Are you into digital art and at the same time, love blogging & social media? So are we, and here is a huge list of the resources for digital artists. 

Pretty much every resource mentioned here is proved to be essential in our daily work. It all comes from our experience it other words. Hopefully you’ll be able to discover some helpful tools and websites.

Resource section is being updated, as we’re getting to know the new online services, open-source goodies and other stuff. So stay tuned to the updates.

Disclaimer: nobody pays us for mentioning their content here. We do this just so you can benefit from it.

MY PERSONAL FAVORITES:

Blender – best free open source 3d content creation suite being developed by Blender Institute and thousands of people around the world. All-in-one tool, featuring everything you may need to kickstart your digital artist career. Whether you aim to create an animated short or want to do architectural visualization, it’s the tool for you.

Unreal Engine is one of the best all-in-one game environments available to mortals. Should I mention that it is now free you pay only some percentage from your revenue (and only after your game earns more than 100.000$). Grab it and test your weird game idea.

Unity – Lightweight, fast, relatively easy to learn, has an amazing community. Can publish to a dozen of platforms.

FREE 3D SOFTWARE

Blender –  the best free and open source 3d content creation suit, but more importantly, a gorgeous community of enthusiastic people.

Sculptris – a younger sybling of Zbrush, but easier to learn and it’s free. Features dynamic tessellation or so called digital clay.

InstantMeshes – have a high poly model and want to rebuild it to use in a game engine? InstantMeshes allows you to rebuild the mesh automatically while preserving the shape of the original model.

Meshlab – a free 3D mesh processing software capable of dealing with super dense meshes and point clouds. Useful for editing and cleaning photo scanned assets.

xNormal – a free tool for baking normal and occlusion maps, transferring textures from one model to another and other cool tricks.

MakeHuman – open-source tool for making 3D characters. Remember customizing your character in Skyrim or Mass Effect? Now imagine a more elaborate character generator, based on real human anatomy.

SculptGL – a digital sculpting web app with sources available on Github. Features dynamic topology, remeshing, matcaps, you name it.

MagicaVoxel – a free lightweight 8-bit voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer.

PAID 3D SOFTWARE

Zbrush – I guess Zbrush doesn’t need introduction, right? Probably the best (most responsive, innovative, optimized) digital sculpting tool for artists. 

World Machine – 3D terrain generator famous for producing an ultra realistic natural erosion. Can export meshes, heightmaps, normal maps and textures.

Gaea – advanced toolset for procedural terrain design and world building. Has a free version.

PHOTOGRAMMETRY SOFTWARE

Meshroom – a free open-source 3D reconstruction software featuring the full photogrammetric pipeline from point cloud generation to texturing.

VisualSFM – a free (for non-commercial use) application for reconstructing 3D from photos. Setting it up can be a little bit tricky, so I recommend watching this tutorial first.

CMVS-PMVS – after using VisualSFM, this CMVS-PMVS tool is needed for the dense reconstruction with more points for a more detailed result.

Photoscan – almost magical way to create 3D models from photos, one of a few major photogrammetry software. 

Reality Capture – one of the fastest and most precise photogrammetry solutions out there. Subscription-based.

fSpy – open source still image camera matching.

FREE 2D SOFTWARE

Gimp – free raster graphics editor capable of doing what you’d expect from it. A nice community too.

Krita – free digital painting application. Stylish and feature-rich.

Alchemy – an unconventional project that explores the new ways of generating shapes in 2D. Think of it as the Rorschach inkblots generator. Super useful for getting new ideas for concept art.

Inkscape –  open source vector graphics editor similar to Illustrator.

PureRef – the simple way of viewing and organizing images. Plus it has the Always on Top mode and its UI color scheme resembles Half-Life (or is it just my taste).

Pixlr – a set of cloud-based image editing tools (imagine Photoshop, but in your browser).

Mischief – An inventive sketching and drawing app for brainstorming. Has an infinite canvas. Has a free version. Hipster-friendly.

