3D animation software such as Maya, 3D Max and SolidWorks can be used in modeling different type of surfaces, components, structures and buildings as well as for incorporating the modeled structure as part of an animated video. This article would serve as a tutorial focused on the use of Autodesk Maya in modeling a 3D building structure. For those who have no knowledge of Maya, the first step in following this tutorial is downloading a free trial Maya 3D software and installing it on your personal computer by following the instructional manual provided on the software.

Modeling with Maya can be done in several but for designing a building three major ways exists and they are;

• Polygon modeling
• Nurbs Modeling and
• The use of sub division surface

We shall choose polygon modeling as our system for designing a building in this particular tutorial due to its easy learning process.

Polygon Modeling Steps with 3D Architectural Animation Software

• It is recommended that a first time user goes through the instructional manual which explains the basic terms and tools used in Maya before taking on modeling. This been said, the next step is opening a new work space by simply running the software, click on>create>Polygon primitives>cube and the drawing tool would be highlighted with a cubic diagram at its edge.
• Use the drawing tool to draw a square vertically on your workspace according to your measurements or taste and then modify the width, height and length of your initial vertical square by simply clicking on it and extending the edges. This then produces a cubic diagram which serves as your four walls.
• You can then proceed to shade the four cubic walls to give it a black hue. Further modifications can also be done to the four walls by selecting the polygons components such as face and vertices.
• To select a polygons surface through the vertices or face component on this 3D architectural animation software; right click your cube with the mouse would pop out a display menu that allows you to choose vertices or face by clicking on it. For our project, we would click the vertices option for it allows us make changes to large portions of the cubic wall surface simultaneously. You can then extrude the vertices however you which to produce the shape you require

• For modeling the roof of the house, you could use a cube, sphere or cone by clicking on create> polygon primitives> sphere/cube/cone/cylinder depending on the roof shape you require.
• Clicking on the required shape provides you with the needed drawing tool on the 3D architectural animation software to draw your roof according to your dimensions or taste.
• Attach the roof by selecting the move tool, clicking on your roof shape and then placing it on top the cubic walls that was earlier designed and you can also employ the extrude techniques in step 4 to modify your roof in any manner.
• Finally, we select the cubic walls and the shaped roof by holding control and clicking on both which allows you group them to together forming your building. This is a basic tutorial using the polygon technique for designing a building structure and we recommend that you spend more time tinkering with 3D architectural animation software such as Maya to get a hang of its unlimited designing potential.

This post was written by Guest Bloggers at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/tips-to-using-3d-architectural-animation-software/.

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In this part we’ll continue talking about the changes we made in our website redesign. We’ll talk about the new pages we added, the general changes which affect most of the pages in our website and the backend changes.

New Pages

New pages were added to our website as following

1. Timeline Page

Pages from blog and marketplace are grouped to the year they are published in. To the left of the title is the day and the month of the publish date and on the right of it is the number of the comments if they are enabled, “Leave a comment” if they are enabled but there no comments or just “Comments Off” if they are disabled.




2. Archives Page

The main difference between the timeline and the archives page is the posts in the archives are groups according to their post type rather than the year they are published on.




3. Author Page

The author archive summarizes everything the author write in our website. The main section of the page shows the profile pic and under it a short description about the author. Bellow the description there are lists of latest posts, latest premium item and latest free item written/created by the author. On other hand, the sidebar display the total number of each the premium item, free items, posts and the comments. There is also a link to subscribe to the author’s RSS.




4. Comment Policy

The comment policy gives the basic rules and guidelines which governor the comments posted in our website.

5. Attachments page

Page dedicated to display the attachments. Assuming the attachment is an image, the page will display the main image along with thumbnails of the next and the previous images.

General Changes

The following are the changes which affect all the pages.

1. Headings font changed




2. UC Ribbon

Which contains UC logo and the length of it’ll shorten when you scroll down.

3. Welcome Bar

The welcome bar background has changed to give it a cloth look and its color is changed to black rather than silver.

4. Top Menu

A new menu positioned at the very top of the page. It has a fixed position so no matter who much you scroll down, the menu will stay at its position. The next big thing about the top menu is that it swaps its content with main menu when scroll down.

5. CSS3 Transitions




6. Tooltips

The title attributes are now shown in black tooltips. Just hover on any link to activate the tooltip.

7. Magnifier Effect

As we mentioned before, we use the magnifier effect in the premium and free items pages. We also use it in the portfolio pages.

8. Default error pages

The default WordPress error pages are just blank white pages, so we changed the background and added our logo to rebrand the error pages.

