Join us for an exhilarating dive into the world of digital art and CGI with Leonard Teo, co-founder of CGTalk and CG Society, in our 8th episode of CGCast! Leonard shares his journey from founding CGTalk in 2001 to leading the expansive CG Society, detailing
the evolution of online communities and publishing ventures. From the explosive growth of CGTalk to the launch of groundbreaking initiatives like the CG Portfolio and an upcoming high-quality magazine, Leonard unveils exciting future plans and addresses
community concerns. Discover insights into managing massive online communities, the challenges of balancing contests and commercial ventures, and the vision behind creating tactile experiences like print magazines amidst a digital age. Leonard also
touches on upcoming workshops, new books, and the enduring passion that fuels the CG community. This episode is a must-listen for anyone passionate about digital art and the ever-evolving landscape of CGI.
Welcome everybody to the 8th episode of CGCast.
Today is the 5th of November and today I have Leonard Thiel
,
co-founder of CGTalk, and we're going to ask him about some
questions.
But first, I would like to say sorry for missing two weeks
of the past episodes
because I started art school and I've been a bit busy,
so it's been hard controlling my time, but now I think I'm
back on schedule.
So Leo, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yeah. About me, let's see, where do I start?
Well, my name is Leonard Tio. Most people know me on the
forums as Leo. And as you've introduced me, I am the
founder of CG Talk, which has recently been merged into the
CG Society. I'm also the co-founder of Ballistic Media,
which owns CG Society, as well as Ballistic Publishing,
which publishes the Exposé books, the D'artiste books,
Elemental and Exotique, which are arguably the best CG books
and art books in the world.
I am 26 years old and Ballistic Media now has 17 staff.
We have three offices, one in Adelaide, Australia, which is
our headquarters.
We have a publishing office in Melbourne and we have a
sales office in Florida.
What made you decide to start CGTalk?
Well, CGTalk kind of started, it's a very long story,
but where it originally started was in San Francisco.
in december 2001 it was um at the time i was in san franc
isco working with a company called db
garage and also working with cg channel at the time and cg
talk was um you know was it was a
forum for cg channel and that was kind of how it started
and uh in july 2002 john eric and i
decided to part ways and i retained cg talk and he retained
cg channel and sort of cg talk became
an independent forum. And I continued to run that while
doing consulting work for Nomen School of
Visual Effects and also doing consulting work for the 3D
Festival, which was the largest
CG conference in Europe. Interesting. So what made you
decide to change CG Talk to CG Society?
Well, that kind of came about through the way that CG Talk
evolved ever since it became an
independent forum in 2002 um you know as you know cg talk
really began to grow in leaps and bounds
when it became an independent forum because um and we
associated ourselves with noman you know
through our partnership with noman we associate ourselves
with 3d festival which was europe's
largest 3d conference and festival and it just exploded we
went from 5 000 members when we um
you know when we started to 20 000 within like six months
and it just continued to grow at this
massive rate. And we began to do a lot of things. I mean,
one of the most notable things was we
started ballistic publishing as a result of the artwork
that was appearing on CG Talk,
because there was so much cool artwork that was being
posted by members, but it was getting lost.
I mean, you know, because at that point in time, we didn't
actually have a means for people to
submit and have their work actually saved in the forum that
was very expensive due to bandwidth
constraints and what was happening was that you know after
a while like a lot of these artists
were going away or you know moving on or their web host
went down or whatever and um the art was
just lost forever and just due to the way that the web is
you know kind of structured um it is a
temporal sort of medium so there wasn't any way to really
capture in a single you know in a single
place all the cool artwork those appearance he taught um
and so i had this idea hey let's put
it into a book. And I pitched this idea to my friend, Mark
Snoswell, and we decided to set up
this venture, which was Ballistic Publishing, to publish
Expose, which was the first digital art
annual book. It was kind of like Spectrum, but it's all
digital art. So we had a publishing
company set up, and that publishing company was still int
ending to do a CG magazine that's going
to come out next year we were running conferences we
started doing our own um awards you know the
3d awards we started doing workshops online workshops and
we also had cg networks come out
which was um you know primarily the news and editorial for
um uh website so we had all of
these different um brands you know it was cg network cg
talk cg pro shop cg workshop cg you
know whatever you could come up with there was cg something
and we looked at all of these disparate
sort of businesses and we tried to find what it was that
brought it all together and ultimately
what brought everything absolutely everything together was
the community i mean at the end of
the day it comes down to the people we are servicing the
artists and um you know what do
you call a group of artists, you know, and we decided to go
with the CG Society because
it made, suddenly, there was a purpose and it made absolute
sense because the CG Society
ran, you know, the forums, it ran the workshops, it ran
conferences and events and awards and
everything else that we're doing is all based around the
society or this group of artists
that we have online.
