Two terms ago we featured visual effects specialists from around the world discussing their perspective on what it takes to be a visual effects supervisor. While hugely successful, we received feedback that people wanted to go inside a real production and do a case study on a real project being made. The complexity of doing this and the legal complications seemed, well, almost impossible. But we pulled it off.

This term, to mark our 10th Background Fundamentals, we've got a blockbuster in store for fxphd members. Throughout the term, we'll look at what it means to be a Visual Effects Supervisor. What are the pressures, the roles and how do you manage a large Hollywood film?

Background Fundamentals is the "required" course for fxphd members and covers a wide range of topics -- the fundamental building blocks of visual effects. This course is a great overview of the industry and deals with a different aspect everyweek.

This term, to mark our 5th Background Fundamentals, we've got a blockbuster in store for fxphd members. Throughout the term, we'll look at what it means to be a Visual Effects Supervisor. What are the pressures, the roles and how do you manage a large Hollywood film?

In this tutorial we will learn how to create a female demon gargoyle creature.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the next-generation platform for building connected systems on the Windows platform. WCF makes it possible to build secure, reliable, and transacted services that can be composed into service-oriented applications. WCF makes this easy through a simplified programming model that unifies and improves many of the previous .NET distributed technologies like ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Web Services Enhancements (WSE), .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services (COM+), and System.Messaging. Not only is WCF simpler to use than its predecessors, it's also more flexible and highly interoperable thanks to its support for industry standards and protocols like REST, SOAP, and the various WS-* specifications. WCF is sure to change the way every .NET developer builds connected systems in the years ahead. This course covers the system-design features of WCF

Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals is a concise and focused introduction to the key features in Photoshop, presented by long-time lynda.com author and Adobe veteran Deke McClelland. This course covers the image editing process from the very beginning and progresses through the concepts and techniques that every photographer or graphic designer should know. Deke explains digital imaging fundamentals, such as resolution vs. size and the effects of downsampling. He explains how to use layers to edit an image nondestructively and organize those edits in an easy-to-read way, and introduces techniques such as cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, correcting and changing color, and retouching and healing images. These lessons distill the vast assortment of tools and options to a refined set of skills that will get you working inside Photoshop with confidence.

Watch step by step as world renowned Photoshop artist, Brian Haberlin, takes you through the art of computer digital painting smudge style.

Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals is a concise and focused introduction to the key features in Photoshop, presented by long-time lynda.com author and Adobe veteran Deke McClelland. This course covers the image editing process from the very beginning and progresses through the concepts and techniques that every photographer or graphic designer should know. Deke explains digital imaging fundamentals, such as resolution vs. size and the effects of downsampling. He explains how to use layers to edit an image nondestructively and organize those edits in an easy-to-read way, and introduces techniques such as cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, correcting and changing color, and retouching and healing images. These lessons distill the vast assortment of tools and options to a refined set of skills that will get you working inside Photoshop with confidence

This course explains how to develop Integration Services packages with an emphasis on the development of processes that support data warehousing. It begins by describing the overall process of package development, then describes the types of tasks that Integration Services and shows how these tasks can be performed sequentially or in parallel in the control flow by using precedence constraints.