9. Pagination

The former look of the pagination may get you confused on which page you are in. The new look is blending with our new redesign much better. Each number is separated in its box and the number of the page you are in is highlighted with black background to make clearer.

10. Firefox open search

If you use Firefox as your default browser, you can add our search to your search option so you can search our website without the need to open our website first.

11. Maintenance and Database error pages

The default maintenance and database error pages are changed to something more understandable, more eyes pleasant. We added some icons which link to our social networks pages and a form to subscribe to our newsletter to both pages.

These are the majority if not all the changes we made to the frontend of our website and it’s the time to talk a little bit about the changes we made to the backend.

Regarding the backend, we created custom post types which are premium items, free items, portfolio, testimonials and 3d previews. Each post type has its own option to help us make the posting process as simple and easy as possible. We also created custom taxonomies for each post type if we think it will help us to organize our website.
The main updates to the backend as follows.

1. We integrated Google Rich Snippets to our premium and free items pages as well as the breadcrumbs.
2. RSS update will be delayed before it show any new published posts just to make sure we didn’t make any mistake before it shows in the RSS.
3. Comments moderation had been changed. Before we moderate the comments manually but now it is moderated automatically. Any commenters comment for the first time, they will have to confirm their email address before the comment appears in our website. Any comments they write after they confirmed their email, will appear immediately.
4. All our premium items will be transferred to Amazon S3 service for faster downloading bit until now the process didn’t completed.
5. We use cookies in the following situations

1. If you add item(s) to your shopping cart.
2. If you collapsed the footer.
3. If you changed the marketplace layout.
4. If you changed the marketplace info being shown.

The reason we use cookies is that to make the visits to our website pleasant to our visitors. Imagine this following situation. You collapsed the footer and then navigated to another page in our website. If we don’t use cookies, you’ll need to collapse the footer on every page you navigate to. This is not user friendly. Please refer to our privacy policy regarding the use of cookies.

These are most the changes if not all of them we had made to our website. If you have any comment, suggestion or even a problem about our website, you are more than welcome to comment in this post, part 1 post or contact us through our contact form.

This post was written by Administration Department at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/website-redesign-2012-part-2/.

The post Website Redesign 2012 Part 2 appeared first on Unique Creativity Digital Services.

To improve our visitors’ experience in our website, we made some changes to both the frontend and the backend of our website. Actually we focused on simplifying the backend and make the process of posting new items, projects and articles much easier which may not that obvious to our visitors. In this article we will highlight the changes we made. If you didn’t know, we use WordPress in our website for its powerful resources, flexibility, customizability and many other reasons. So let’s first begin with frontend changes.

Homepage

The layout of the homepage is completely changed. We wanted the homepage to summarize almost everything on the website, so we added different widgets to it to accomplish this. The main widgets are:

1. Latest marketplace items
2. Latest blog posts
3. Latest UniqueCreativity news
4. Latest testimonials
5. Newsletter subscription form

Comments

1. Add ribbon to author’s comments and slightly change the background color to make the author’s comments stand out.
2. Verify the fields of the comment form for any errors before processing the data.
3. Comment form icons
4. CSS3 transition when the field is focused.

404

We changed the 404 error page to make it easy to the visitors to find what they are looking for. We added four widgets which are the latest posts, premium items, free items and portfolio projects.

Search

We added a search form with some advanced options above the search results. Now you can choose what you want to search whether you are searching for premium items, free items, blog posts, portfolio projects or all the previously mentioned.

We also changed the layout of the search results. Now each result will show its information corresponding to its type.

Login

For the login page, we just changed the design of the page and rebranding it with our logo and links to our website.

Blog

Our blog got a new look. One of the main changes includes the change of the color of the header, the ribbon and the links to red. The post title and the excerpt are now shown in a box with a footer which includes some info about the post such as the author, date and the category. These are not the only changes. The other main change is the tumbler like posts. We had implemented the Woo Tumblog plugin with our theme to accomplish this. Each type of the post formats has a different colored icon to easily distinguish each type. This is about the main blog page (the blog archive) but what about the single view of the post’s page.
First, let’s say you liked a post and wanted to print it. With our print version CSS, you will no more print crappy unwanted elements. You will only print the texts and the images you are interested in.
Each post will have the following.

1. Author box

Which contains information about the author, the author’s name with a link to the author’s website or the author’s archive page, author’s avatar, a description and links to the author’s social networks.

