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.

To make 3D-Sphere and the content more interactive we decided to implement an „preview“ option for all new tutorials which will be published in the nearest future (The tutorials which are already uploaded at 3D-Sphere will be first converted in a new video format and after uploaded together with preview.). The „preview“ will feature a web-based video directly on the tutorial page with 3-5min content from the tutorial. With this option you can decide if the tutorial suits for you and if you will download it.

In few days we will start a new „news“ section called Hardware in which we would like to bring the latest news from the world of Hardware which is essential part of a workflow in any 3D modeling or animation project. The new section would feature news from the major players in this like Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Dell and others which bring the tools needed for smooth running and using any CAD or 3D application.

During the last tutorial we decided to improve the quality of our recordings by encoding the video a different way. So far all tutorial are encoded using Xvid and Lame mp3 for audio keeping the recording resolution. After some tests we decided to resize a bit the video down to 70% and rising the encode quality of Xvid by keeping the bitrate of the video around 550 kbps.