We Just Launched CORE 5.2 LTS (And Lived to Tell About It)

CORE 5.2 LTS: The Story of How We Pulled This Off Again

It's been two years since CORE 4.2 LTS. Two years since that series turned into the thing thousands of you used to actually learn Blender, not just watch it. So in late April, I had what I can only describe as a hare-brained idea: what if we did it again for the upcoming Blender 5.2 LTS release in a couple of months?

Here's how that idea turned into eleven finished courses.

Step one: convince some respectable Blender folks this was a good idea

First I had to pitch, well, trick is probably the more honest word, some genuinely respected people in the Blender community into signing up for this. And I want to be straight with you about what that pitch actually was: there was no guaranteed massive payday.

CG Cookie and our instructors only get paid when this thing actually works, when people watch it and buy it. That's the deal. What I could offer was the adventure of it, and a spot in our RISE program, which means these instructors keep earning from this series for months and years to come, every time you or someone else picks it up on Superhive or watches it on CG Cookie.

So if you want to say thank you to the people below, watching their course or grabbing the bundle is literally how you do it.

And somehow, six people said yes anyway:

• Chris Bailey took on six courses solo: Mesh Modeling, Sculpting, Materials & Shading, Texturing, Animation, and our brand new Geometry Nodes course. Six. From one person.
• Wayne Dixon handled Rigging, the course where students either fall in love with Blender or throw their mouse across the room.
• Kenny Phases took Physics and somehow made it fun instead of dry and technical.
• Zach Easton brought Compositing to life, still the most underrated skill in this whole lineup.
• Jesse Schuuring, aka Kaizen3D, taught Lighting. If you've seen his renders, you already know why.
• Paul Caggegi built Fundamentals of Grease Pencil completely from scratch, one of two courses that have never existed in this series before.

Step two: figure out how to project manage this without losing our minds

Eleven courses. Six instructors. Multiple timezones. We used Basecamp to help manage the chaos, eleven individual project spaces for each course plus one shared HQ project where all of us could talk, plan, and, more importantly, trade coffee recipes at 11 pm when the recording grind got long.

Step three: bring in reinforcements

As recordings piled up, we pulled some instructor assistants out of retirement to help review every single video. Over 330 of them. Adrian, Martin, and Omar reviewed a genuinely absurd amount of footage, working directly with each instructor to catch what needed fixing before it ever reached you. A true team approach to ensure CORE was packed with quality, goodies, and fewer edit errors. ;)

Amber from Community helped me check in with instructors and spread the word to affiliates that this was in the oven.

I'll also be honest about the part I'm less proud of. A lot of us put in unspoken hours and full weekends to get this across the finish line as close as we did to the 5.2 LTS release. That's on me as much as anyone. With a bit more forethought and planning, I know we can avoid squeezing the team like that next time.

Step four: turn 330+ videos into an actual product

As recordings wrapped up, Kyle Unzicker took on design and branding for the whole series, and I put on my favorite hat: organizing everything for upload to Superhive and CG Cookie. That's 330 videos, course project files, .srt caption files, landing pages, and probably a few things I'm forgetting. Clearly, since a couple of you have already pointed out a missing file or video here and there. Hehe. We're on it.

What actually shipped

Eleven courses, rebuilt and recorded fresh in Blender 5.2 LTS:

1. Fundamentals of Mesh Modeling: Chris Bailey
2. Fundamentals of Digital Sculpting: Chris Bailey
3. Fundamentals of Lighting: Jesse Schuuring
4. Fundamentals of Materials & Shading: Chris Bailey
5. Fundamentals of Texturing: Chris Bailey
6. Fundamentals of Animation: Chris Bailey
7. Fundamentals of Rigging: Wayne Dixon
8. Fundamentals of Physics: Kenny Phases
9. Fundamentals of Compositing: Zach Easton
10. Fundamentals of Grease Pencil: Paul Caggegi
11. Fundamentals of Geometry Nodes: Chris Bailey

Every course ships with the same standard: video lessons recorded natively in Blender 5.2 LTS, downloadable project files organized so you can actually find what you need, Spanish captions, and exercises and assignments built around what you just learned.

How to get it

Option	Price	What you get
CORE 5.2 LTS standalone bundle	$199	All eleven courses on Superhive, nothing else
Inner Circle Annual membership	$399/year	CORE 5.2 LTS, our full course library, all member resources, and live programming starting this September

Grab the standalone bundle here: superhivemarket.com/products/core-lts

What's next

Now that it's out in the world, the job shifts to spreading the word. To folks coming over from other software, to schools and studios looking at this as an investment in their students and teams, and honestly, just to anyone who loves Blender enough to want to make something amazing with it.

Will we do this again for 6.2 LTS? Ask me in two years. That's how far off it is, and frankly we've earned a little time to recover first.

But to everyone who had a hand in making this real, instructors, reviewers, design, support, the whole team, thank you. This one mattered.

See you on CORE V3. Should we go for fifteen courses next time?

Wes