Keep Me Busy – Urban Web Studios – Daniel LaBarge – Get UrbanPowered

Well, I have officially made the switch from ID Studios to Urban Web Studios. I have always operated under my private website name and posted all my artwork there, but I’ve decided now to migrate more to web development. So, with that decision comes the need for a new site (which I have had for a while). I have dropped the intellidesign.org domain name but have kept the idstudios.org domain. Operating under the long version of my studio’s name, my primary domain is urbanwebstudios.com. A parked domain for those who like to keep it shorter: urbanpowered.com. I’ve put some redirects on the old ID Studios site to point to the blog and to certain pages of the blog for those trying to find stuff that they used to get!

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Many of you use iGoogle or Google Reader to RSS feed your favorite news and tutorials so I figured that I would give a break down on the latest and greatest in industry resources. I basically break them into four columns: Personal, Web Applications, Inspiration, and Tutorials. I guess I could make tabs out of them but that’s another click, and well, I am lazy.

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I love free. That’s no secret. The thing I like more than free is free stuff that works better than the junk you have to pay for! A perfect example of this awesomeness is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It’s been a couple weeks since they released their latest version of their Photoshop equivalent program but it’s still something worth shouting about. I’ve been running it in fully professional environment for these past few weeks and it’s performed incredibly! So here is my professional break down on it’s capabilities.

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I finally got around to updating the static image on the home page with the flash portfolio that I had been planning. It’s nothing fancy just a small preview of each image in the portfolio and if you click on it, it will open it up into a larger preview. It’s not all of my artwork, only about 3/4 of it. I don’t have any of my website portfolio on there either. I may do that in a post one of these days. I just figured I’d let everyone know that I got around to updating it so be sure to check it out!

I love matte painting and although I’m not very good at it I like to touch up photography or composite them together into fantasy worlds and such. one of my favorite sites for this feature is MattePainting.org. I was doing some research on techniques for matte painting and such and found a link on 3D World (the September 2006) issue and in the article it said to practice using the clone tool – alot! So I decided to brush up on my painting skills (no pun intended). (more…)

I’ve been playing around with the idea of redoing my website for 2007 and have finally decided to go ahead and do it. I was started to get tired of the incoherent look and wanted to get back to my original white/grey/black/orange color scheme of when I first started as a freelancer. (more…)

I don’t usually do this but I feel like it is extremely deserving. Eugene Reilly of BlenderNation and Geneome has got to be one of the best Blender contributors/educators out there. I have been so impressed with his dedication to providing and maintaining such high quality video tutorials! Even with the unfortunate down time on his website he has compiled a list of formidable tutorials. So, here’s my kudos to Geneome! Good job Eugene!

As many of my regular readers (all two of you!?) know that I work for as a Developer for Monster Web, Inc., a New Braunfels/San Antonio hosting company that specializes in CSS/XHTML web design and UNLIMITED hosting packages. Well, for those Blender heads who have come to love their services you’ll be glad to know that I’ve recently created a redesign for the company website!

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Well with it coming to an end it’s time to have a few reflections on what’s happened in the history of ID Studios and see where we are going from here. Let’s take a look (they aren’t in any particular order):

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Thanks to my buddy over at BlenderNation, Eugene, I’ve got an updated Wordpress blog! It’s kind of shaming to admit but I’m not very familiar with Wordpress and with all of his experience on BlenderNation and his own site at Geneome he agreed to redo my entire site. That’s the reason for the messed up theme, then the ugly theme, and now this one which is the one I redesigned. Thank you very much Eugene!