PAINT APPS

MyPaint – a nimble, distraction-free tool for digital painters. Supports innovative features like spectral paint and linear color mixing.

IMAGE-EDITING APPS

8Bit Photo Lab – a photo filtering app capable of simulating the ‘8-bit’ look of various computers and consoles from the 80s and 90s.

Canva – create designs and documents in your browser, drag-n-drop style.

MATERIALS

Substance Designer – 3D material creation tool, de facto the standard in the 3d graphics industry for PBR texturing.

Materialize – a stand alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images.

PixaFlux – PBR texture composer, visual scripting of image operations.

ArmorPaint – a stand-alone software designed for physically-based texture painting.

COMPOSITING SOFTWARE

Natron – an open-source compositing software which I personally haven’t used, but people tell it rocks.

VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE

Shotcut – a free, open source, cross-platform video editor.

Kdenlive – free non-linear video editor aimed at GNU/Linux, but also works on BSD and MacOS.

Cinelerra GG Infinity – a resource-saving 8k video editing software for Linux.

Davinci Resolve – cross-platform professional 8K editing, color correction, visual effects, audio editing and more. Has a free version.

HandBrake – an open-source tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

AviDemux – a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. Can also be used for datamoshing.

AUDIO EDITING SOFTWARE

Reaper – digital audio workstation with a free trial.

BLENDER COMMUNITY

Blender Community – an independent community agregator.

Blender Guru – this learning hub by Andrew Price is probably the Videocopilot of the Blender community. Andrew is the perfect example of how you should approach tutorials and the entrepreneurial side of things.

Blender.today – a modern looking crossbreed between Reddit and Blender, with a super fast news posting interface included.  Whoever did this, they have my deepest respect for that kind of modern thinking.

Blendernation – if you want to keep track of what’s happening in Blender community, this IS the resource. Bart Veldhuizen, together with community reporters, is doing a great job here, putting it all together every day.

CgCookie – the quality of CG Cookie tutorials is mind-blowing. Stuff that Jonathan Williamson, Kent Tramell and other artists produce is really professional & clear.

CG Masters – the finest Blender tutorials and video courses by computer graphics veterans Aidy Burrows, Chris Plush and Lee Salvemini.

Aidy Burrows – CG artist, veteran game developer, lead instructor at VertStretch.

Blender Network – Blender Foundation’s official partnership program, an online directory and social network for Blender professionals.

James B. Candy – 3D scanner and film maker at Classy Dog Films.

Bill Barber – tutorial maker, runs BlenderBrit website.

Leonardo Braz – 3D artist with a huge potential.

Grant Wilk – 3D generalist, creator of Remington Graphics.

Troy Sobotka – acolyte of moving pixels, an expert of color science.

Manu Jarvinen – top-notch artist, illustrator and modeler that loves open-source software. Look at his artworks! So damn stylish and also… efficient? Can’t find the appropriate word. Love it though.

Reynante Martinez – an artist with a very distinctive style, who also loves sharing his knowledge online. He is writing a book about materials, so if you are into shader work, check Reynante’s blog right away.

Adaptive Samples – Visit Greg Zaal’s blog to learn some very intricate Blender tricks, and to download free goodies like panoramic interior HDRi. Greg, thank you so much!

Colin Levy – The voices in my head ordered me to include Colin in this list. Right now. I obeyed, because I think that Colin is such a creative talented guy! Not only because he directed Sintel and have been working in Pixar, one of the best animation studio in the world (keep an eye on his Skywatch short).

Paul Chambers – professional CG generalist, runs a blog.

Mason Menzies – environment 3D artist

Rachel Frick – a super stylish CG artist

James O’Brien (Vadim Ignatiev) – CG artist. Check his car and city renders!

YanSculpts (Yanal Sosak) – a passionate hard working character artist.

Penfinity – Blender tutorials and amazing hard-surface modeling expertise by Wesley Vanitou.