2. Post info

It is a widget added to the post’s sidebar to display some info about the post being viewed. It display the post author’s name, the publish date, the category assigned to, the total number of the comments with a link to comments section and a shortlink to the post.

3. Related posts

A number of related posts which share the same category will be listed at the end of each post.

4. Closed comments message

If the comments are closed in a certain post, the message will appear instead of the form. Maybe you are thinking there is nothing special about this. That’s right. What we do was that we styled the message so it becomes easily recognizable. Let’s say we want give some gifts to our visitors and the way to subscribe to the giveaway is by leaving a comment. So when the giveaway is ended, we will close the comments. The default message, which is “Comments are closed. If you have something really important to add, contact us. Thank you!”, is not suitable for this situation so we added a text area in our backend dashboard so we can change the message to whatever we want.

Marketplace

The design of the marketplace archive is completely changed. Each item is presented in a box with the price on its right edge if it’s not free item. Now all the details shown in the box are generated automatically. Previously we had to add it manually using the excerpt box but no more. We also added four ribbons, free, new, discount and 3rd party marketplace. The details and the colors of the items are changed according to the ribbon associated to them if any. You might noticed the buttons above the boxes. You can switch the boxes layout, whether you want the boxes to have a fixed width or full width boxes. You can also reduce the details shown in the boxes by switching the layout buttons.
Let’s now talk about the single pages of both premium items and free items. The changes we made are the following.

1. Main page section changes:

1. Item’s preview now comes with a magnifier effect in order to see the details of the item before you buy it. Just click on the image to activate the magnifier.
2. 3D preview and live preview buttons:

The live preview button is a simple button links to a live website if the item being shown is an HTML or WordPress template for example. On other hand, 3d preview button is linking to the page where you’ll find 360 degrees preview. Actually we created a custom post type for the 3d previews with slightly redesigned layout.

3. The item description is separated into different section for better organization and better readability.
4. Moving the comments to a subpage for more organization.
5. Related Items at the end of the page with thumbnails of each item.

1. Purchase buttons

If the item is being sold in our marketplace, previously we used toggle effect to reveal purchase now and add to cart button but now we changed the effect to accordion and deleted the purchase now button since there is no need to them.
But if the item is sold in third party marketplace, a button with the price is shown with a link to marketplace where the item is being sold.

2. Seller widget

Seller’s name with an avatar next to it and some icons linked to the seller’s social networks.

3. Comments widget

Which show the total comment the item has and a link to the comments subpage.

4. Rating Widget
5. Item Info

Shows info about the item. Programs used, date the item created in, date the item updated in and files included.

6. Social buttons
7. Tags associated to the item.

Checkout

There is not much redesign applied to the checkout page. But you have to agree that it looks much better.

Sitemap

The sitemap now is organized in three columns. It lists posts by category, pages, authors, premium items, free items, portfolio projects and marketplace categories.

Testimonials

Before we redesign our website, we show our testimonials in the homepage but now we’d created a page dedicated to both showing and submitting the testimonials.

Responsive Layout

Responsive design is becoming common and famous every day. Actually it is becoming one of the web standards. The concept behind the responsive design is by using CSS3 media queries to define different widths and changing the design layout according to the width. Media queries eliminate the need to provide different websites to different devices screens. Now the website will have one design but the layout will change according to the device screen width.
We have provided four layouts for our website to suit four different screen widths as following.

1. Above 1024px suitable for PC screens.
2. 881px to 1024px suitable for iPad landscape screen.
3. 641px to 880px suitable for iPad portrait screen.
4. 640px and bellow suitable for iPhone and other mobile devices screens.

To test our responsive design, just resize your browser window’s width.

Footer

We’d applied multiple improvements to the footer. We darkened the color a little bit, changed the social icons to suit the new color and applied CSS transition to social icons and the footer’s lists of links. The first minor change is the footer menu. The second one is the ability to collapse the footer. Not only that, Actually the status of the footer is saved in a cookie so when you visit other pages or revisit our website on other day for example the status is reserved. We also added two new widgets to the footer, portfolio widget which shows the latest projects and the contact form widget so you can contact us with the need to navigating to the contact page.

Services Page

This post was written by Administration Department at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/website-redesign-2012-part-1/.

The post Website Redesign 2012 Part 1 appeared first on Unique Creativity Digital Services.

In our effort to provide more convenient and easier ways for our customers to submit their information to us either for requesting just a quote or for starting their project(s) with us, we have converted our design/development questionnaire into an online form. What’s great about online questionnaire? What makes the online form is better than the PDF version? Actually there are some benefits of using the online form for both us and the customers. Here are some key points of using the online questionnaire.

