Today I am excited to announce CG Cookie’s newest project. Over the next few months we will be gathering the best Blender artwork around and compiling it into a beautifully bound, professionally printed art book that is worthy of your coffee table. The current working title is “Art of Blender – Volume 1”

Why an Art book?

This is a project we have wanted to do for quite some time and we feel the time is right. The Blender community is full of talented artists and we think it will be great to showcase the incredible work they produce in a way that really lets the work shine.

Submit your artwork below

However, this book is about more than just showcasing great artwork. We also wish to display the achievements of this great community, all built around open-source. Through the book we will be including making-of walkthroughs from top Blender artists that bring additional educational value to the book while also helping show off the accomplishments of the artists, developers, producers, and everyone else that helps make this community great.

In that light, we also want to create the art book to help further Blender’s on-going development. So 5% of each sale will be donated to the Blender Foundation development fund. The development fund helps create a sustainable environment for the progression of the Blender code-based and other projects around Blender (such as blender.org, documentation, etc). Read more about the Blender Development Fund: http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/development-fund/

How will this come together?

An art book takes a lot of work and so we will be taking the next few months to put things into motion. Below is a rough milestone goal:

• Announcement and Call for entries: (Today)
• Pre-orders open for the Art Book: (Mid-June)
• Deadline for Call for Entries: (July 15th, 2013)
• Blender Art Book complete and send off for printing:  (Fall-ish)
• Book is publicly available and pre-orders shipped:  (2-3 months after files sent to printer)

These dates are not exact and may change, though we are going to do our best to hit them. The most important step is to get some artwork in!

Call for Entries!

This book is all about the art and so we need you, the artist! Use the button below to submit your best Blender artwork to us for consideration of inclusion. Please read the submission guidelines and make sure your image qualifies.

Level of quality we are looking for

Check out the Blender Cookie featured gallery and the Blender Artists Gallery forum. These images are of the level of quality we are looking for on the Art Book.

Also keep in mind that any readable company logo, name, element or design that represents or could identify a company or it’s products will be rejected.

F.A.Q.

What resolution should my image be?

For initial submission you may send any size that you have. However, if your image is accepted you will need to prepare a print-ready version. We will specify the exact details at that point.

Do I need to pay to submit an entry?

Nope! CG Cookie is taking on all costs for printing and handling of the images.

How are accepted artists compensated? 

Each artist that is featured in this Blender Art Book will receive a year-long Citizen membership. Our hope is to also offer a free copy of the book to each accepted artists, but we cannot guarantee this yet, due to the high costs of production. All accepted artists will also gain exposure by being featured in the publication, which will be distributed through CG Cookie and tentatively the Blender.org e-shop.

May I submit work I’ve done for a client? 

You may submit client work if, and only if you have explicit, written permission from that client.

What are the specs of the final printed book?

Currently we are looking to create an 8.75″ x 11″, Portrait, Hard cover,  180-200 pages. This is subject to change as the production progresses.

What will be the final price of the book?

The book will tentatively be priced at $49.95. However, there will be a discount for all pre-orders.

May I submit more than one entry?

Yes, you may submit more than one image to be considered for the book.

May I submit an image which was created in Blender but rendered with an external render engine?

Most definitely! So long as the work is created primarily in Blender then it’s acceptable.

The post Project: Art of Blender Book – Call for Entries appeared first on CG Cookie.

Kjartan Tysdal is an experienced Blender artist who has had the pleasure of being  involved in projects such as Tears of Steel and spent some time on the Royal Yacht of Norway!

Artist Portfolio site: http://www.kjartantysdal.com/
Blender Network Profile: http://www.blendernetwork.org/kjartan-tysdal/

When you meet someone new on the street and they ask, “What kind of work do you do?” How do you answer?

That’s never easy. I use to tell people that the basics of what I do is more or less the same as how Pixar make their movies, but people never really seemed to understand what I was talking about, so I’ve stopped doing that.

I try to explain that there is a lot of variation in the work I do, and that I have done work toward commercials, television, industrial animation, vfx and architecture. It usually takes a bit of time to explain, and they tend to look very confused when I’m done..

What was the most challenging aspect about modeling the Quadbots for Tears of Steel?

Figuring out how to UV and texture that whole model was a huge challenge, partly because there is no way to enter edit mode for more 1 object at a time in Blender. Also simple things, like just staying organized was hard because the Quadbots consisted of hundreds of separate objects, and I had to make sure that everything I did was clean and easy to work with down the line for Jeremy (the rigger).

