It’s hard to believe that it's been nearly a year since my co-founder, Jonathan Williamson, published a blog article announcing that CG Cookie is making the jump from WordPress to Ruby on Rails, a more modern and flexible web framework. Since then, our small team has re-launched the Blender Market on Ruby and for the past 8 months we've been rewriting http://cgcookie.com from the ground up. Today, we are closer than ever to releasing our SIXth version of the site - and I think you're really going to dig it.

While we are still a few weeks out, I wanted to take a moment and share snippets of what Nick Haskins (Developer), myself, and the entire CG Cookie has been cooking for you.

What is different

The experience you’re familiar with on CG Cookie will not change drastically. However, we took a close look at each section based on your feedback and made improvements with one goal: to make CG Cookie work even harder for your success.

Everything on this new version of CGC had to be written from scratch in Ruby, from the advanced live streaming features all the way down to pagination.

Dashboard is About You

The new Dashboard is there to recommend content based on your learning preferences, bring awareness to your network, maintain your learning momentum and remind you where you last left off.

Gallery Is Your Multimedia Portfolio

The goal of CG Cookie is to help you succeed. We do this by helping you expand your network, provide feedback and give you exposure general. In the new Gallery, you will have the ability to not only add multiple images to a single project, but also add videos from Youtube, Vimeo, and Wistia, along with embedding Sketchfab. 

Use all of these media types in a single project to show off the scope of your work.

Training Is Organized To Keep Your Focus

While it is important to understand the full creative pipeline, artists need to have a clear focus, whether that is Concept Art, 3D Modeling, Game Development or Sculpting. Having a section to immerse yourself in that subject is beneficial your success while still having the ability to explore other disciplines with our cross-discipline content. Within SIX, the 4 disciplines now each have their own homes with CG Cookie, represented by their colors. You can explore Concept Art or Game Development while keeping a pulse on what’s going on with the rest of the site. 

Community Is Integrated To Make You More Connected Than Ever

Launched just a couple years ago, CGC's community has grown into a thriving microcosm for global creatives.Every day, I am humbled to see members going out of their way to answer a question or help a fellow cookie. The grind with the current community is it feels separate from CGC - and, technically, it is! Different server, different Database and a different CMS running it. While this has served us well, the separation has put limitations on how close we could integrate it into the CGC family. Now, we've taken the foundations of community.cgcookie.com and integrated it within CG Cookie SIX: you can follow your favorite artists, view profiles, and leave comments without having to leave CGC.

And Much More Is Improved Within SIX

• Video Lesson auto-play
• Site-wide mentioning system
• Upgraded video viewing layout
• Improved notifications on activity
• Upgraded School/Group feature
• Improved blog/article layout
• Faster loading

Moving forward, the switch to Ruby will allow our team to be much more agile in development of the app and the experiences you've having with the Cookie. We are considering CG Cookie SIX the MVP(Minimal Viable Product) and cannot wait to grow it with you. Exciting things are already in full development I cannot mention just yet. 

How Will The Change Happen?

• On the actual launch day this summer, expect CGC to be down for majority of the day (the exact date will be announced in advance) simply due to the vast amount of data we are migrating from one server to the next, checking everything out and flipping the switch. If you're a school leaning on CGC for summer workshops, you're welcome to download the days of training prior to the switch. Reach out to [email protected] with any questions.
• Your login stays the same! ?
• The avatar you're currently using will be carried over together with your Cookie ID, which is where its editing will also happen.
• We are doing our best to keep all of your bookmarks, questions and exercise submissions intact. Exercise submissions that are not fully graded on FIVE yet will need to be resubmitted on SIX. 

We are expecting to launch the new site within a few weeks. Keep an eye out on our social channels or here on CGC for further updates. Thank you again for all of the support of CG Cookie over the years and enabling us to do what we do! ❤️   

Update: