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.

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.

Hello Everyone! With another year come and gone, we like to take a quick look back at what was great during the past year and give you guys an insight at the upcoming year! Concept Cookie is just barely over a year old and the amount of support and feedback has been humbling and I am grateful for every single follower and subscriber concept cookie receives.

CONCEPT COOKIE

For those who are new to the site, Concept Cookie is a branch of the CG Cookie training network. My name is Tim Von Rueden and I graduated with a degree in Game Art and Design. Concept Cookie began up after I was hired as a concept artist for CGCookie. After a few months, they took a risk and launched this new site with me at the helm. It was intimidating and I couldn’t thank them enough for the opportunity. Since then we have learned and expanded the site and have created a “Cookie Community” that has been most helpful in shaping what the site has become and will continue to become in this new year.

LOOKING BACK AT 2012

Over the site’s first year we had some great highlights from creating Eat Sheep, our first iOS game to the newly established courses on the site. Eat Sheep was released back in August on the iPad and it was a great experience to be a part of this team. Here is the game’s official website for more details: EAT SHEEP

We had a great year in Contests with our Winter King, Modern Vampire, Original Eat Sheep Monster, and Coloring Kara Contest. These contests are a great way to test out your current skills and enter your chance to win some great prizes. You can be sure to expect more of these for the new year!

2012 was filled with amazing digital artists that took the time to interview with us. I can’t stress enough how invaluable these interviews are and the insight that they provide is incredible. I seek out artists that I admire and that means across the globe. It is an honor whenever they get back to me and are willing to answer our questions. These can always be found under the “community” tab up top under “interviews”. This past year we had the privilege of interviewing Lane Brown, Ruan Jia, Daarken, Peter Mohrbacher, Matt Kohr, Cameron Davis, Lois, Cyril Rolando, and Andrew Johnson.

Citizen Member Benefits

Citizen members are the fuel keeping our CG Cookie tanks going. If you would like to become a member yourself, check it out here: Citizen Membership

If you are on the fence about signing up, here are a few reasons why you should join.

Not only do you receive all the exclusive resources, downloads, and tutorials from Concept Cookie but across the CG Cookie network. This means all the exclusive contest on Blender Cookie, Max Cookie, and Unity Cookie. So you can receive a full education from Conception, Modeling, to taking it into a Game Engine.

Courses are Citizen Exclusive

We have introduced courses as well across all the cookie sites and concept cookie was no exception. First, we had the Character Concept art course with the Natalia Course, looking in each of the standard steps in creating character concept art. In June the Software brothers made their appearance in this short Stylized Characters Course. October was the month of the Creature Course and this took the viewer through the different surfaces and textures of a creature. And the latest one from last month is the Pixel Course, which took an in-depth look at getting started in pixel art.

Lastly, we had a slew of resources available for you guys to download and use in your own work. This includes Turnarounds, Brushes, References, Anatomy, and so much more! For most of these, I include a free sample for everyone to download but to get access to the majority of them, you must be a citizen member to download.

CONCEPT COOKIE’s ACROSS THE INTERNET

The site has grown into other sites across the wonderful internet and if you belong to any of these pages and would like to follow us there as well I have listed each of those sites below!

Facebook Page: This is where every update on the site, what’s happening at the studio, and just great art posts that I stumble across will be posted.

Youtube Page: Our free tutorials are now being hosted on this page along with timelapses and intro videos to courses to act as a sneak peek.

DeviantArt Page: I have been on DeviantArt for years, so for those who would like to follow us on here as well, feel free to subscribe and you may receive a llama!

Twitter Page: This is soley for new tutorial and site updates. So no worries if you do not like random postings on twitter. I do not compose any

CGHub: CGHub is a site full of inspiring and professional standard artwork and will be another place to find our top resources and tutorials.

Tumblr: The newest site I have attached Concept Cookie to is Tumblr after finding some of our images already on the site reposted from someone else.

THE OUTLOOK OF 2013!

For this next year, we have a few plans already set and in production. We are going to be adding a slew of new resources from turnarounds, reference sheets, photo references, and life model references. You can always look forward to a new contest every new season (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) and a new course roughly every other month.

ABOVE ALL ELSE: What would YOU like to see?