The biggest challenge was probably figuring out and designing all the different parts. Ian (the director) wanted something that looked completely unique, but also slightly utilitarian, as if they had a purpose other than being generic “killer-robots-with-huge-guns”. I don’t think I succeeded in that, but I think it at least looks quite original and interesting, so I’m fairly happy with how it turned out.

You mentioned yourself as a “generalist.” How do you think this benefits you in your day-to-day art?

Having worked as a generalist for a number of years has definitely made me a lot more independent and confident whenever I need to take on a full project. It forced me to think of projects as a whole, and it also made me a pretty decent problem solver.

It’s always necessary to present my projects in a nice way. Having some experience with lighting, compositing, FX and rigging sure makes that easier.

Do you have a favorite subject to work with? Hard surface modeling, sculpting or painting?

Sculpting is probably what I enjoy the most. I really like that it’s possible to create characters and creatures directly in 3d without the hassle of normal poly modeling. I mostly use Sculptris for my initial sculpts and Zbrush for the high poly sculpting, but I’ve also used blenders native sculpting tools from time to time.

I’ve also gotten more into digital painting. I enjoy that as well, but that is still just a hobby. My ambition is to get more comfortable doing 2d work, and then use those skills in my 3d work.

What was the biggest lesson or experience you took away from working on Tears of Steel?

Tears of Steel was the first time that worked together with other blender artists. I learned a lot from just observing how they did things. I also learned that doing weekly meetings on Fridays with chocolate and beer is a great way to end a work week.

How long have you been playing StarCraft, and what is your favorite aspect about the game?

I grew up with games and StarCraft is one of the first PC games that I can remember playing. My favorite aspect of StarCraft is definitely the cool design and aesthetic of the characters, props and environments. You can tell that they have put a lot of effort into making it look as good as possible. I think that sci-fi games can be a great source for inspiration, and I take a lot of inspiration from game universes like Mass Effect, Killzone and Gears of War.

When you are working, do you listen to any music? If so, what kind?

You can probably make an educated guess based on this project: http://www.kjartantysdal.com/projects/dragon/ I usually listen to (cheesy) music with lots of guitar. Some examples are Iron Maiden, Steel Panther, AC/DC, Neil Zaza and Buckethead.

I also like to listen to audiobooks while working sometimes. For example, during the Tauren Marine project, I listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

How did you find yourself in the 3D/Blender world?

That’s a long story. 3D was at first just a hobby for me, but I quickly decided that I wanted to pursue it as a career. I spent pretty much all of my free time learning from web tutorial and books, and after doing that for a few years, I was lucky enough to get a job doing it full time.

I had been doing CG for almost 7 years before I decided to use Blender as my main tool. Until then, I had used a variety of different software for my work, and I spent a lot of my free time evaluating rendering engines and CG apps. I was looking for a CG application that I could really focus on and master, and after a long time, I decided to go with Blender. I had been a big fan of the blender open-movies, and I wanted to try to get into one. That was 1 year before project Mango started.

How was serving on the Royal Yacht of Norway? Pull any experiences to help you as an artist?

I mostly just served coffee to the crew. I tried to do 3d on my free time, but there wasn’t any tables on the boat. It’s really hard to do 3D if you don’t have access to a table. I ended up drawing a lot instead. I gained the reputation on board for being the “drawing guy”. I got to draw some cartoons of “rules at sea” for a pamphlet that was used during Queen Sonja of Norway’s 70th birthday. I even got a personal thank you letter from Her Majesty + a gift (it was a vase with her insignia on it).

If you could work anywhere or on any project, what would like to be doing?

Game cinematics! It is the coolest type of production I can think of. I’m a huge fan of cinematics from companies like Blizzard, Digic, Axis Animation and Blur. If I ever have a bad day and need some quick motivation, I’ll watch a couple of cinematics from those companies and I’ll be back on track.

Thanks for the time Kjarton!

Be sure to check the rest of Kjartons work at: http://www.kjartantysdal.com/

The post Blender Artist Interview: Kjartan Tysdal appeared first on CG Cookie.

Sometimes it is nice to reflect back and see what the community and Blender have accomplished together. Big congrats out to these artists and cannot wait to see more!

Check out these amazing top 20 images to the Blender Cookie Gallery!

