Hey Reader,

Zach here,

With a new dose of inspiration and resources from the 3D World.

Today, I’ll share a video about fixing an old plane crash scene VFX, a breakdown of ToAnimate Studio’s first animation work, a 100% free high-quality 3D asset library, and finally, a few words about our latest Community Site improvements.

Let’s dive in.

​Fixing Air Force One Crash Scene VFX​

EricdoesVFX challenged himself to make a better version of a plane crash scene from a 1997 “Air Force One” movie.

​This entertaining breakdown video gives a good overview of a VFX pipeline including animation, physics simulation, rendering, and compositing.

Eric makes the whole thing fun to watch with jokes and even a little bit of VFX history.

​How ToAnimate Studio made their first Animation​

Brian Kouhi and his ToAnimate team have recently opened an animation studio, and they’ve got their first paying client right off the bat.

They created a cool character-reveal animated trailer and decided to share their workflow and show some behind-the-scenes of this project with us in this breakdown video.

That's not the only 'first' thing happening in their camp. Brian has just announced he's expecting the birth of his first child! 🎉

To celebrate this happy event, ToAnimate makes a month-long sale with a 25% discount for all their courses and assets (affiliate link).

To claim the discount, just use the code BABYSALE at checkout.

​Freepoly - a 100% free 3D Assets Library​

If you are looking for free, high-quality 3D assets to use in your projects, Freepoly.org is a great resource.

A 3D artist called 'After' (aka River Yang) created the library containing a selection of 3D models, scans, materials, and some HDRIs, all free with a CC0 license (meaning you can use them even in commercial projects).

If you’d like to support the creator, you can join his Patreon or buy a handy add-on to easier access the whole library inside Blender: Get the freepoly add-on here.

​Revamped CG Boost Community Site​

We’ve recently made some changes to our CG Boost Community site to make it more accessible, fun, and well-structured.

This means we’ve opened up previously student-only sections to all community members and prepared new separate spaces for:

• general 3D questions (Share & Learn)
• presenting final artwork (Showroom)
• personal and artistic development discussions (Your Journey)
• everything that doesn’t fit elsewhere (Off-Topic)

There are also new separate spaces for each specific CG Boost course to make questions related to the courses easily searchable and less cluttered (this is separate from the support that we offer in the CG Boost Academy).

We’ve kept the Challenge section for previous and upcoming CG Boost Challenges and added a mini-challenges section (Side Quests) where we encourage community members to share their results and motivate each other.

If you’re already a Community Member, we hope you’ll enjoy this new structure.

If you haven’t yet joined - now is the best time to do it.

​Join CG Boost Community (it's completely free)

Important Note: If you're getting too many email notifications after the change, adjust your notification setting here.

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That’s all from me today, have a great weekend, and till next time.

~Zach