Research Tools and Services Discovery

Think version control is just for programmers? Think again. While version control tools are typically targeted at developers, anyone who works on a computer can benefit from them. Version control is the ultimate safety net, and an ongoing journal of your work. This course aims to empower designers, writers, photographers, teachers, and, yes, developers with the knowledge to integrate version control into their workflows. Author Joe Chellman dispels myths about version control and demos a simple version control project featuring not code, but a screenplay. He reviews examples of work that's well suited to version control—graphic design, web design, lesson planning, and even WordPress theme development—and show what's possible when you begin sharing and collaborating with version control tools like GitHub and Bitbucket.

VFX Techniques with author Lee Lanier introduces common yet critical visual effects for film and television. This installment shows how to remove an unwanted building from a live-action plate and replace it with a new digital matte painting.

Learn how to track the footage with the Adobe After Effects 3D Camera Tracker, replace areas such as the sky, rotoscope moving elements such as buildings and cars, and integrate a digital matte painting so it gains appropriate shifts in perspective and scale. You'll also apply color-grading techniques and learn how to fabricate reflections. The course also covers an alternative motion-tracking workflow with the Foundry CameraTracker plugin.

Realistic materials make for better game worlds. Learn how to craft materials like wood, bronze, and glass, and then light your scene inside the Unity 3D game engine. Author Adam Crespi starts out with simple materials and gradually introduces more complex shaders: diffuse surfaces like plaster, as well as metal and reflections. Then you'll delve into the magic of bringing a level to life with lighting, including point, spot, and directional lights. Finally, explore light baking with the Beast lightmapping engine.

A dependable backend is a must-have for today's games. Giving users the ability to log in and save and retrieve player data can make or break a community-oriented game. The goal of this course is to build a flexible and scalable networking solution, which can be reused in any of your future games, using Unity and Google Firebase. Instructor Harrison Ferrone starts with an overview of the Firebase Authentication and Realtime Database modules and the Firebase SDK. He shows how to script some basic functionality for logging in and registering users, and progresses to more complex functions like saving and fetching data, waiting for responses while providing good visual feedback, and displaying real-time data in the Unity GUI. By following along, you will understand how to integrate Firebase with Unity, save and fetch user data in a game scene, and bundle your work in asset packages that can be used in many other Unity projects.

Unreal Engine is a complete suite of game development tools made by game developers for game developers. From 2D mobile games to console blockbusters, indie experiments, and virtual reality, Unreal Engine can power it all. In this course, Craig Barr covers the essentials of level design, lighting, effects, Visual Scripting, cinematics, and game packaging with Unreal. He covers creating your first project, building a base landscape, blocking out levels, and exporting and importing assets for use in the design. Want to find out how to craft a unique look? Learn about applying materials and creating special effects with Unreal's particle systems. Plus, get a thorough introduction to Blueprints, the visual scripting language, and optimizing performance for great gameplay with Unreal.

Efficient project management and team communication are the keys to meeting the ever-shrinking deadlines of post-production. Trello is the perfect tool to coordinate editors, assistant editors, producers, vendors, and entire creative teams, whether located in the same physical space or scattered across the globe.

Trello for Video Post-Production is a hands-on learning experience in using Trello, Google Drive, and Slack to build your post-production project management system from the ground up—all the way from planning to the delivery of your final masters. This system can apply to scripted projects, unscripted, documentary, reality, and almost any other kind of project imaginable. Filmmaker and professional editor Zack Arnold shows how to create boards and add new cards, attach documents, share media, assign due dates, and link to several different cloud-based storage solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox. Each step of the process is broken down in detail so you understand how to use Trello to its fullest potential. With these tips, you can finally achieve the dream of a post-production workflow that minimizes busywork, paperwork, and email and maximizes your time to be creative.

Having the skills to create believable smoke and fire is crucial for any aspiring VFX artist. In this course Ben Watts shows how to use TurbulenceFD, an incredibly powerful fluid simulator that plugs right into CINEMA 4D, to create realistic smoke, fire, and explosions.

Want to jump right in? Check out the "Quick Start" chapter for short lessons on creating containers and emitters and rendering your simulation. From there, the course explores every aspect of TurbulenceFD in depth, including its solver and timing settings, forces, channels, and emitter options. Along the way, Ben includes some practical and fun examples. By the end of this course you'll be confident using Turbulence FD and creating your own awesome smoke and fire effects.

By combining Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, you can take full advantage of each program's capabilities. Use Lightroom for photo organizing, sharing, and basic image enhancement. When you need more advanced retouching and editing features, one click sends a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop.