Ian Lloyd Dela Cruz – Blender 3D privateer, creator of Ice Tools Pro

Lawrence Jaeger – 3D Generalist and Visual Effects Artist.

Jim Morren – 3D character artist and asset creator.

Sean Kennedy – professional VFX artist, runs OpenVisualFX blog with tips and training for free & open-source VFX software.

Daniel Martinez Lara – the director of award-winning animated shorts, artist, developer of Grease Pencil

Daniel Bystedt – Blender artist, senior character artist at Goodbye Kansas Studios.

Jerry Perkins (masterxeon1001) – creator of HardOps and other add-ons for Blender, member of TeamC.

MACHIN3 – creates modeling add-ons and 3D assets.

Blenderartists forum – one of the best places to see the artworks of other beginners/professionals/nerds and to ask for feedback.

Gooseberry Open Project – the first fully open-sourced feature film ever, and we are able to see every detail of creative process.

Blendtuts – educational resource with a very tasty collection of Blender tutorials. Maintained by Oliver Villar (check out his newest book!).

BlenderDiplom – tutorials by Gottfried Hoffman.

BlenderSushi – dark magic and procedural tricks by generalist and technical cg artist Jimmy Gunawan.

Creative Shrimp by Gleb Alexandrov – sorry, couldn’t resist the temptation. Bam!

Blender Unleashed – the website with Blender training, reviews (and some seriously cool products!) by charismatic Brandon Hix.

Zacharias Reinhardt – Loads of CG tutorials, workshops and incredibly stylish artworks (oh I drool over the cookie monster) by Zacharias Reinhardt.

Blender Stack Exchange – the go-to place for asking a Blender-related question. An extremely caring and knowledgeable community, ready to help.

Partners in Crime – What to do when you crave motion graphics made in Blender? Check out Partners in Crime. These guys know their mograph.

BLENDER ADDONS

Node Wrangler – This is a built-in Blender add-on, which makes working with shader nodes so less tedious. To name just one feature, you can hold ctrl+shift and click on any node to preview it.

Filmic Blender – Filmic replaces the default color management system with the improved one with much higher dynamic range, for more photo-realistic renders.

Animation Nodes – a node-based parametric modeling and visual scripting system designed for motion graphics in Blender. How cool is that.

Sverchok – a powerful parametric modeling toolset for Blender, featuring >150 nodes for creating and manipulating geometry.

FLIP Fluids – a paid liquid simulation add-on for Blender, based on a modern FLIP-based fluid solver.

D-Noise – a free ai-accelerated denoising add-on for Blender, based on Nvidia Opti-X technology. Only supports Nvidia GPUs.

Theory Studios Blender build – a branch of Blender that includes Intel Denoiser, Embree, Scramble Distance and Dithered Sobol features.

PAID 3D ASSETS

BlenderMarket – the biggest asset store for Blender by CgCookie. This marketplace contributes to Blender development fund by donating some percentage of the revenue to it.

Chocofur – 3D assets and ready-to-render scenes for architectural visualization by Lech Sokolowski. The most of the assets are set up for Blender and Cycles.

FREE 3D ASSETS

Archive 3d – huge archive with free architectural models, no strings attached. Though most of the models are in 3DS and GSM formats, so you will need to convert them to OBJ (if you want to bring them into Blender).

Blendswap – the best selection of free assets for Blender (licensed mainly under CC-BY or CC-0). I have composed a bunch of scenes using  the assets solely from this resource.

yobi3d – a robust 3D model search engine with the Search by Image and Search by 3D Model functionality.

HDRI Haven – One of the best websites with the high dynamic range images licensed under CC BY 0. Greg Zaal is doing an incredible job with updating the library non-stop.

ART CONTESTS & COMPETITIONS

Weekly CG Challenge – The place where digital artists compete to win a prize and ultimately take their art to the next level.

ARTISTS AND CONTENT CREATORS

CaptainDisillusion – a famous superhero debunking internet hoaxes.