This is a site dedicated to provided resources and helpful tutorials for the cookie community to grow and strengthen their digital art skills. In the comment section let us know what you would like to see next, whether it be a specific topic, resource, tutorial, brushes, etc. Whatever it may be we wanna hear it because you never know if your suggestion will be exactly what we create next!

Leave your suggestions and comments below and lets make 2013 great!

The post Concept Cookie in 2013 appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn Creature Modeling for Production in Blender with Kent Trammell

In this training series Kent Trammell will take you through the complete process of modeling a creature for production in Blender. He will show you how to take an original piece of concept art and reproduce it in 3D as a production-ready model with clean topology, great details, and ready for texturing, rigging, and animation.

Concept Art to Final Model

You will learn all that is needed to create a the final creature seen above. This includes how to use the skin modifier for quickly blocking out the form and how to use the new Dynamic Topology sculpting. You will learn how to retopologize your sculpt with clean topology that is animation friendly. And you will learn how to exquisitely present your model to impress the rest of the team, production higher-ups, and/or the internet at large.

Get Real Production Insight

Through this series you will get great insight into the real production process of a large studio. See and learn what it takes to make a high-quality model that is ready for a larger production. Your instructor, Kent, is a modeler at Reel FX, a production studio based in Dallas Texas and Santa Monica California.

Concept art by Aaron Quist 

Who is Kent Trammell?

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. He has since transitioned to Reel FX and worked on projects like the Ice Age Christmas special,  Chuck E Cheese rebranding commercials, and the studio’s first upcoming feature film Turkeys’.

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

Frequently Asked Questions:

What are the perks of pre-ordering the series?

By pre-ordering you save 20% off the final price and you get a 10% discount code you can use on any additional Blender training in our shop!

How many hours is the training? 

The final training material length is approximately 12 hours.

Can this model be used for games?

The final model from the series is ideal for animation but is not optimized for games. However, you could use the techniques taught HERE to create your own lowpoly creature from the highpoly sculpt.

How awesome is Kent?

He’s pretty awesome! Check out his personal site HERE and his other tutorials HERE

Is there a DVD version of the training?

Absolutely! The DVD version is available for pre-order now and will ship shortly after the series is released.

The post Creature Modeling for Production Training DVD – Pre-order 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.

We are excited to announce Animation Tool Kit, a training series on character animation in Blender.

Following the Animation Fundamentals Series, we have partnered with Beorn Leonard and Nathan Vegdahl to bring you a new training series on character animation production and workflow.

What is the Animation Tool Kit?

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

Will open for regular orders soon.

What is the Cookie Flex Rig that is included?

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.

Will open for regular orders soon.

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: 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 this series be released?

a: The current production schedules has us around mid-November for completion

Q: How much is the final price?

a: The final training series cost will be $48 USD for the download version and $54USD for the DVD-R version.

The post Pre-Order: Animation Tool Kit appeared first on CG Cookie.

Hello Everyone and Welcome to this October update of Concept Cookie!

A lot of updates coming your way for this spooky awesome month of October! Are you ready? I know I’m excited, so lets get started!

What’s going on with the site?

In early August I announced that the site will be taking a break to update and so I wasn’t expecting many posts for a couple months. Now that we are entering October you may be wondering what the status is on the update. What was initially a concept cookie site update has now become a CG Cookie site update. So this is going to take a bit longer than expected. So while the new features and cleaner look may wait a few more months, I refuse to keep you guys waiting. I am going to ad lib some of the pages that will be added. So for instance, this week I will be posting an updated brushes, interviews, and anatomy resource page for you guys to have easy access to them and to polish them a bit to look nicer as well!

What’s going on with the tutorials?

After many requests and creating so much creature concept stuff lately, I have decided with the suggestion of Wes, to create a full blown Creature Course. This won’t be just a tutorial series on creating a specific creature, more as a workshop where the tools will be given to you to create your own creature concepts. This will include plenty of resources from animal anatomy, surfaces, eyes, horn, teeth, fur, etc. There is a lot of reference along with the brushes that will be included. I am spending the better half of these next two weeks to record it so look for it later in the month for all you Citizen members!

You may have noticed an introduction to written tutorials on the site. We are experimenting with incorporating both video and written tutorials. What do you guys think about having a mix of both? I have two that we’re published last week from Jonathan’s workshop and they were fun to make.

Check them out by clicking on the pictures to the side if you haven’t already!