So that was kind of why we decided to consolidate all the
brands into one, which is the CG Society.
Oh, very interesting.
So what's the future for the CG Society?
It's pretty exciting times, actually.
I mean, we're doing a lot of development.
As you know, we have been posting a lot of stuff as far as
CG films and articles are concerned on the website.
We now have over 1.7 million visitors to CG Society every
month.
And if you look at our Alexa.com ratings, we are the single
biggest CG website in the world.
And what we have lined up is pretty exciting.
We have the CG portfolio, which is going to come out in
about six weeks.
What's that?
The CG portfolio is going to be the revolutionary, it's
just a revolutionary way of showcasing artists' work online
.
And it's not like a gallery.
It's nothing like it's ever, ever been seen before.
It's pretty amazing in the way that we're constructing it.
You know, we wanted to showcase artists' work.
We wanted to make it easy for artists to be able to put
their work online and have a homepage and a base that they
could really showcase all of their work.
But not only that, we wanted to make it easy for other
people to find their work as well as employers to be able
to identify talent.
And so we decided to do this portfolio type thing where
members, all of the CG Society members will be able to post
their artwork on their individual profiles and really
showcase it to the rest of the community, to the world.
And at the same time, employers will be able to identify
talent.
If you like a particular artist, you'll be able to
subscribe to their fan club or their blog or whatever.
It's a real feat of social engineering that we're
developing around the CG portfolio.
And I truly believe that this is something that is
revolutionary and it's never been done before.
So it's going to be very interesting.
And yeah, we're really looking forward to launching it.
Sounds exciting.
What else do you have planned?
Well, there's a lot of stuff that we've sort of mentioned
on the forums when we launched the CG Society that we
wanted to go into.
One of them, of course, is the magazine.
And I'm going to keep that on the wraps now, including the
final name for the magazine, because that is another really
exciting venture that we're going into.
The magazine will be released in, first issue, we're aiming
for May 2006.
And we're also looking, exploring the option of doing, you
know, the conferences and events again.
And there are no firm plans yet, but we're eyeing sometime,
you know, sometime next year or in 2007 to really go full
on into events.
So, and apart from that, you know, we also have a really
exciting range of books that are coming out.
As you know, this year has been really, really great for us
because we did Exposé 3 and we did the two new D'artiste
books with D'artiste character modeling and D'artiste matte
painting.
We have more Dartis books on the way.
We have more tutorial books underway that are much more in-
depth
because the community has been asking for them.
Expose A4, we're going to start to call for entries very
shortly for that.
And we also have a lot of exciting new products
that we're going to bring out to the market.
So we think that the community is just going to be really
stoked
with the sort of stuff that we have in the pipeline.
How about the magazine?
Will it be a paper magazine or will it be a digital
magazine
like the one that 3D Total has?
Paper.
I have never, ever believed in digital magazines or digital
books as a primary means of communication.
I mean, obviously, there are people out there who are doing
it.
Like, for example, Zinio, you know, they have all the
magazines.
I think the future publishing ones were available through
there.
And, you know, all the business ones, PC World and stuff
like that.
But I think inherently there is a problem with that because
it's not tactile.
Obviously, you're still communicating the information.
It's not the same.
Yeah, it's just not the same.
And that's exactly why the book, Exposé, has been so
successful.
And people ask us all the time, like, how can you take
images that are, you know,
because most of the images from Exposé are available
online if you go out and look for it.
search for the images they are online at some point, you
know, because artists either post
on CG Talk or they post on their website or they post on
another website, you know.
So all that stuff online, why is it that the book is so
successful?
Why is it such a commercial and, you know, success?
And why does the artist want to be in this book?
And why do people want to buy it?