Vitaly Bulgarov – concept designer, 3D artist and hard-surface modeler, level = godlike.

Tor Frick – art director, concept designer and 3D generalist.

David Revoy – a digital artist using 100% open-source.

Ben Nicholas – senior concept artist, designer and photographer helping people to deal with depression by tweeting his journey.

Beeple’s Blog – let me say just a few words. Mike Winkelman is producing an image each day, for 2931 days already. Each image is remarkable in its own fashion. Bizarre. Stylish. Craploads of daily awesomeness. 

Neil Blevins – astonishing sci-fi, robotic, alien artworks (and advice!).

Adam Pizurny – Adam has such a distinct style, you won’t mistake it with anything. Ooze-dripping fragmented body parts, psychotic post-modern GIFs. Incredible.

ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION

Ronen Bekerman – if you are into architectural visualization, this website is just what you need to get ahead in archviz. Ronen is constantly posting top-notch making-of’s, case studies and architectural renders.

MOTION GRAPHICS

Video Copilot – the insanely popular website for motion graphics artists, and frankly for everybody else. Personally, I learned so much from Andrew Kramer’s video tutorials. Hollywood-quality visual effects at your fingertips.

FREE IMAGES, ICONS AND PHOTOS

Pixabay – The friendliest license out there. Creative Commons CC0 – that means that we’re absolutely free to do whatever we want with the images (to the extent possible under law, of course). Modify, use in the scrapbooking, pack in a game, send it over to your best friend or broadcast on Youtube channel.

License: Attribution not required, but appreciated. Absolutely free images and textures.

Image After – another great resource in terms of license. We can modify, redistribute as a part of printed work and use in the commercial projects. One thing that we can’t do is to resell the images on the competing resource. No surprises here, I guess.

License: Free for personal or commercial use, no hidden obstacles.

FreeImages  – the pictures can be used for free in many cases (related to digital distribution) such as: in magazines, books, dvd-covers, on websites and broadcast film and video.

License: Free for personal or commercial use, with some restrictions.

Flickr –  very talented people and one of the sexiest photo collections out there. But there is one little thing that sometimes stops me from downloading. While technically we can filter the content by Creative Commons license, it precisely means Attribution 2.0 Generic type of license.

License: There are free photos, but attribution required.

CC Search Free Images – not exactly the source of the images, but could be the starting place for any Creative Commons related search.

7 Cool Websites with Free Images and Textures – my article about Creative Commons licensed images and textures. There you will find the detailed list of resources, which I use when searching for a free stuff.

Gratisography – hipster alert! Photos of a great style, made by Ryan McGuire. I enjoy a unique artistic approach of this guy.

License: Free of copyright restrictions.

Unsplash – hand-picked daily photos of outlandish quality and clarity. Very blog-post-thumbnail-friendly type of stuff.

License: Free of copyright restrictions. Do whatever you want.

Iconfinder – What I usually do is search for an icon with these filters turned on: Free and No Link Back. When I manage to find an icon, it makes me happy. I’m a simple being.

FREE STOCK VIDEO FOOTAGE

Videvo – thousands of free stock videos (royalty-free, no attribution required). For the premium videos, 5-50 downloads a month with a paid subscription active.

TEXTURES

TextureHaven – high quality textures (8K, PBR) by Rob Tuytel. Licensed under Creative Commons 0.

Poliigon – a huge library of textures, materials and HDR’s.

Textures.com – despite the paid subscription (non obligatory, but 15 images a day is never enough) CgTextures license is quite permissive to make us, texture geeks happy.

License: Free to use in the projects (no reselling and redistribution).

CC0 Textures – public domain PBR textures by StruffelProductions (Lennart Demes).

Texture Ninja – public domain textures by Joost Vanhoutte.

2D CONTENT PUBLISHING PLATFORMS

Gfycat – upload and share high-quality looping GIFs. The embedded player looks neater than your usual GIFs!

