Blender Cloud

Yet another resource that is almost mandatory for a new Blender user, is the Blender Cloud. In my situation, I wanted to help the Blender Foundation, but at the same time I couldn't justify the $25/month donation, at least not at the time. It's almost as if they knew new users experiencing this dilemma. Blender Cloud was introduced earlier this year, giving users the ability to pay a subscription to gain access to a large library of tutorials, and open projects.


So what do you get with Blender Cloud? Well, let's look at the library.

In the "Training" section you get the following video courses:

• Blender For 3D Printing by Dolf Veenvliet
• Humane Rigging by Nathan Vegdahl
• Blend & Paint by David Revoy
• Track Math Blend by Sebastian Koenig
• Blenderellla by Angela Guenette
• Creature Factory 2 by Andy Goralczyk
• Venom's Lab! 2 by Pablo Vazquez
• Blender Inside Out by Jonathan Williamson

Each course has an average of 10 videos, and hours of content, covering each topic inside and out. To complement each course, you have access to various assets to help you along  like basemeshes, textures, and concepts.

Of course, that's not all there is. You also have access to the Blender Cloud "Open Projects", which include:

• Gooseberry
• Caminandes
• Tears Of Steel
• Sintel

You can view each one of the projects, and various assets only available to Blender Cloud subscribers. Each Open Project has various videos for you to view, assets to download, and allow you to see exactly how it was made. The Caminandes project itself comes with various tutorials, covering rigging, rendering, and of course the effects used in the project.

I did want to let anyone viewing know of this great source, as the Blender Foundation doesn't do a very good job of advertising it themselves. A matter of fact, the only way I found it was looking through the bug reports, and noticing someone reporting a bug that they couldn't download assets from the "Cloud". Of course, they have revamped the cloud site since then, and those bugs are now non-existent.

Overall, it's a great resource for new users, and even moderate users. Even if all you want to do is watch the Gooseberry project evolve, Blender Cloud is a great subscription to consider. Not only that, it is also a great way to give back to the Blender Foundation, and in turn they give you the greatest Blender training videos that you could only see if you purchased the DVD, and lots of assets to compliment them all.