In this course, photographer and author Jan Kabili shows how to combine both programs. The course begins with details on how to set up the two programs for maximum compatibility. The course then covers strategies for working with photos in a variety of formats, sending them from Lightroom to Photoshop to viewing the edited results in Lightroom. The final chapter demonstrates several real-world scenarios for using Lightroom and Photoshop together.

Following a user-centered design technique puts you more in touch with your users' true needs, which helps you develop solutions that really work for your intended audience. The approaches described in this course help development teams pool their diverse perspectives and collaborate to understand how to turn thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and desires of users into the design for a product.

Join Chris Nodder as he provides a road map to his series, UX Design Techniques. Each technique in this series builds on the data and output from the previous techniques. The user data from observations is used to identify user pain points and create personas. The pain points and personas are used during the ideation phase to create multiple possible solutions. Scenarios and storyboards take these multiple possible solutions and narrow them down to a working set, from which you build a paper prototype that you can usability test with some more representative users. At any point, you can follow the trail all the way back to data you gathered from your initial observations.

Being able to configure a backup and recovery solution is a key skill for any VMware vSphere administrator. This course covers both the fundamental and advanced concepts of backups in vSphere. Rick Crisci focuses on vSphere Data Protection—a backup solution that comes bundled with vSphere—and vSphere Replication, which allows virtual machine data to be continuously copied to a recovery site. Viewers learn how to use snapshots to preserve the data and the state of a virtual machine at a specific point in time, and revert to that state if needed. Rick demonstrates best practices and practical techniques in an easily replicable lab environment you can set up on your home computer.

Many designers used Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign together, but the unique formatting and hidden markup in Word often cause issues when you bring text into InDesign. In this course, learn how to make these programs play nicely together and create beautifully formatted documents from existing text. Author and InDesign Secrets creator Anne-Marie Concepción shows how to clean up your text formatting, strip out Word styles and map them to InDesign ones, place Word document elements in InDesign, and fix the formatting once the text arrives. Plus, learn to repair corrupt Word files and explore alternatives to Word such as InCopy and Google Docs.

Become more productive and use Microsoft Word more efficiently with this collection of quick, bite-sized videos that tell you exactly what you need to know about working with Word. Each video in this course is self-contained and about a minute long, so you can jump in at any point to quickly gain helpful insights. Authors Nick Brazzi, Garrick Chow, and Jess Stratton provide on-the-spot solutions for common questions about Word. They cover using section breaks to control column layouts, viewing two parts of a document, converting text to table and table to text, and more.

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 cut time spent on repetitive and complex tasks in Microsoft Word. With macros, you can record a sequence of steps and perform them with the click of a button. Macros are driven by Visual Basic, but you don't need to be a programmer to create them. Instructor Gini von Courter begins this course by showing you the easiest way to set up a basic macro in Word. She explains the basics of macro security, and shows how to view the macro code in the Visual Basic Editor. Next, Gini shows how to build more complex macros by incorporating Word building blocks. Then learn how to export and import macro modules. Finally, Gini demonstrates how to manage your macros and add them to your Word toolbar or ribbon.

Want to build a website, without all the work? Do it yourself (DIY) with WordPress and Genesis, the WordPress theme framework. This course helps you set up WordPress, showing how to choose a web host and connect to it via FTP, download and install WordPress, connect to a database, and make your first post. This is the primary step in creating and maintaining your very own WordPress website.

Ready for the next stage? Find more courses in this series by searching for Wordpress DIY.

Discover how to manipulate the inner workings of WooCommerce to deliver customized WooCommerce stores. In this course, learn how to tailor the functionality of your online store to match your existing business practices by creating a plugin that interacts with WooCommerce. Join WooCommerce expert Patrick Rauland as he explains how to create a settings page, hide the checkout page, and customize the edit product page. Plus, he covers how to customize the WooCommerce checkout, add custom order statuses, and send automated updates to customers.

Enabling readers to share your WordPress content with their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter is the key to your site growing and prospering. Staff author Morten-Rand Hendriksen shows how to add social media sharing buttons to your posts and pages, with several different WordPress plugins. This course covers the different options, including the sharing features in Jetpack and the dedicated WPSocialite and AddThis plugins, and their pros and cons.

This installment of Start with a Theme shows how to set up a video blog using WordPress and three different free themes that result in three different looks for your site. Series author Morten Rand-Hendriksen explains how to get up and running quickly with Twenty Twelve, Origami, and Sundance, and reviews the benefits and drawbacks of all three themes as they apply to video content in particular. Learn how to add video from services such as YouTube and Vimeo, enhance the visibility of your posts, add a video slider, and more.