Imgur – an image sharing platform and a passionate community where memes and viral images flourish.

3D CONTENT PUBLISHING PLATFORMS

Sketchfab – the biggest 3D content publishing community, aimed at turning 3D into a mainstream media format. Sketchfab is a marketplace as well as a hub for Creative Commons content.

3D ART MAGAZINES

3dArtist Online – had a pleasant experience of writing an articles for this magazine for CG artists. Also I’ve heard that reading the articles can be interesting too The issue costs around £6.00, give it a try.

3dWorld (at CreativeBloq.com) – one of the most bombastic international magazines, dedicated to 3d art. Wrote several tutorials for them and can recommend it. Very nice people.

Itsartmag – a lively community with the constant updates on art, interviews with special guests, shorts, making-of’s and other inspirational stuff. I heard many people praising this resource, so I decided to include it.

ART TUTORIALS AND PODCASTS

Level Up – free online art community for teaching and sharing. I’ve discovered this awesome website while reading the comments under this article – and I’m hugely impressed by the art podcasts available. Thanks, Steve.

Ctrl+Paint – a great resource for digital painting by Matt Kohr. Art school-style tutorials and other free goodies for those who are into drawing.

GALLERIES

Artstation – sharing the aesthetics of a famous CgHub, this online gallery with a grid layout is attracting enormous amount of talented artists from all around the world.

CgSociety – ever popular gallery & community of… hmm… cg artists. Take a look and see for yourself!

Blenderartists – Have I mentioned Blenderartists? Anyway, it’s worth mentioning the second time, as IT IS the place to share your art if you use Blender. Feedback guaranteed.

3DTotal – online gallery, tutorials for artists, downloadable magazine and much more. 

Deviant Art – the place where you can share your deviations. See? You are not alone, there are many artists that sublimate their fears/desires into art.

FREELANCE

Upwork (ex Odesk) – I have tried a lot of online workplaces and had a great experience with this particular platform. Pretty intuitive process of jobs searching, for those who are interested in graphics and design.

GAME DEVELOPMENT

Polycount – an old and respectable forum where game developers and artists gather to discuss their real time content. If you are searching for an advice and inspiration on game visuals, check it out.

Mathew Wadstein – Unreal Engine 4 and the Blueprint tutorials, lots of them. 

Matthew Palaje – helping out the game development community by sharing awesome indie devlogs.  

Game maker’s toolkit – Does Half-Life teach without tutorials? How games get balanced? And other game development theory gems by Mark Brown.

GAME ENGINES

Unity – Lightweight, fast, relatively easy to learn, has an amazing community. Can publish to 16 (?!) platforms and that list is growing.

Unreal Engine 4 – one of the best all-in-one game environments available to mortals. Should I mention that it is now free you pay only some percentage from your revenue (and only after your game earns more than 100.000$). Grab it and test your weird game idea.

Godot – free and open source game engine, being developed at a high rate. The Blender of game engines.

Armory – an open-source 3D game engine with full Blender integration.

DESIGN

Zimri Mayfield – graphic design inspiration, logo redesigns and charming personality of Zimri.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Art of Photography – the best photography channel on Youtube by Ted Forbes.

Peter McKinnon – photography and cinematography tips by a vlogging coffee adept.

COLOR AND LIGHT

Adobe Color CC – struggle with color harmony? This tool is gold. It makes picking a color scheme a breeze. You can select from the different color rules: triad, complimentary, monochromatic and so on.

Color Hunt – trendy color palettes for designers and artists.

Crafting Physically-based Materials – from Google Filament documentation.

TYPOGRAPHY

Google Fonts – an extensive catalog of open source designer web fonts.

Fontsquirrel – as they describe themselves, Free Font Utopia. High quality free fonts licensed for commercial use.

PRINT SERVICES

Printful – on-demand online printing and shipping, can be paired with Gumroad for semi-automatic orders.

Redbubble – printing and shipping services. T-shirts, device cases, posters, stickers, you name it.

