Announcement #5: This class has officially come to a close. Please check out the closing post and thank you for joining!
Announcement #4: Week 2 is officially complete! Thank you for submitting your homework on time. Let the grading commence.
Announcement #3: Week 1 is officially complete! I'll be grading 55 homework submissions by my count. Thank you for submitting on time. I'll be busy today :)
Announcement #2: First week's live stream recording is available and I've started filling out the homework roster. Feel free to keep an eye on the Report Card throughout the month if you'd like.
Announcement #1: Class is in session! We're all going to learn a lot and have fun the next 3 weeks. I wrote a kickoff post on page 3. See you tomorrow for the first stream!
Welcome to the CGCookie Class: Get Started Building Stuff with Blender 2.8! If you're interested in computer graphics, 3D modeling, and you're new to Blender or just new to 2.8, this class is where you need to be. Ushering in the modern era of Blender, we will familiarize ourselves with what's new as well as get up to speed with how to build STUFF in 3D.
This "Class" format invites all Citizen members to focus together on a particular topic/skill for a month. Participation looks like this:
WHEN? The class will take place from JULY 29th - AUGUST 20th.
This time the class curriculum is project-based. You will have the opportunity to choose between 3 assets to create throughout the month: A wooden sign, a barrel, a sword or a treasure chest. I chose these assets because they're fun to create but also conducive for teaching fundamental skills.
The goal week 1 is to get familiar with Blender 2.8 and model your chosen asset. If you're brand new to Blender it's very important that you spend time each day of this week getting comfortable with Blender's interface. Once you're comfortable, you will have a more enjoyable experience learning and practicing modeling.
Courses to watch:
Homework:
Plain gray models can be boring. So we paint them with colors! This is where "textures" work their magic. But before we can paint on our 3D models, we have to layout UVs. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry. After you watch the texturing course and the live event for this week, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Course to watch: Treasure Chest Course (Chapter 2)
Homework: Layout UVs and paint textures for your sign, barrel, sword, or treasure chest.
Texturing introduces color to your models but materials make your model appear to be plastic, or wood, or metal, etc. If you're asking yourself "What's the difference", fear not! I will make sure you know the difference by the end of this week.
We will also be exploring the Eevee engine and how it works together with texturing and shading for a realtime workflow.
Pre-recorded courses to watch: Treasure Chest Course (Chapter 3)
Homework: Create materials and establish appealing lighting for your sign, barrel, sword, or treasure chest.
This thread is reserved for CG Cookie Citizens that are participating in the "Get Started Building Stuff with Blender 2.8" class. Its purpose is to serve as central communication for all participating Citizens (excluding Hobby plan Citizens) to ask me and fellow participants questions pertaining to the class. As the instructor of the class, I will be monitoring this thread on a daily basis (especially Mon-Thurs) throughout the month of August.
Free members are welcome to observe the thread but please respect that communication and participation is reserved for Citizens.
At least I think it's complete. If I missed anyone's submission, please @ me in your homework thread.
@theluthier So 14 less submissions to grade this week, that probably was a breeze for you 😉
Question - In the treasure chest you used dirty vertexes to show the details and edges, in the stream you added it to the texture that you drew, and I think I have also seen it done using nodes (not with images). How do you know what the best method to use is? Great class, learning a lot, especially like the idea of one project from start to end and the class and the stream doing different meshes.
ttanya53 Honestly the choice between procedural edge detection (dirty vertex colors and/or shader based (pointiness node)) and painting by hand usually comes down to laziness for me. If the mesh is simple, like the sword, painting by hand is potentially just as fast as procedural. However if the mesh is more complex, like the treasure chest, it would take way to long to do by hand.
The tradeoff is that usually by hand is more appealing and more natural-looking where procedural runs the risk of looking too uniform and unnatural. Often when I go the procedural route I like to break it up with an additional texture. I demonstrated this approach in the sci-fi helmet course.
Great class, learning a lot, especially like the idea of one project from start to end and the class and the stream doing different meshes.
Thank you, Tanya! You're the second person to point out this approach. I'll keep that in mind for future classes.
@theluthier and dostovel that would be so fun and an amazing experience!
