During the last few weeks together with the optimization process we also slight changes some elements on the site. One of the major changes one was the preview video which we included into all tutorials to allow the users to watch around 5 min from the tutorial and then decide if it’s fine for them to download. The minor changes from which you probably didn’t noticed all of them was a slightly change in the form how we write the tutorials and also the comment system.
Our first competition with the codename „Grinch“ came to the end. Even that we had very less participants and none of our users was able to complete his final artwork until the deadline we are happy that we started this kind of event here at 3D-Sphere. The whole competition was also a lesson for us and we learned a lot by it, got new friends from the users but also from the CG industry and also because of this we take the competition as positive.
Even that the average speed of internet connection is rising and also the present computer systems can handle a lot internet connections, request and large amount of data the importance of light weight web-sites is still present (see for example google.com). Because of this and the periodically maintenance which we do at 3D-Sphere.com we started performance optimization process to ensure the stability and speed of the web-site. This process includes; SQL table optimization, purging empty dB tables, compressing CSS and Java formats, compressing HTML, temporary files delete, image optimization and other.
You sure read this. As you know, we prepared a competition for you. Everyone, who wants to join, has to create something what want for Christmas. Although we chose an open topic, we still have only one entry. Based on feedback from you we have found, that many want not to join because they think their final artwork will not be good enough for our contest. AND THIS IS WRONG. Our portal is focused on beginners or someone who wants to improve. And competition is one of the way how to do this.
Because Photoshop is a powerful and essential tool in many workflows used by 3D or 2D artists we decided to start a Photoshop tutorials section at 3D-Sphere.com to provide our users with basic and advanced tutorials for this great software. The tutorials would be focused on post-production of images, manipulating of photos, color handling, effects and more to ensure and to cover at most aspects and features of Photoshop.