And the reason for that is because they can pick it up and
it's a totally different experience,
you know, to actually have a book in your hands and the
tactile sensation as, you know, as you
actually can view the images and everything in, you know,
in full print medium. So, and which is
why, you know, we really want to do that, do stuff in more
traditional mediums, whether it be, you
know, in print or, you know, whether it be as large format
paintings, sculptures and things
like that because we we believe that that um that the
digital world should not just be you know
experience um completely digitally you know it can be at
the end of the day it's the art that and and
the communication that's the that's important how much will
this magazine cost i have no idea you
know um obviously we don't want to price it too um you know
too high or um or too low you know but
it is going to be a very high quality magazine uh you've
seen the books you know like um the and
the quality of the production that we go for. And we are
definitely going for something that is
extremely high quality. And that, you know, is that can be
enjoyed by artists, what we don't
want to do is, you know, is to do another 3d world or do
another CGW magazine. And there's
nothing like that. I mean, this magazine that we're
planning is, is, it is going to be a new
concept in um you know in the cg magazine arena and so we
we really think that's going to make a
big splash but at this point in time we don't actually have
any pricing to announce can't wait
but um another question about it will it be available in
newsstands or just subscriptionally
because i like to buy magazines from the newsstands because
i can just pick it up when i feel like it
yeah absolutely we are for the magazine we are going for
mass distribution and um i think a lot
of people have you know they they've asked us about
distribution before especially about our
books um because you know it is hard to find it in in book
stores in the u.s and but we are going
into mass distribution all across asia we're we are in asia
like we we're in all the bookstores
in asia in kinokuniya you know we're every single kinokun
iya bookshop um now and but we're doing
a massive distribution effort in the u.s which is starting
in january next year and you know at the
moment i have 10 000 books on the way to the u.s and and
for the magazine as well we are definitely
going to go into mass distribution so you'll be able to get
it at all newsstands we hope that's
great um if i see it i'll pick it up that's correct okay um
a question about the books i've
heard a complaint that um a lot of images a lot of the same
images appear a lot in the same books
um you keep reusing images will you do anything to fix this
in the future because i've heard a
lot of people complaining about it well i'd actually like
to see the substantiation from that
i mean because um our books are positioned very differently
and um if you for i mean i think most
of the complaints recently has been in the has been in the
exotic uh thread because um if you
happen to own expose 2 expose 3 and artiste character
modeling you'll find that uh you know
and elemental say which is like four other you know um
books from ballistic publishing so some
of the artwork is uh definitely that there is some overlap
there but it is a minority of overlap i
think that um when you actually look at exotic and you look
at the um all the artwork in it you'll
find that it is a minority of artwork that actually does
overlap and i mean exotic is a very different
book and we position each of the books very differently of
course you know you've got
Elemental, which is
and we're launching Elemental 2 soon, by the way,
and Elemental, which is a predominantly
discrete slash autodesk artwork
and it
appeals to people in that market.
Exotique is a totally different title.
It's made for people who want to enjoy character
artwork, but they're not interested in
architectural
artwork. They're not interested in design
visualization or
environments and stuff like that. They just want to see
characters.
And so undoubtedly, there will
be some overlap
But we made a really conscientious effort to keep that
overlap minimal.
I would have to say that, you know, as far as overlap is
concerned, I mean, you're looking at a very minimal, like,
5% overlap or something like that.
And I think that it just sticks in people's minds because
they see something and they say, hey, that was an image,
you know, that's Aki from Dark Seas character modeling.
Or, you know, that's, hey, I saw that in CG Channel's
machine flesh, you know, or something.
And they just make those connections mentally.
But actually, the book itself, when you think about it,
it only overlaps with any other ballistic title in a very
minimal way.
Okay, it's not so bad as they said then.
The contests, how do you think it's going so far?
Will you be keep doing the contests or what?
Absolutely.
I mean, the challenges are absolutely massive.
We love doing the challenges.
We love inspiring the community and getting them to think
about stuff.
Our latest challenge was spectacular.
And I mean, the artwork that is coming out of that is
absolutely magnificent.
I mean, the contest has taken a bit of a backstep recently,
purely because of the commercial
failure of the books.
I mean, the reason why we did the books in the first place,
as in the CG Challenge books,
we did the Machine Flesh and Grand Space Opera, was to help
finance the challenges.
because each of these challenges costs us an incredible
amount of money to run,
not just in server costs, which is only the beginning, but
in staff costs as well.
You're running a contest over a three-month period.
