Andrew Price, aka the Blender Guru, needs no introduction. He’s arguably the most successful Blender educator on YouTube and founder of the model and texture asset library, Poliigon.
Andrew started making videos about Blender at roughly the same time as CG Cookie co-founder, Jonathan Williamson. Our two sites were the go-to places to learn Blender for many years as we enjoyed a friendly rivalry. Over time our paths diverged a bit. Blender Guru doubled down on YouTube and built an asset library business while CG Cookie doubled down on paid courses and created an add-on marketplace. After going in slightly different directions for many years now, we were curious - how has Blender Guru been doing?
Kent and Lampel sat down with Andrew at BCON LA to get the full scoop. Listen to the full conversation below or wherever you get your podcasts, or read on for a short summary!
Back to Courses
It’s not 100% confirmed, but Andrew is interested in creating another long course for beginners. With the success of the iconic donut tutorial, he’s in great position to follow it with a paid course for beginners to take afterwards. It would be project-based like the donut, but would go deeper into the skills of modeling, texturing, and the other areas of Blender that he frequently gets questions about.
If you're a beginner, we have several FREE comprehensive courses for you. After that, check out the CORE fundamentals courses if you're looking to dive in further.
Andrew’s Architecture Academy and Nature Academy courses were some of the first "block-buster courses" in Blender history. They were extremely well produced and were a huge hit. So we're as excited as you are to see what kind of course he makes next!
The NFT Debacle
During the conversation, Kent remembered the success of the academy courses, congratulated Andrew on a well-deserved 3 million subscribers on YouTube. I think most of us are familiar with Andrew's successes. But what about failures? Or at least what he considers failures. Without skipping a beat, Andrew answered, “The donut NFT!”
“I came like two months late to the party, right? ...Right as it crashed and everyone was like, ‘oh, this is all corrupt and everyone's scamming each other’ and like, ‘boo NFTs, boo’. And I'm like working in the background, like, s***, s***, I gotta release this thing.”
While the sentiment from artists about NFTs sharply declined, the amount of work required for the project only increased. Andrew had asked his entire audience to send him .blend files of their donuts. He then hired Patrick Crawford (one of the early developers of RetopoFlow and several other add-ons) to write a tool to automatically sort through the files and render out every single one of the 17,731 scenes.
Andrew then painstakingly made a collage of one giant donut from all of the renders and listed it for sale. With proceeds planned for donation to the Blender Foundation, it looked promising. But unfortunately, although the project was quite cool on a technical level, it never sold. The big donut is still listed on the Foundation marketplace for 8 ETH.
He and his team then created 12 smaller NFTs of individual donuts, called The Baker’s Dozen, which did sell. Overall, the project earned about $18,000 for Blender. That’s nothing to sneeze at! But far less than he initially hoped. There was also some reputational damage done to the Blender Guru brand since many in the Blender community were anti-NFT and didn’t like Andrew’s take on the topic. It may seem like a distant memory now, but that was a really contentious time in the Blender / 3D community. Despite Andrew's excitement and good intentions, hindsight suggests it wasn't his best idea. Though of course he learned from it, so is it really a failure?
Diversifying from Blender
Poliigon, on the other hand, has been very successful. Andrew joked that the initial reason for starting the texture and model library business is “a bit of a dark story”, because it was created at a time when he wasn’t sure that Blender would succeed.
During the UI debates the preceded the 2.8 era, Andrew got involved in the discussion and pushed for left click select to be default among other changes we now take for granted. While a lot of users supported the change, many of the developers were against it, leading him to feel disillusioned with how community driven Blender actually was. He worried that it might eventually be on its way out. Poliigon was his way of branching out to other 3D software so that his career wasn’t entirely dependent on the success of Blender.
It was smart to diversify, but it also came with its own challenges. Andrew wanted to provide the best possible experience for his customers. Each texture and model came in 15 formats - one native file for each popular software and renderer. This created a ton of overhead, which became incredibly difficult to maintain as apps and engines continued to regularly update. Now, he just uses FBX files and has plugins for each popular app so that the assets are imported as natively as possible. This way only the plugin needs to be updated when a change is made to the app and not the thousands of assets themselves.
Additionally, Andrew found it challenging to advertise outside his existing Blender fanbase due to the sheer number of existing asset libraries out there. He also found that Blender beginners want to learn how to make assets themselves more than downloading pre-made assets. This realization has inspired him to reconsider picking up the tutorial course part of his business again.
Moving to America
The most recent news from Andrew is that he’s now living in LA! He says the 3D community is much more vibrant in Hollywood than anywhere in Australia. He would always try to meet with animators and VFX artists when visiting the USA. Each time he would learn more in a week or two speaking with industry veterans than months of googling on his own back home. Living in the midst of the action should help him grow his skills and his business faster than ever before.
Andrew is a longtime friend of CG Cookie! We sincerely appreciate him taking the time to chat, and we’re looking forward to continued success for Blender Guru and Poliigon! You can follow Andrew on YouTube, Twitter, blenderguru.com, and poliigon.com.