Zazzle – an online marketplace that allows designers to create customized products like clothing and accessories.

Teespring – a platform for custom merchandise with no upfront cost.

PODCAST SOFTWARE

OBS Studio – my favorite free and open-source software for video recording and streaming. After trying it I don’t want anything else. Fast, lightweight, great video quality.

MEDIA PLAYERS

VLC – a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player that plays almost everything.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Two Minute Papers – bite-sized science videos by Karoly Zsolnai every week.

LIFESTYLE

The Puttytribe – a vibrant community of multipotentialites (people who have a dozen projects or jump from passion to passion).

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Casey Neistat – YouTuber that loves meritocracy, democracy and indie filmmaking. Lives in New York City and loves direct connection between creator and audience. 100% authentic and I can’t stop watching Casey broadcasting his life.

Darren Rowse – Darren shares his advice for aspiring bloggers and social media enthusiasts. Must read for those who want to make living with her or his blog.

Gary Vaynerchuk –  throws tons of useful content at us – which is MUST SEE if you are into social media. Crushing everything with his charisma and deep knowledge of social media, business, wine and hustle.

Smart Passive Income – very, I mean VERY deep advice on blogging, social media marketing and passive income from Pat Flynn. Learned so much from this guy. Recommend, especially the podcasts.

CopyBlogger – I’m returning to this place from time to time, just to make sure I haven’t missed anything important on content marketing. And if I have, I read through the articles like there is no tomorrow. Well, maybe it’s an exaggeration, but anyway CopyBlogger publishes a bombastic content, aimed at social media peeps.

Chase Jarvis’ blog – if you have a passion for photography and at the same time want to know the today’s social media landscape, consider visiting this blog. Personally, I find Chase Jarvis’ advice to be very inspiring and helpful.

Austin Kleon – a writer of Steal Like an Artist book and an artist with exceptional personality and a keen eye for typography.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOOLS

Mailchimp – Email marketing platform which I use. If you are into blogging, you gonna need some kind of email marketing service. After you hit 2k subscribers, it will ask you for a monthly pay.

ANALYTICS

SocialBlade – user statistics for Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

CROWDFUNDING

Kickstarter – a crowdfunding platform with >150k projects successfully funded.

Indiegogo – yet another crowdfunding platform with a huge group of backers.

BOOKS. SOCIAL MEDIA AND PRODUCTIVITY

Will it Fly by Pat Flynn – How to know whether your next big idea sucks or rocks? Seriously, the easiest way is to buy this book and read it. It has the answers. 10/10.

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon – the life-changing book for many artists whose ideas and creations are inspired by the ideas of other people. This book makes you accept the cultural influences and not be ashamed by it.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk – Posting content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and want to know what are the essential differences between these social media? This book covers it all, and what I like about it, features real examples of either brilliant or crappy posts.

REWORK – Change The Way You Work Forever By Jason Fried  – this book perfectly summarizes the trend of ’employing yourself’ while working not in the context of some corporate environment, but within the frames of your own lifestyle and your own vision. Must read.

The One Thing by Gary Keller – if I had to recommend just one book, I’d name The One Thing without hesitation. I promise, it will influence how you perceive the success, the work, the life and the cookies (I have eaten a lot of those with coffee).

The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? by Seth Godin – one more potentially life-changing book, that researches the change in the way we work, connect, succeed and fail. And the last point is the most interesting and refreshing part of the book.  

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind by Jocelyn K. Glei – this book is a Cure Procrastination spell for us, nerds. The downside of reading this book is that we might as well procrastinate without pretending we learn how to deal with procrastination. But still, one of the best book regarding  productivity.

BOOKS. COLOR AND LIGHT

Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney – A meticulous study of color and light in paintings.

BOOKS. VISUAL CULTURE

James Elkins: How to Use Your Eyes – A book that gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of our visual system.

PASSIVE INCOME AND MONETIZATION

Patreon – a service that lets you support the creators you love by donating money to them. As much as I adore everything crowdfunding, Patreon makes it right.