1. The fields in the questionnaire will be showing to the customers corresponding to their choice of services in the first parts of the questionnaire. The customers will have no more to go along all the questions just to answer the ones which are related to the services they had selected previously.

2. Your submitted information will be saved to our database so there is no potential lost in information for future use. Also you have no more to download the questionnaire and upload it again in order to send it to us via email as the emails are not so reliable.

3. We will have more statistical information data from the submitted information, so we can provide more efficient services/products.

4. It is easier for us to add more detailed questions to the questionnaire.

This post was written by Administration Department at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/ready-to-start-your-project/.

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Few days ago we had updated the way our visitors can download our free items. We had removed the social buttons which previously to had to click on of the buttons to reveal the download link. The social buttons in replaced with a simple button which leads the visitors to a landing page where they will have to fill the form to download the file. This method is not new. Many websites are using this method. At the meantime we are experimenting various methods to determine the method which suits us and our visitors the most which allow the visitors to engage with us.

We welcome all your feedbacks. If you have any comments, suggestions or even if you have any complaints, please share them with us.

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT OUR DOWNLOAD FORMS:

1. All the submitted information through any kind of forms in our website is confidential and won’t be shared with any third party. See our Privacy Policy

2. You will have to fill the form every time you want to download our freebies.

What you think about our changes? Share your thoughts with us.

This post was written by Administration Department at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/freebies-download-changed/.

The post Freebies Download Changed appeared first on Unique Creativity Digital Services.

As many of you may notice, a few days ago we experienced a server related problem. This problem was a result of some configurations to optimize our website to make the experience for our visitor better. The problem is now solved, hopefully. We are trying our best so this won’t happen again. If you face any problem while browsing our website please let us know about it. Comments and suggestions are much appreciated to make our website better than ever.

This post was written by Administration Department at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/server-related-problem/.

The post Server Related Problem appeared first on Unique Creativity Digital Services.

How to Drive to Your Site with Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your websites. One of the big problems I suffered with while doing search engine optimization is that you can’t drive a huge traffic to your website. Clients used to say that they need traffic in one month, but it seems to be hard to rank the keywords on first position in search engines with in single month. How can you drive traffic to your website with in single month only and the solution can be the social bookmarking websites like digg, reddit, delicious.

 Most of the people think, it is hard to rank your page high  in famous social boomarking sites like digg, delicious and reddit, but that is not you can follow some steps to easily rank your page high in these famous social bookmarking platforms. Here are some of the important guidelines you should follow for the successful implementation in Digg, and other famous social bookmarking platforms:

Headline of Your Bookmarked Webpage

All of us know that computer is human invented stuff, so we need to think the ways it has been developed and how can we use the same ways to rank our pages high in human developed social bookmarking websites. The first thing you need to implement is the heading of your bookmarked webpage. It should be catchy and attractive for others. All you need a little effort to choose the best heading for you. Most of the times we don’t notice that what is heading to our bookmarked web page and we loose important traffic for it.

Informative Description

The next step after you are finished with your heading is taken care of your description. Make it sure that it is informative and can attract the visitor to visit your bookmarked webpage. Don’t say some thing like this that “this article is best tutorial to search engine optimization” but include some benefits of search engine optimization in your description so that people can understand that there are some benefits of search engine optimization.

First Paragraph of Your Article

An old Adage, first impression is the last impression, you need to take care of your article you are going to bookmark, that first paragraph of your article is catchy enough that user will not leave the webpage without reading the next paragraph of your article. Understand that what people like and write some thing that is catchy for them in the first paragraph.

Contents of Your Articles

If you are SEO Expert offering affordable SEO services, you can understand what I mean by the contents of your articles. Contents are always king, you can attract lot of visitors to your article with informative and useful contents only. In recent panda updates, Google has recently made it clear to search engine optimization experts that becarefull with your contents.

Easy Voting

Internet users are your asset to spread a word about your business. You should make it sure that you write the informative contents for your readers, so that they feel happy to share your contents among the other people interested in the same information. Provide them with a easy way to share your web pages full with useful contents among others. New visitor to your web page should understand that there are people who like your article and he/ she should be motivated as well to read your contents at full length.

Choose the Right Category

Famous social bookmarking sites like digg, reddit, delicious promote your web pages categorically. Make it sure that you have chosen the right category to publish your article. Internet users for these kinds of social bookmarking websites have their own interests and they are willing to have some thing informative when they are free to browse the contents of their favorite category. Don’t place the contents or web pages in the wrong category.