1. Title: Juggernaut   Author: Max Puliero

2. Title: Fishes  Author: Christopher Lee

3. Title: Monsters Inc Author: Nathan Wilkinson

4. Title: SSS Study Author: Kent Trammell

5. Title: Bubble of Consciousness Author: Kevin Hays

6. Title: Violet  Author Lucas

7. Title: Mr Neeson  Author: Kent Trammell

8. Title: Destroyer Test Render Author: Chris Kuhn Textures by Jack

9. Title: Swampler Author: Kevin Hays Concept by: Katarzyna Zalecka

10. Title: Wasp Author: Manicol

11. Title: Golden Eagle  Author: Paulo Ricard S. Ribeiro

12. Title: Forest Path  Author: Igor K

13. Title: Red Fox  Author: Lucas

14. Title: Cloud Strife Model (Fanart)  Author: Brunoikari

 15. Title: Venice  Author: Christopher Lee

16. Title: Still Life with Feather  Author: Aaron Solo

17. Title: Re-L from Ergo Proxy (fan art)  Author: Felipe Torrents

18. Title: The Holiday Emu  Author: Moxiecrimefighter06

19. Title: Still Oranges Enhanced   Author: Matej Mo

20. Title: Scarecrow   Author: Alfonso Annarumma

The post Top 20 Most Loved Blender Images appeared first on CG Cookie.

The current shop was functional, though was not as user friendly as we would like. This goes for the front end and even the admin back-end.  We were finding ourselves hammering a bit at the code to force it to do things that it really just wasn’t meant to do.  One of our goals is to try and make using CG Cookie a “warm fuzzy” experience. With the main goal of reducing the need to over that help desk button.

Today we’ve officially moved over to a new shop system using our lead developers plugin called “Easy Digital Downloads” by Pippin Williamson.  This system is a perfect match for CG Cookie and was developed by the main custom plugin developer whom works on CG Cookie. Makes sense right?  

Initial new features

There are a bit of back-end improvements that will reduce our need to curse at the computer screen, though here are some you may experience!

• Updated Downloads Tab in your account page. Meaning if you’ve purchased items from CG Cookie. It “should” be there now if it was made within the last year. Here you may access your downloads without having to e-mail the Cookie Crew. 
• Downloadable PDF invoice of your transaction.
• Cleaner download e-mails.. In the past the download links would be named CG Cookie Download. You would have no idea what was hiding behind that link. Now the products are delivered in a clean format, labelled and the download size listed!

Thanks for hanging with us on the site and a bunch for updates are coming to the site in the coming months.

The post Shop Upgrade appeared first on CG Cookie.

Free 360-degree HDR Panoramas available for download

A big thanks out to the recent contribution donation from http://www.hdri-hub.com. It has been quite a while since we’ve completed a contribution post and this is a good one.

Below are 4 panoramas available under the free Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. 

Provided by: HDRI-HUB.com

HDRI-Hub.com provides royalty free, high resolution 360-degree High Dynamic Range panoramas and high quality architectural textures.

More Resources

Do you have a great resource you would like to share? Send it over to CG Cookie at support@cgcookie.com and we’ll consider sharing it on the site!

The post Contribution: Free 360-degree HDR Panoramas appeared first on CG Cookie.

Education Production

A typical week at Cg Cookie involves research and development into new education topics we are thinking of covering, or continued production on topics fully in development. This is the healthy engine which ensures there is a steady flow of fresh content released on the network of sites. Of course throughout the daily tasks there is general site support, business management, server maintenance, meetings, e-mails and the occasional trip to the water cooler. Though we tend not to look back on past tutorials, unless to answer a comment or offer support.

This is a bummer right? What have these tutorials done to become used and forgotten about?

Why a demo reel?

Starting in 2013 CG Cookie is beginning to change this way thinking. We’ve started to catalog our entire education library of over 1200 videos, record the time, size, and categories. You would think we would have been doing this all along, but ehhh… lets move on.

Taking this catalog knowledge with us into the design decisions of the new Cg Cookie 4.0 site. Our goal is to have the past education accessible and apparent as long as it is relevant. Currently if a tutorial falls off the front page goes to that dark place, where it is hard to find, or difficult to for a new user to ever know it was there. We aim to change this!!

Found some goodies

During this process of the crew becoming re-exposed to past education, it was inspiring to see the amount of training material CG Cookie has created, and quite a few  ”Oh, man remember that one!!” could be heard or read through our Skype chats. So we decided to take on creating CG Cookie’s first education demo reel to give a highlight reel almost of past education. As a studio we do take on actual studio production work, but felt it was important that this include only education results from tutorials, training series or Citizen courses.