Gumroad – Sell digital goods online. A minimalist, cool platform with a super straightforward checkout process and low fees (3.5% + 30 cents per sale on a premium account). Supports Paypal, credit cards and some other payment methods.

CLOUD FILE STORAGE

Google Drive – The cloud storage which is free until you hit the limit of 15 gb. After that, it’s just $1.99 / month for 100 GB. Which is as cheep as it can get.

COLLABORATION TOOLS

Trello – Have a team scattered across the globe? Try Trello to organize the project and work in a shared environment.

Perforce – collaboration tools that are compatible with Unreal Engine among other things.

PRODUCTIVITY

Google Docs – online editing, sharing, and collaborating on documents.

ASSET MANAGEMENT

Connecter – free visual asset manager for 3d artists.

E-LEARNING:

Pluralsight – one of the biggest technology learning platforms. Digital-Tutors is now part of this platform.

Gnomon – computer graphics education for careers in the entertainment industry.

Udemy – Online learning and teaching marketplace, with a huge following and dozens of courses (including the courses on computer graphics and art).

WEBSITE CREATION SOFTWARE

WordPress – My tool of choice for designing a website. Did I mention that it’s free? I mean, the .org version which is self-hosted. Though, hosting usually costs some money.

Slider Revolution – awesome plugin for WordPress, which makes creation of sliders so easy that you won’t believe that. We used it for the whole pages too, just check out the Space VFX product page.

SquareSpace – a paid website authoring, marketing and analytics platform.

MUSIC AND AUDIO (Creative Commons)

Youtube Audio Library – Music tracks licensed under Creative Commons or Youtube license (the latter is kind of free to use anywhere without having to credit an author).

Freesound – Free audio samples for all occasions. Really huge library of sounds. Licensing options vary from Creative Commons 0 to Creative Commons Share Alike, etc.

OtisMcDonald – Producer and multi-instrumentalist Joe Bagale released 30 tracks under a copyright free license on Youtube Music Library. I love these tracks.

MUSIC AND AUDIO (paid, royalty free)

Jamendo – Royalty free music for videos. I believe they have some Creative Commons tracks as well, somewhere in the backyard.

Bensound – Yet another resource with royalty free music by Benjamin Tissot. Snappy, upbeat, inspirational tracks, licensed under CC BY (you have to credit the author).

MISC

NormalMapOnline – an online normal map generator.

terrain.party – the easy way to extract real-world height maps.

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY. COME BACK LATER.

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Let’s face it: everything looks better with bokeh. Ask your friend photographer, every CG artist in the world should try bokeh at least once, she’ll say.

Why? Simply because it is very artistic way to spend LESS time and get MORE awesome pictures. Hide the trash and showcase what matters.

Bokeh is dangerously effective – so why not abuse it like photographers do? 

What is Bokeh?

It is pronounced as a boʊkeɪ/, sometimes as a boh-kə. The term comes from the Japanese word which means ‘blur’ or ‘haze’.

Before actually knowing about bokeh, many of us already have a feeling that it must relate to depth-of-field somehow. Well, photographers define bokeh as a subjective quality of the blur produced by the lens. This special quality relates to softness, creaminess, artistic feel.

Here is more strict definition, if we need one:

“The way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light”.

Bokeh Shape

Remember these blurry circles of light in holiday photos?

These bright spots can also look as N-gons, because its shape depends on the shape of aperture.

Custom Bokeh Shape – Hearts and Smiles

But what about hearts that flow from the cup? I bet you’ve seen this effect before. Good news: we can reproduce it in Blender by using a stencil, placed in front of the camera.

(Tip by Reynante Martinez – thanks, man!).

Reminder: despite the obvious awesomeness of the highlights, bokeh is more than that. All blurry areas contribute to the final feel of the image. So everything is bokeh, my friend.

How Can I use Bokeh in My Renders?