Somebody's got to go out and get all of the sponsorship, do
all the coordination,
do all the planning, write up the contest,
and deal with all of the crap that happens during those
three months.
technical support etc um you're talking like two staff
basically on that and running over three
months and it just it adds up to a phenomenal amount of
money you know which is i mean i won't
be shy to tell you know each of the contests we run you
know it goes well into tens of thousands
of dollars just to just to run a challenge um and you know
we can go out obviously and get and get
sponsorships because um you know they're sponsors they're
donating like thousands and thousands of
dollars worth of prizes um and you know if we would start
charging these sponsors for you know
to rather um for uh financially we'd only be able to run
maybe like one challenge a year but we
would we've you know we want to run three or four
challenges a year so we decided to do these books
and um you know and when we did a survey you know everybody
told us that 99.9 percent of people told
us that they would buy a cg challenge book if we published
it and um they have been an absolute
dismal failure i have to you know i'm sorry to say that but
it's true so we stopped we stopped
publishing the cg challenge books but you know now we're we
're back just to doing the challenges and
trying to keep down the you know trying to keep them under
control so that they don't blow out
wow i had no idea it was so expensive oh yeah so um are you
guys planning any events for the
society like maybe a member meetup or something um yeah i
mean um we have done some events already
very low-key sort of events we did one in melbourne um
early in the year melbourne is one of the one
of the main cities in in australia um and we definitely
want to go back into events in a very
very big way i mean i won't add any more to that right
right now because it's still you know it's
still fairly far off but when i say in a big way i mean the
you know running a conference or festival
similar to what we did for 3d festival which was europe's
largest um cg conference uh where you
know you have like three tracks and uh you know which is
game development um animation visual
effects and workshops and you know architectural viz and
you've got the you know awards and
festival with that so we definitely are looking at going
into events conferences in in a very very
big way um and um at this point in time like i i'm not
entirely sure like you know how when that's
going to happen because obviously you know that's going to
be an extremely expensive proposition but
we we hope that we can do that you know at some point maybe
next year or definitely 2007 as far
as member meetups and stuff concerned i mean we you know we
have that we have the mechanism on the
CG Society forums for members to organize, you know, their
own meetups.
And we do rely on the members, you know, to use their
initiative to organize meetups.
But I think inherently it's, you know, it's always going to
be an issue because people
are just glued to their computers.
They're on CG Talk all the time.
And, you know, and just to get them to go out to, you know,
to the local bar to have
beer is, you know, it's actually pretty, pretty difficult.
Like say, I don't have a CG Society member, but like, what
would you tell everybody who
who's interested in one but it's not decided yet what what
's the biggest advantage to getting it
well most of the cg society memberships that we've had so
far have been primarily due to
people wanting to support the community and um you know at
we we launched the cg society early
in the year you know and we we felt that there was uh that
um that cg talk had we had to elevate it
the next level and um and so these paying members they um
you know they get the discounts so you're
going to get discounts on uh on all ballistic publishing
books and uh you get discounts on
all our cg workshops and every single one of our cg
workshops has you know has sold out pretty
pretty much and uh you know and quite a number of cg
society members take advantage of that offer
because um you know it's uh it's great value proposition
when you're getting back your money
right away. So discounts is a big thing. And when the CG
portfolio comes out, I think everybody is
going to want to be a CG Society member because of what you
will be able to do with the portfolio
is, you know, you're going to definitely want to have a CG
Society membership. $29.95, when you
think about it, is really not a lot, you know, six cups of
coffee, you know, get over it. It's
It's not a lot.
So we think that is great value for helping to support the
community,
getting your money back in terms of discounts,
and getting the value out of member benefits,
such as the CG portfolio, which will be launched soon.
What if members don't have a credit card?
We accept PayPal as well.
So yeah, that pretty much negates that as far as being able
to pay online.
All right.
The CG workshops, what do you have planned for that?
um right now you know which is uh we're still developing
the cg workshops it's been a slow
start primarily because it's it's actually uh been not
because there hasn't been a demand for it you
know there is an incredible demand every time we run a
workshop it just gets flooded um with people
wanting to do it but um you know trying to get the
instructors in and uh and get them to develop the
material it is uh it does take a while for example for you
know for an instructor to develop an
eight-week course.
Steven Starberg has done a course
on modeling the
female form.
