DirectX, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Universal Windows, and more. He also shows how to create class libraries and leverage third-party project templates that extend Visual Studio's built-in project types.

Visual Studio is already a powerful IDE. But when you add extensions, third-party tools, and templates to the mix, you have a development environment that can be tailored to your exact needs. In this installment of Visual Studio 2015 Essentials, Walt Ritscher shows you how to find, install, and use the most helpful extensions for Visual Studio. Learn how extensions like Spell Checker, Comment Remover, CodeMaid, and Productivity Power Tools can automate and speed up the way you code. Then discover how to build your own extensions, and share them with other developers in the Visual Studio Gallery. Walt also shows how to use standalone external tools to augment the Visual Studio workflow, and create custom templates that include just the files and settings you need for your project types.

Ensure your code is up-to-par by performing a unit test, verifying your code works as expected. You can perform unit testing using Visual Studio 2015. Selecting a framework and creating a small piece of code, to exercise a specific area of functionality, is all you need to get started. In this course, learn about the types of frameworks, naming conventions, integrations, and options available to you and how to implement them into your testing workflow. Join Walt Ritscher as he explains the process and step-by-step instructions. Along the way, he provides guidance on how to test with multiple parameters, customize your test runs, discover untested code, and even debug the actual unit tests.

Provide stakeholders with realistic, interactive prototypes so they can test and experience the intuitiveness of your designs. You can accomplish this by using a tool with features that help you achieve current user experience (UX) industry standards. In this course, learn how to use the popular UXPin platform to create wireframes, enhance mockups, add animation, share interactive prototypes, test responsiveness, and more. Discover how to create layouts for devices ranging from smartphones to tablets to desktops, and learn how to work with layered design files from Photoshop or Sketch.

Are you charging the price you deserve? You might be able to increase revenue through value-based pricing, a strategy in which you set prices based on the perceived value to customers instead of on cost. In this course, IMD professor Stefan Michel lays out the differences between cost-based and value-based pricing, while detailing the four capabilities of value-based pricing: superior customer insights, an understanding of your market, and the abilities to manage prices and apply pricing psychology. Along the way, explore the benefits of customer segmentation and the concept of pricing as pain management, and learn about the importance of maintaining confidence during price negotiations.

Learn to rig a car model in Autodesk Maya for use in animation, games, design visualization, and visual effects. Author Adam Crespi starts with an overview of parenting and hierarchy, moving into separating the model into working components. From there, you'll learn about creating controllers, constructing functioning wheel assemblies, and constraining the suspension. Expressions are used to tie the rig components together and add a degree of autonomous motion and rotation. Last, a bonus chapter on materials shows how to add realistic shaders onto the car and tie the controls to functionality such as operable headlights and taillights.

Note: Some experience with polygonal modeling in Maya and beginning knowledge of rigging and constraints will help you get the most from this course.

What makes a 3D space battle even more spectacular? Compositing in Adobe After Effects. Learn to take the render-pass sequences of the spaceship versus asteroid scene you created in part 1 of this series, VFX Techniques: Space Scene 01: Maya Animation and Dynamic Simulation and recombine them in After Effects. Author Lee Lanier shows how to integrate shading and color in your render passes, animate the flames emitting from the spaceship, and create a particle simulation that makes the asteroid explosion seem more realistic. You'll also learn to replicate glows, lens flares, film grain, and camera motion along the way.

Blue-screen and green-screen keying is the bread and butter of visual effects compositing. Every VFX artist must master this complex subject to succeed in the industry. This course offers 12 hours of the most comprehensive and detailed training ever produced on the subject of keying, covering literally every aspect of the job. You can follow along with NUKE, the software featured in the videos, or with any other compositing software that offers floating-point math. NUKE master trainer Steve Wright introduces several overall compositing workflows, as well as a myriad of tips and tricks and several keying techniques never before published. Learn about green-screen, blue-screen, luma, and saturation keys; spill suppression; color correction; edge refinement; and more. Plus, get a bonus appendix chapter of tutorials on keyers such as KEYLIGHT, Primatte, Ultimatte, and others.

Note: This course was created by Steve Wright, author of the seminal book, Digital Compositing for Film and Video. We are proud to host this course in our library.

Learn how to create, format, share, and print a wide variety of documents in Word 2016. Author David Rivers covers creating new documents from templates and scratch, formatting text and pages, working with headers and footers, using themes and styles, adding multimedia, and more. He'll also show how to share documents with others and enhance your productivity with macros.

Creating a Laser Battle shows VFX artists how to generate science-fiction-style gun battles, complete with laser beams, sparks, and set damage. The effects are created right inside After Effects, with its built-in particle tools, rotoscoping, motion tracking, and color, distortion, and blur effects. Combining these techniques in your own shots will allow you to create a wide variety of futuristic gun blasts.

Visual effects (VFX) can add destruction to a scene without causing real-world damage. Learn to destroy a building with a fireball, using an After Effects 3D environment, Maya dynamic simulations, and matte painted elements. Author Lee Lanier shows you how to convert video footage into 3D layers, adapt stock footage effects, add and improve Maya particle and rigid body renders, and integrate static artwork to inflict realistic damage to an old-world castle.

VFX Techniques introduces common yet critical visual effects techniques that are used in film and television shows on a regular basis. This installment shows how to build complex composites with Adobe After Effects and mocha, where motion graphics are mapped to live-action footage of an actor. Author Lee Lanier starts by combining rotoscoping and effects to digitally apply makeup to an actor to disguise motion tracking marks. Then discover how to transfer footage into mocha and generate planar tracking data that you can use to motion track graphics to the moving face of the actor. Plus, learn how to build and adjust motion graphics to create the look of a virtual tattoo and a pair of holographic heads-up glasses.

Whether you're a freelancer or the owner of a production company, creating and presenting accurate budgets is essential to the success of your video project. In this course, learn how to create professional budgets and proposals. Instructor Walter Biscardi Jr. provides instructions for video professionals on how to plan for the financial needs of each video project. To begin, see how to tackle client assessments by viewing an actual example shown from a script-to-screen project. Next, learn how to develop a working concept with pre-budget production planning by assessing your time, crew, and equipment needs. Last, learn how to present your budget and proposal and how to make revisions.