1. Give background a dreamy look (and separate it from object)

What we don’t see holds a mystery. Given only the slightest cue to what we see, we imagine the rest. And the rest is gorgeous.

2. Enhance the depth impression

Gradual defocus and the scene falling in bokeh – that’s the way to enhance the depth of the scene. It almost gives the impression of 3d image in 2d medium, so strong it is.

Check Reynante Martinez works, he uses soft focus quite often.

3. Beautify the background by turning mess to light

Imagine you have a pile of trash in the background. Quite literally, it can be trash. Or if you modelling the 3d scene, it can be ugly placeholder assets from some other project. Anyway, we can easily soften it, hide it and turn it into aesthetically pleasing splotches of light. See?

4. Give viewer the reality clue

The language of photography is tightly linked to ‘reality capture’ (illusion, but still). We can use this link to our advantage and inject some photo-real magic into our images.

5. Achieve creative effects

Bokeh can be used for the sake of itself. Formal and decorative effects of this technique is another reason why you should try it. When you think about it, bright circles of light can be a cool motive for a killer image.

How to Create Bokeh in Blender?

For us, CG nerds, achieving awesome bokeh is simply a matter of doing 2 things:

1. Activating checkbox in the camera (using Blender for this example)

2. Setting up the scene to create an interesting pattern for the blur (often, we need highly reflective/emissive objects to get the splotches of light)

While the first step is easy, the second one is tricky to get right.

Actually, How to Achieve a ‘Cool’ Bokeh?

In photography, there are all sorts of lenses and some of them have aperture shape and lens aberration that produces a ‘pleasant’ bokeh.

It’s very subjective quality that can’t be measured. Personally I don’t think that near-ideal circular bokeh is the only option. Polygons are fine for me. They have style.

Speaking about environment, getting the ‘right’ bokeh is no easier than getting the right composition or the right lighting.

You just need to figure it out in practice.

For stating such thing in the tutorial I’m shooting myself in the foot, but I don’t see the other way around. Photographers do it everyday and eventually they crush it.

I think that’s the point.

Bonus Tips:

1. WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get)

Try enabling bokeh somewhere in the middle of the modelling process. Don’t wait for the post-processing. Knowing how blur will be distributed, you can see which objects need your love, and which not.

2. Effect can play a leading role

Techniques, developed by photographers, can be implemented here and there in your renders. Try making a render, in which bokeh effect is THE MAIN OBJECT of the picture.

Not a finishing touch, but a hero.

3. Lighting is the key to amazing bokeh

When illuminating the background, think about adding texture to the light, to achieve an interesting lighting pattern. Or just do what everybody else do: place the shine holiday garland somewhere in the background.

Thanks to Matthieu Sévère for a great photo (which you can see on the thumbnail). Also, cheers to other artists, whose photos and renders are featured in this article.

And, of course, thank you so much for reading. It means a ton for me!

The post Bokeh Tutorial For CG Artists | +A Few Inspiring Examples appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

At the same time, this video is a motivational punch for those who abandoned digital art for some reason. That’s for you too, folks.

#QUESTION: What was your first creation in computer graphics?

Getting Started in CG : bonus tips

Create a Cube Companion

Remember playing Portal and that wicked puzzle which involved burning your Cube Companion to make a progress? You would need a Cube Companion in your journey. So create one now!

Don’t rush through it

Whatever application you use, take your time to familiarize with its interface. Be patient, when facing something weird. Google the hell out of it and everything will be fine.

Example: Blender right click select is something you don’t encounter in the most of interfaces. But you are going to love it, eventually (evil grin here).

Request a focused critique

Share your cube with your friends (you may send me a message too)! Ask for a critique – or just an opinion – and try to make something out of it. It may be cruel and still you would need it.

One of the most foolish things we can do is to hide our pictures.

You may also like (and maybe not): Bridging the Gap: How To Get Started in CG

The post From Cube to Awesomeness: Getting Started in CG appeared first on Creative Shrimp.