Being that it is October I am hoping to create some appropriately themed tutorials and you might just see me in a costume or two The creature course and resources will be taking up a great chunk of my time but as of now I am hoping to create a blood mini-series of showing how to draw blood being splattered, in water, and intermingled with gore. Along with that I would love to do a tutorial that somehow involves zombies, witches, vampires (the old school kind) werewolves etc. We will see how it goes with the spare time I am given.

So to test out the waters with some written tutorials I went on a quest to find artists that I respect and will produce great tutorials based on the concepts they were give. Some are finished and some are still in-progress, just know that these will be coming out from time to time. The first one will be published on the 9th, and it is using the program Paint Tool SAI. This is the first tutorial from that program and hopefully will be the first of many! Check out some of the works of these upcoming authors.

The Upcoming Written Tutorials:

I linked their names to their Concept Cookie galleries, go check them out!

Nubia Palacios will be taking us through her process of creating concept art for a sci-fi female character. Ryan Mueller will be looking at the darker side of concept art and focusing on a more grotesque topic, a Twisted Character concept. Pui Che has such an interesting take on how he goes about creating environment concept art, so I am very excited to see his process on creating a Forest Environment concept. Paul Hoeffener worked on Eat Sheep with us and is one of the fastest concept artists I know. He will be going through creating an alien anime character. Jarrett Moore is first in line and his tutorial will be posted next week and he is going through creating a cartoon animated character in Paint Tool SAI. And lastly, Titus Simirica, who gave us the awesome gun tutorials a few months back, will be going through creating a Fantasy teenage male character.

What’s going on with the community and resources?

• CONTEST! It has been too long. The contest will be announced later this week and I’m excited to see the results for this particular “Halloween themed” contest.
• So along with the page updates to the brushes, anatomy and interviews, I will be adding a photo reference section. To start it off, we will be setting up a room with professional lighting and backdrop and taking different perspectives and angles on the human body for you to download and use for reference. As of now I think we will start with arm reference.
• This this month’s interview we will be highlighting the works and interviewing Mike “Daarken” Lim. He is a phenominal artist working in the industry as well as sharing his own tutorials and downloadable brushes. I highly recommend checking out his work, site, and tutorial site. He is a great artist and look for the interview to go live mid-way through the month. (I’m thinking this will be the standard for an interview to go up once a month, somewhere in the middle)

Whats new at the Studio?

The Eat Sheep art book was released and it feels so strange holding the physical copy. It feels as though I am holding the good half of my life in August, in my hands. I would give it a look through if you haven’t already!

Thanks for checking out this update, if you have tutorial suggestions, comments, or questions, leave them in the section below ↓

The post Concept Cookie Update: October 2012 appeared first on CG Cookie.

Hello and Welcome to the Announcement of the Eat Sheep Art Book on sale now!

The mobile game Eat Sheep was our first Passion Project at Cg Cookie. Our Passion Projects are meant to be a side project of the CG Cookie crew. These are not client projects, nor are they core business adventures. These are meant to give the crew an outlet to break from day-to-day studio work, education production or just something different.

Eat Sheep was quite the adventure I will admit, and it is still continuing. As we wrestle the build to play well on the iPhone and Android, there are other arms of the Eat Sheep world which are growing….

First up is the Art Production Book! 

This is more of a Art Production book which covers why some art assets were created, and an insight into their conception. The Art Book reviews the various monsters which were produced, wrangers and reveals quite a few art assets which never made it into the game.

How to get the Eat Sheep Art Book

We are selling the book through http://blurb.com whom is handling the printing and shipping of the book. This works out well and helps keeps cost down. Avoids them shipping books  to us, and then us handling and then shipping out. There is also an e-Book version available. All income from these books will be used to help fund the next adventure of CG Cookie.

You may also preview the book on Blurb, but we’ve placed some preview images here below.

Book Stats

• Size: 7×7 inches (18cm x 18cm
• Pages: 80
• Four-Color Printing

Game Available in the App store for iPads

Thank you for all of the support on this project and anxious to start the next one!

The post Eat Sheep Art & Production Book Now Available appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn all the theories, fundamentals, and techniques you need to master subdivision surface modeling - starts September 10th

We are pleased to announce pre-registration for our first CG Cookie Workshop is now open! This workshop on Mastering Modeling in Blender has been developed over the past two years to provide an unparalleled education platform  to learn mesh modeling with subdivision surfaces in Blender.