It would be incredible if it was planned well and completed with a competent micro short film. But if it wasn't planned well, it could crash and burn. So I will want to plan it accordingly.
@theluthier The idea of Omar is really beautiful, however absolutely agreeing that such a yearly class would need very careful planning to be real and executable.
There might be pros and cons arguments why that should be or should not be possible, my associations were the following reading that:
Minus -> Almost in each thread can be read, even in a monthly class, that the person is struggled with the time. Just objectively, what tiring that could be in the whole year :-) (including the families and relatives :D). However it is also true that distributing the workload on quarters would be easier.
Plus -> Per the historical statistics 196 students participated in the 6 CG Cookie Classes, from them 45 ones multiple times (red line on the below chart). That almost 25% could be considered as potential core, which is quite a lot of people
Plus -> Maybe the created assets in a certain quarter could be continued by other users if the life arranges like that, so there are much more potential than the let's say core participants
concrescence Yes definitely! Sorry I haven't responded to your email - I've been a bit buried the past few days. I'd like to be able to concentrate on your message so realistically I will have some time to do that tomorrow. And I will certainly grade your homework too!
Goodbye homework's threads, may you all slowly drift into tranquility.
Am I the only one that thinks knowing how to do one of those excel sheets is harder that doing 3D? It's all so white and full of words.
Am I the only one that thinks knowing how to do one of those excel sheets is harder that doing 3D?
dostovel No no 3D is much harder Omar :-)
Such Excel sheets can be highly automated, while how to automate 3D compositions, or what about when touching the sphere of Art? That is not possible, stating this even with knowing that the AI (Artificial Intelligence) entered to the 3D topic recently with machine learning and etc.
For me such sheets work like machine, while presenting a textured and shaded 3D model with lighting that is like an organizm.
Maybe the best analogy for Excel formulas is the node editor in Blender. On a spreadsheet the inputs are only numbers, with the same formulas they produce esentially the same output. While in Blender although there can be ready recipes in node editor too, but at the end the artist always need to tweak the result
csehz Zsolt you are too smart, you even sound or read like what smart persons sound like.
Do you have any of those fun graphs about cool statistics of this month class?
This has been an action-packed 3 weeks! BC1-1908 is officially the biggest class yet with the highest live stream attendance, most homeworks submitted, as well as highest homework completion rate. I can't measure this, but the general learning atmosphere was especially electric this month. More people were helping each other, posting tips / tricks they discovered, along with workflow insight. On top of that some incredible 3D art was created!
It's been an absolute pleasure being your instructor and I hope each of you can say your Blender skills took a leap forward.
Commitment: One of my favorite characteristics of this particular class is its commitment level which proved higher than any class before: 79% of participants that submitted week 1 homework submitted all 3 weeks, beating out the former highest percentage of 65%. That's nuts especially considering this month also had the highest homework submission volume to date. Here's to perseverance!👏
Here's the list of people that submitted homework every week:
thecabbagedetective )
jack07)
tijnkroon )
clintjohnson )
shiennar )
captainbedpan )
ullreym )
spikeyxxx 
dieterweireldt
cruento )
louhikarme )
leverett )csehz )
iylandmuncee )
scottwaite78 )
ahmedc )
avirozenboim )
annarudzka )
mrheist )
n647
otowa )
philip79 )
brzostek )
splat21 dostovel )
svetimas )
silentheart00 williamatics )
syaz )
notcastanza )
blanchsb )ketre )
justjenn )
Volunteer Assistants: Once more I want to draw attention to the VA's. In addition to participating as students, each of you stepped up and committed your time and effort to be a consistent, helpful presence for your peers. As a result confusion was resolved, technical issues troubleshooted, constructive criticism given, and encouragement shared. CG Cookie Classes would not be successful without you. THANK YOU:
spikeyxxx thecabbagedetective )silentheart00csehz ) for maintaining the report card spreadsheetshiennar ) for editing a homework reel every week
XP Flood Warning in effect: Today I will be manually adding class XP points to everyone's account. That's 6580 points in total! Yikes, I'm going to have to get a loan with Gringotts to pay that out...