So enough of me blabbing on and on about these little buggers..  hope you enjoy the reel!

Tutorials Featured on this Reel:

Blender

• Breaking objects with Cell Fracture series
• Creating a Realistic Head Series
• Creature Modeling for Production – DVD
• Blender Animation Toolkit with FlexRig – DVD
• Sculpting a Male Bust
• Hard Modeling in Blender – Plane Series – Coming very soon!

Concept

• Exercise: The Eyes 
• The Creature Course

3D Studio Max

• Planet Death Series
• Tiny Train Toy
• Rendering Jewels with iRay
• Creating a Photoreal Chess Board
• Rendering a Photoreal Car in Vray
• Creating a Photoreal Kitchen
• Playing with Particles
• Ink in Water
• Falling Buttons Logo 

The post Cg Cookie Education Demo Reel 2013 appeared first on CG Cookie.

Welcome Kent Trammell To The Team

CG Cookie is very excited to announce Kent Trammell will be joining the full-time CG Cookie crew this Friday! Kent was successfully tricked…I mean asked to join us and he accepted.

Who is Kent?

Kent is a great artist from Dallas Texas, where it is warm and they have great BBQ sauce. He has a degree in computer animation from Full Sail University. His first industry position was a 3D generalist for MAKE, where he worked on several commercials and spec spots. Later he transitioned to Reel FX and worked on projects like the Ice Age Christmas special, Chuck E Cheese re-branding commercials, and Reel FX’s first upcoming feature film Turkeys’.

You can check out more of his work at http://ktrammell.com

Wait…how many people work at CG Cookie now?

The official count of full-time artists has reached 4. This means there’s four of us staring at computers all day keeping the ovens going. This means we could now hold up a large table evening, or start up a polka band. But in reality it means you have 4 artists pushing the software to create solid education to enable you to make money or have fun with CG.

Goals we are striving to achieve:

• Increase tutorial development and quality
• Offer additional Blender support and tool development
• Adding additional humor to the team’s daily Skype chat

What does this mean for the CG Cookie and Blender Community?

With the humbling support of this community, CG Cookie is able to bring on Kent full time as a content creator for the site and studio. Kent will be working closely with Jonathan to push Blender productions, create tools, and produce some amazing training.

Kent will also be assisting in day to day studio production and contributing to our upcoming unannounced passion project.

The post Announcement: New CG Cookie Crew Member – Kent Trammell! appeared first on CG Cookie.

On November 25th, 2012 the Cg Cookie network will be undergoing server maintenance/migration. We will be installing a new racing engine under the hood to power the sites! You may expect the site to be down for the majority of the day, though we will be working to keep this to only a few hours.

We are very excited about this upgrade and what it may offer. I wanted to share some of the details and what resources CG Cookie is investing back into the structure and stability of the CG Cookie Education sites and Blender Artists.

Currently the entire CG Cookie network is served off of a Shared Cloud site which has worked out well, though we pay high overage fees each month to maintain it and manage CDN Costs. All of this is great because it means you guys are hanging with us on the site and taking advantage of the education we are offering!

The current server and CDN networks take a daily usage beating to the drum of 300GB at day. This spikes or drops depending on new releases, etc.. . It is wild to think this much data flowing through the internet tubes on a daily basis.

With that said, let me get to the good stuff and show what we are setting up on the 23rd. Below is a quick diagram of the current and new setups to illustrate the differences. In short the new set up will allow for redundancy, happier servers, load distribution and smoother experience for visitors to the site.

This Sunday we are focusing in on moving the CG Cookie Education sites first, then will be working to move Blender Artists there-after. To help mitigate downtime we are spacing those two out. Where the Blender Artists Database is in the upwards of a GB plus to move, and handle.

I will continue to update this doc throughout the process as news comes in.

Thank you for being with us on the CG Cookie sites and see you on the other side of the server migration!

Cheers,

Wes Burke

Update – 11/25/2012 – 3pm The site has been migrated over! There are just a few things that we are going through and testing, cleaning up some missing images that didn’t make it over.

Update: 11/25/4:30pm –   We are aware of some caching issues on the new setup that we are looking into. Some users are reporting warning errors in the header or on the site.