Rebecca Kimmel did one on human anatomy.
We're going to be running one now on male scripting
very shortly.
As far as the upcoming courses are concerned,
we have some exciting ones planned, including some master
classes
which are going to be very, very interesting.
but um you know i can't give you any um any timelines or
dates because they sort of like
at the moment they sort of like happen when they happen and
when and when i say that it's usually
like one or two workshops uh pop out every month those
tutorial books you mentioned earlier when
do you think you'll have them out and like what kind of
subjects would you cover would be generalized
or very specific that's a good question actually because um
you know that that sort of came up very
recently and um in response to people's feedback on d'artiste
we i mean just a bit of history about
d'artiste and how they came about um we wanted for the d'artiste
books we wanted to make them 50 50
like 50 tutorial 50 artwork and there was a very very good
reason for that because we did not want
to uh you know uh to make another book like you know new
writers inside you know my or whatever
We wanted to make a book that was fairly generalized, that
could stand the test of time.
And not only that, that people could really, really enjoy.
So the sort of book, like if you pick up D'artiste character
modeling, for example, even if you don't want to read the
tutorials, you can still flip through and go, oh, wow.
I just admire the artwork in it.
So that's why we made it like a 50-50 split.
The response from the community has been great.
I mean, those books have been selling incredibly well.
But the more esoteric users have been begging us to do much
more in-depth books that really delve into the subject
matter.
And I think that, yeah, what we decided to do is to come
out with a new series, which will be a lot more technical,
a lot more in-depth.
It still will be fairly generalized in that what we don't
want to do is do like an Inside Maya book or something like
that, because there's like a new version that comes out
every year.
And stuff gets outdated pretty easily.
you know we want to go into the subject matter and it could
be anything it could be like you know
match movie being character rigging you know you name it
and there's just so much in the field of
cg that you can touch on that you can go into a lot of
detail in so um that's definitely what we're
what we're planning to do so how would you make it like not
very application specific
or will the books be application specific i think that you
you need to be application specific to a
certain extent like you know you you have to be um you have
to go ubiquitous applications for example
like photoshop or something like that you know you have to
be app specific up to a certain extent
before you really go into but what you don't want to do is
to do stuff which is very very version
specific and um it's going to be a tough call but you know
i think that we um we're looking at that
you know at all those details now we're working with
authors to uh you know to suss out how we're
going to present that to the you know to the community so
will you have the tutorials in um
both available for both apps like say my one book for my
and one book for max but there will be the
same tutorial we don't know yet i mean um anything's
possible at this point because um you know we've
we're sort of um uh we're you know we're looking at all the
options but um i i don't want to commit
to anything you know by by saying you know in this
interview that okay we're going to do this or that
and we don't do it, you know, but basically as a rule of
thumb, we try to be as generic
as possible, you know, just so that the information is kept
fairly intact.
So it doesn't get outdated within like, you know, 12 months
.
Okay.
I would like to see a ZBrush book.
I would buy that.
So would I.
Okay.
Is there anything about CGTalk that you'd like to tell us
about?
like something what you'd want the members to do to make it
a better place or any stuff like that
well um i don't know i mean it's hard to it's really
difficult to sort of you know answer that
question because the community is just so dynamic so fluid
and um i i guess you know just never lose
enthusiasm in in uh in cg i mean we we are doing this i
mean everybody at ballistic is is doing
this because we love what we do. I mean, we are so
passionate about CG. We love the community.
We love the way that, you know, we can bring like so many
people together and what we're doing to
help the community, to help artists. We're definitely not
driven by, you know, by commercial
ambition. You know, if I wanted to make money, I would not
be in the CG industry. I can assure you
of that. So we, you know, we are really passionate about
what we do. And I think that that enthusiasm
is catching on.
But yeah, we really,
you know, it'd be nice
to sort of, I guess,
you know, continue that.
And we hope that all of our members
can share in that enthusiasm
and that love and passion for CG.
Okay, that's excellent.
You have any final comments?
Yeah, just, you know,
keep on rendering,
keep on doing it.
And just have lots of fun.
Ultimately, you know,
that's what it's all about.
You know, you got to have fun
and enjoy what you do
because that's what drives you.
All right.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Not a problem, Olivia.
It was great fun.
Okay.
Say bye to everybody.
Okay.
See you guys.