If you build a website with WordPress, build it with accessibility in mind. Making your content, themes, navigation, and other site features accessible helps everyone—including visitors who want to find your site through search engine results.

This course, merging WordPress coding with accessible web design techniques, helps you make sure your website meets modern accessibility standards. You'll learn how to use the power of WordPress to quickly build a beautiful and accessible website that can be used by people with different types of abilities. Author Joe Dolson provides a broad introduction to accessibility and then focuses on practical steps to make sure your WordPress themes, plugins, and content are accessible and usable to all.

One-page sites with JavaScript-based scrolling navigation are popular, especially for creative portfolios and company websites. However, in WordPress, single-page sites also have severe restrictions and can be hard to manage. This course shows you how you can create a dynamic one-page front page for your WordPress site that pulls content from different areas and displays it in a visually stunning way. This method allows the front page to update automatically as site content changes, without you having to constantly manage it. Staff author Morten Rand-Hendriksen will take you step by step through this solution: creating a new template and content pages, calling content to the front page with custom loops, and adding JavaScript to enable sticky menus and scrolling.

Want to start making an income from your WordPress site? Try paid memberships. This course covers two great solutions for selling paid memberships with WordPress: Restrict Content Pro and iThemes Exchange Membership. They are both highly rated plugins, about equal in cost and functionality, and work right out of the box. In this course, WordPress guru Morten Rand-Hendriksen shows how to find, install, and configure Restrict Content Pro and iThemes Exchange Membership to restrict your content and accept payment from site members. He also shows how to set up discount codes and "drip content" that will keep your members coming back for more.

Choose the solution you think will work for you and watch that chapter, or watch the entire course before making a decision.

Learn how Dave Darlington achieves his Grammy-winning sound with Waves plugins. First, Dave covers EQ techniques, from boosting to cutting, notch filtering, tone sculpting, and hardware emulation. Next, he discusses compression, including automatic levelers, multiband compression, side chaining, and hardware emulation. He moves into reverb, showing how to utilize the basic algorithms and parameters of different types of reverbs to create sonic ambience and a sense of space. Then, Dave covers delay and modulation effects, including multitap delays, flangers, and some tricks for adding bottom end, width, and crunch to the mix. Finally, he'll cover some the basics of mastering, including master buss compression, EQing the master buss, and maximizing the output level.

This series explores web careers from a variety of angles: insights from veteran web designer and agency principal Lauren Bacon, interviews with industry insiders, and answers to questions from our members. Lauren Bacon has mentored and coached many web professionals as they were starting out and loves sharing all that she's learned from her 15-year career as a designer, front-end developer, and agency principal.

If you're interested in a career in web design, programming, UX, SEO, project management, or content development, this course is a great place to start. Learn about the career options that are available to you, identify a path that fits your skills and preferences, and look a few steps ahead of where you are now, to plan your professional future.

Parallax is an optical illusion that gives 2D objects a sense of depth. Parallax motion, on the other hand, is when objects in the foreground tend to move faster than the background. Adding parallax motion can make your web projects more interesting and immersive by adding the illusion of depth. In this course, Tom Green shows you how to build a parallax motion effect using a combination of Google Web Designer and Adobe Flash CC, and then create a separate, even more captivating effect in Edge Animate.

Behold the lowly gif animation: it's making a comeback on the web, appearing as a preloader, or indicator that site content is loading. Join Tom Green, as he shows you how to make your own GIF-based preloader in this installment of Web Motion for Beginners. You'll learn how to export a series of fireworks-style explosions from After Effects, create an animated GIF in Photoshop or Fireworks (your choice), and make the GIF usable as a preloader in Edge Animate.

To be an effective web programmer, you have to understand what happens when you enter a URL or click on a link. Under every webpage lies the markup—JavaScript, HTML, and CSS—and the hierarchy that controls display—the Document Object Model (DOM). Then there is the server that hosts the files, the browser that renders them, the metadata, and the mobile experience to consider. Explore what happens below the surface, and learn how to write better code. This course provides a deep dive into the world wide web, and the underlying structures you need to understand to build robust applications and websites that are efficient and easy to maintain. Learn how HTML documents provide the foundation for CSS and JavaScript, and see how to layer presentation and interactions on top. Learn how different code editors and browsers interact with web content, enabling editing, programming, and display. Discover why accessibility is so important to keeping the web open and available to all users, and what workflow works best for web programming. Instructor Morten Rand-Hendriksen keeps the lessons fun and fast-paced, so it's easy for almost anyone—web programmers, web designers, and even web publishers—to follow along.