If you are unable to login

Update 11/26/ 9:42am – If you are unable to log into the site, you may have to remove/clear out your cgcookie.com cookies in your local browser. Below are some links to help out.

Remove Cookies from Chrome
http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95647

Remove Cookies from FireFox
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/delete-cookies-remove-info-websites-stored

Remove Cookies from Safari
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5049

Remove Cookies from IE
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835

The post Server Migration Notice and Upgrade appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn Advanced Character Animation in Blender

Everybody loves character animation. But character animation is difficult and takes a lot of time and skill to master. To make it easier for anyone to learn we have partnered with Beorn Leonard and Nathan Vegdahl to bring you a new training series on character animation production and workflow.

The Blender 3D Animation Toolkit is a training series developed to teach you the  advanced character animation techniques and workflows needed to animate complete scenes. This series is a sequel to the Animation Fundamentals Series,

What is the Animation Training Series and what will I learn?

In this Blender training series you will learn body animation, facial animation, lip syncing, and a complete workflow for animating your character scenes in Blender using our new Cookie Flex Rig. Through the series you will be walked through the complete process of animating two scenes, from story-boarding to layout to blocking to polishing the animation. One scene will be taught by Beorn, and one scene by Nathan.

You will also learn the ins and outs of the Cookie Flex Rig, how to quickly generate many character variations, and how to bring the rig into your scenes. Along with this you will learn about each of the different animation editors, working with pose libraries, keying and auto-keying in depth to build upon what you learned in the Animation Fundamentals Series.

View Outline of this series

What is the Cookie Flex Rig?

Along with this series, we’ve developed a new custom rig that allows you to generate your own characters easily. This highly customizable rig allows for a wide range of variations, giving you a chance to animate almost any human character you can imagine.

The Cookie Flex Rig was created by Jonathan Williamson, Nathan Vegdahl and Beorn Leonard, based on an initial design by David Revoy. The rig is designed for maximum flexibility, with numerous controls for body shape, facial features and a small library of clothing and hairstyles. It’s intended to provide a great resource for learning and testing animation.

The rig will be resourced for free under a Creative Commons license shortly after the release of the training series to help build a continually improving set of resources for the Blender animation user-base.

Often Asked Questions:

Q: Will I be able to use the character and rig in my own projects?

a: Absolutely! We will be releasing the rig under Creative Commons and so you will be able to use it for anything you wish.

Q: Can I rig my own characters with the Cookie Flex Rig?

a: The rig is not intended for rigging other characters. It is designed as a tool for learning animation, giving you maximum flexibility with the provided character base.

Q: What was Jonathan’s role in the series?

a: Jonathan worked with Beorn and Nathan quite a bit on this series. Jonathan’s task was to create the character mesh that would be able to adapt to all of these character types by creating very clean topology that allowed for a large range of shapes and deformations.

Q: When will the DVD version of this series be available for purchase?

a: We are working to have the DVD-Rs available for purchase in approximately 2-3 weeks. This is largely up to how long it takes to get back from the printer.

Q: I Pre-ordered the series when will I receive the download links? 

a: Download links have been sent out, though if you didn’t receive the e-mail, just let us know at support@cgcookie.com with your name, e-mail and receipt if possible. If you pre-ordered the DVD-R as well, these should be shipped out to you with 2-3 weeks.

The post Blender Animation Toolkit – Training Series for Character Animation in Blender appeared first on CG Cookie.

There were just under a 100 entries to the contest which made it quite difficult for the judges to just pick 3. It may sound cliche’ but there were quite a few awesome entries this year! In addition we opened it up the community vote which challenged each artist to market and get the word out on their render. But enough of me babbling, lets get to the results!

Winner – First Place

Author: Alfonso Annarumma
Link: http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/scarecrow-2/

Winner – Second Place

Author: Shakquan Mcallister
Link: http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/shakquan-mcallister/

Winner – Third Place

Author: Sergio Cajazeiras
Link: http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/macabre-scarecrow/

Community Vote

This vote is based on the likes at the time CGC goes in there to grab the winner. We are adding another community vote! Both of these entries with over 100 votes.

Winner – Community Vote #1

Author: Mael Rambur
Link: http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/scarecrow-contest/

Winner – Community Vote #2

Author: Jeremy Deighan
Link: http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/all-hallows-eve-2/

Thank you again for all of the amazing entries and keep the calendar open for our winter contest coming in just about a month. Happy Blending!

The post Scarecrow Contest Winners Announced! appeared first on CG Cookie.