To kick things off we are hosting a pre-registration period between August 23rd -27th for 10% off the final price. Regular registrations will take place September 5th-9th

Pre-Registration Period August 23rd – 27th for 10% Off Final Price

- Citizen members get an additional 5% off -

This CG Cookie workshop is intended to provide an in-depth study of the key theories, fundamentals, and techniques you need to know about subdivision surface modeling. This course makes use of Blender but the majority of the material is applicable to any software that supports subdivision surface modeling. This course covers all the fundamentals that are vital to modeling, including topology, subdivision surfaces, organic modeling, hard-surface modeling, sculpting, low polygon modeling, and more.

All material is presented as video lessons in the form of lectures, fundamental skill-sets, and practical tutorials that are available for either streaming or download on a week-by-week basis. Students are also assigned a weekly exercise which is due at the end of each week. These lessons are supplemented by weekly, live Q/As, and personal instructor reviews of student exercises for Premiere students. Basic students will submit exercises for review by their peers in the workshop forum. All necessary, and additional resources will be provided each week.

Workshop weekly breakdown

View the Complete Workshop Outline

The Mastering Modeling in Blender workshop is broken down into four to five weeks (depending on access level), plus a set of additional resources and beginner guides for users that wish to start at the absolute beginning

The post Mastering Modeling in Blender – Workshop appeared first on CG Cookie.

I’m proud to announce that our Eat Sheep game is now available for free on the iOS iPad app store!

Eat Sheep is a top down, puzzle game for iOS mobile devices. Your goal in the game is to navigate the level, eating the incoming sheep before they can reach the barn by controlling your monster. The game has been built completely by CG Cookie.

This iOS game was built almost exclusively with volunteer time over the last year. We used Blender and Unity 3D for all the 3D assets and the game engine.  If you wish to support us please consider purchasing Wool or Monsters in game! This will give you the ability to upgrade your monsters further, unlock more monsters, and help enable us to produce another game in the near future! This game would not have been possible without all the support you already give CG Cookie. I hope you’ll also consider giving us an honest review of the app from the App Store page

With enough support we can do another one

You can find out more on the game, read about the team, download free assets, and more on http://eatsheep.com

Download Eat Sheep Free for iPad Now!

Game Highlights:

• Free to play
• 60 hand designed playable levels across 3 worlds.
• Play as Melvin or one of the other three lovable monsters.
• Upgrade your Monsters speed and abilities.
• Collect the 3 world trophies
• Collect Wool as in-game currency to be used for unlocking new monsters, upgrading their abilities and buying cookies to keep them energized.

Coming soon to iPhone, iPod, and Android devices!

We are releasing the first version for iPads and will soon be releasing a version that is optimized for the smaller screens of iPhones and iPods. We are also actively working on Android version!

Support Us by Downloading Eat Sheep for iPad Now!

The post Eat Sheep Now Available on the iOS App Store for iPad appeared first on CG Cookie.

Hello everyone and if you have been wondering where have all the recent tutorials and posts been lately? Well I am here to explain what is going on with the site!

Eat Sheep was a tremendous effort on all of our parts here at the studio. For the past month I have been working hard to finish the Eat Sheep Art & Production book which will be out this fall! I was then asked to draw a few production pieces for Jonathan’s upcoming workshops. These have all been a distraction from my work on the site.  However, this doesn’t mean that the site hasn’t been on my mind everyday and there have been so many ideas brewing in my head of where I’ve been wanting to take the site for quite a while now.

Well the time to grow and expand is now!

The next few weeks I will be spending each day working on the new features and tutorials for the site. I am so excited to show you guys what is coming, but I ask that you be patient for a couple more weeks. I will keep you all updated on the progress on our facebook page, and look forward to knowing that a newer and greater Concept Cookie is in progress

During this process I ask for suggestions, not only for tutorials, but what do you what and like to see from a concept art site? Is it more references, brushes, concept references, photo reference, anatomy, contests, worksheets, monthly updates with contests, forums, etc. You name it. We are looking to make this site a great resource for a digital artist to feel comfortable knowing that whatever they need can be provided on the site!

Let us know in the comment section below!

The post Concept Cookie Update is Coming appeared first on CG Cookie.