Strong Profile

Post interesting, informative web pages to famous social bookmarking websites. I have already stated that you should attract users to visit you. If you post something interesting, internet users will prefer to see who is posting these kind of stuffs. It will stand you unique among the others. Strong profile always plays an important role to drive traffic to your website.

Stay in Touch with Others

You can surely understand that if you are alone then you are missing the ideas and much more from others. Stay in touch with others so that you can teach yourself that what others are doing and what you should implement.

Fresh News

There are many out there who are not looking for old updates, but looking for fresh news only. Write new contents and submit to famous social bookmarking sites. You will see people coming to read your contents and following you with in couple of weeks.

Reply Back to Comments from Others

You have recently submitted news to famous social bookmarking website and you can see that people are commenting to your article, like we can see comments in traditional webmaster forums. You should not leave them alone but you should make it sure that you are replying them and participating in the community. It will leave back lot of affects for your profile and for your identity as well.

This post was written by Guest Bloggers at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/social-bookmarking/.

The post Social Bookmarking appeared first on Unique Creativity Digital Services.

Label is a printing piece of paper, cloth, metal or polymer that is attached with specific products to give information about that particular product. Labels are printed for various purposes; to identify the product, to advertise, to warn or to communicate with others at first sight.

In these days stock labels are printed by keeping in view their usability. According to the usability there are four major categories.

1. Permanent labels

These types of labels are used for perpetual or permanent adhesion purpose with the product. Sticky or adhesive material is so powerful that it is unable to remove them once these are pasted. Removing them from product would result in damaging the label. For example you have seen prize tags, bar codes and cautions etc on electronic gadgets. These all are permanent labels that are so powerfully stick with the surface to fulfill their duty for longer period of time.

2. Peel able labels

 Peel able labels are relatively less strong sticky and adhesive with the surfaces as compare to the permanent labels. These are also known as removable labels. Warranty notes are printed on these less permanent adhesive stuffs. Though you might remove them from surface but it take pretty good effort and some residue remains on surface.

3. Easily peel able labels

These types of labels have nominal adhesive quality. These are printed in such way that it wouldn’t take any extra effort to remove them from products or any other stuff where they stick. Labels on fruits, food items and seals on boxes are made up of removable labels.

4. Frost Fixed Labels

Very common usage of labels is to paste them on bottles. Now different types of bottles carry different labels. Cold drinks, beverages etc contains permanent labels. These types of labels are so strong that they can easily bear high chilled atmosphere. Even frost cold wouldn’t damage their adhesion quality and printing quality.

Where to print labels?

There are many online printing companies offering labels printing services. You can try Vista Print, Uprinting, and Dow Printing to print your labels for your any needs.

This post was written by Guest Bloggers at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/types-of-labels/.

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The giveaway had been ended. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep tuned whenever there us another giveaway

On the occasion of launching our marketplace, we are giving our paid items to three lucky winners. The winners will select their prizes by themselves from the items listed below.

ITEMS INCLUDED IN THE GIVEAWAY:

• Folded Paper Business Card

• Pencil Drawing Business Card

• Blueprint Party Flyer

• Colorful Corporate Identity

• vCard Site Resume/CV

• Blueprint PowerPoint Template

• Lines Party Flyer

• Wedding party Flyer

• Creative Designer Resume Template

• Sleek Professional Calendar

HOW TO PARTICIPATE IN THE GIVEAWAY?

It is simple as subscribing to our newsletter or by purchasing any item from our marketplace. When you subscribe to our newsletter you will get 1 entry and for every purchase you will get 3 entries.

HOW TO GET ADDITIONAL ENTRIES?

• Share it on Facebook

• Tweet about it on Twitter

• Follow us on Twitter

• Like us on Facebook

Please fill out this form below to subscribe to our giveaway. Enter your email you used to purchase our paid item(s) or subscribe to our newsletter.

GIVEAWAY HAD BEEN ENDED

THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY WILL END ON 6 JANUARY 2012, 11.59PM MCT.

This post was written by Administration Department at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/uniquecreativity-giveaway/.

The post UPDATE: UniqueCreativity Giveaway-ENDED appeared first on Unique Creativity Digital Services.

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This post was written by Editorial Staff at Unique Creativity Digital Services, if you are not reading this at Unique Creativity Digital Services, please show your support to the author by reading the article here…http://www.uniquecreativity.net/19-free-texture-packs/.

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