Join us on CG Cast as we dive deep into the perks of CG Society membership for just $30 a year! We explore the vibrant CG Portfolio, comparing it to traditional websites and YouTube, highlighting its ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and unique features
like unlimited image uploads and higher-resolution animations. We also unpack the benefits of exclusive articles, enhanced forum access with larger attachment sizes, and member-only discussions. Plus, discover how CG Society offers discounts on industry
essentials like Ballistic Publishing books. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, this episode breaks down why joining could elevate your digital presence and networking within the CG community. Tune in to see firsthand how these tools
can boost your portfolio and connect you with fellow artists!
*CG Cast Intro*
Welcome everybody to another episode of CG Cast.
Today we're going to be talking about the CG Society
membership and see what you get for those $30 a year.
if you don't know cg society is like cg talk and all that
stuff they have articles they have the
big forum cg talk the cg portfolio and etc and etc first
thing we're going to check out is the cg
portfolio let's check it out and have some fun the cg
portfolio is like having a website you can put
up all your images you can now you can put up your
animations have a little blog a guest book
and etc you're probably thinking to yourself well i already
have my website and my hosting why do i
need this well there's some advantages to the cg portfolio
over having a traditional website
you have a little icon under your nickname on the forum so
it's easier for people to see
your stuff also it's doesn't have as much hassle as doing a
website where you have to have ftp
you upload make the website yourself get hosting it's also
cheaper than hosting hosting costs
normally a good price like eight dollars a month here it's
like thirty dollars a year so there's
a big it's much cheaper but it's a good idea to have your
own personal website alongside
your cg portfolio if you're a cg society member you can
upload as many images as you want you
have your own banner have a special image to represent you
you have unlimited things and
also you have 50 megabytes of animation things um if you're
not you can upload five images
and no animations
And then the animation thing is
I'm, not really too fond of it right now
I still prefer youtube but the one advantage it has over
youtube
Is that the it's higher res the the videos?
the the problem with it is just
Way too much work
Well, i'm lazy, but you understand you have to make sure
you have to get the riva encoder
encode it to flash so if she had in your video would have
to be an avi or something that's
compatible with the encoder so you have to encode your
video again to encode it back to flash
then you have to get the cgtalk uploader blah blah blah do
so many stats when it's youtube you just
upload fill out description and youtube does everything
server side but
the the the videos are tied into your portfolio so it's
easier for people to see
and another thing it's only 50 megabytes youtube is
practically unlimited so i guess you'd put
your very best video or short movie or whatever on the cg
portfolio and the rest on youtube
your choice hopefully in the future they'll make the
uploading process much easier they should take
a lesson or two from youtube let's check it out so this is
what the interface looks like um
you can upload your images blah blah blah you can have a an
overview of all the images you
have uploaded also a cool thing that i found out was that
if you had submitted um images to the
galleries it automatically finds them when you sign up for
cg portfolio so you don't have to fill
all out of all of that stuff out again that was pretty cool
by uploading an
image to your CG portfolio you can submit it to the CG talk
galleries maybe
you can get a CG talk award if you are if your image is
good enough and maybe
your front page can be rich and famous like all the other
CG artists the
interface is alright it's pretty clean you can manage all
your stuff you can
and all your stuff.
You can change your username,
but I wanted to get Archer,
but that's already taken.
You can manage your settings.
You can enable your blog,
your guest book.
You can change your cover art,
your custom banner.
I don't have one.
Save settings.
You can find your favorite portfolios.
I don't have anyone
since I just signed up today.
You can have a social network,
a little bit MySpace-y.
I'm not really sure how that works.
not very into the community and very to myself.
Manage your guestbook when people post.
Can delete messages when they tell you you suck.
You know, censoring for the win.
You can put in your blog, "Today I feel so emo."
I am sad.
You know, good stuff like that.
I wish I could type.
you can save your entry etc. Now let's go check out what
else we have to offer. For
fun let's try and let's compare the CG Society animation
thingy with YouTube. See how they
look compared to each other. Should be fun. First up let's
check out the CG Talk animation
hosting this is one of my favorite commercials of all time
let's check it
out the loading is a bit slow but the video is a bit higher
resolution it
looks pretty good it's much bigger than YouTube's put some
sound I'm noticing a
bit of V-syncing error. I'm not sure why.
Bit of heat sensation.
Loading is pretty fast, you just have to let it buff for a
little while but it's pretty
good.
Let's try it out on YouTube.
As you can see the window on YouTube is much smaller.
And the quality is not as good.
But you know, you can put as much as you want on YouTube.
I think YouTube has the full screen option.
No, that's not it.
It has a full screen option.
The quality is so-so.
very pixelated.
Yeah, CG Society Animation Hosting wins for the quality but
YouTube wins for user friendliness
and quantity.
So you choose what's more important to you and you make the
decision.
Another little bonus if you're a CGE Society member is you
get access to featured articles
that normal members don't get.
They're very well written and the presentation is really
good for those articles.
I don't really read them because I don't really have the
time with school starting up and
But once in a while it's really nice to check them out and
having access to the featured
articles is pretty cool.
You also have access to the broadband videos at higher
resolution and it's really cool
you get to see some interesting shorts and making gloves
and stuff like that.
Let's go check it out.
The articles on the CG Society are pretty interesting.
They're very well presented as I said.
They give a lot of information.
Like this one, the farewell kiss.
It's kind of like a tutorial by Michael Passion.
There's a lot of text, a lot of waves.
It shows all the sketches, the entire process, how it was
done.
I think that's really cool.
And it's quite a few pages of information.
And it's well worth it.
Also, there's the shorts.
this is also well presented and gives you a bit of
information a lot of images to get you interested
um the videos themselves are in quick time and there's this
advertisement i know you can remove
the advertisements if you remember but it's a bit annoying
all the videos are in quick time i
I don't maybe in the future they'll change it to their
flash thing now you better not really a fan
of quick time unless it doesn't gel well it doesn't stream
well and normally takes a while to load
this though it did fast because it was in the cache but
other than that it's pretty cool
let's move on to the next thing next up is the forums when
you're cg society member you have
some new forums that are cg society member only there's
quite a bit activity going on but
you it's mostly check out the normal forums also you have
bigger attachments and you have
but you can have like 20 megabytes of attachments.
I really didn't notice.
There was limits because no one would just upload my stuff
to my web host or whatever.
But if you don't have a web host and you don't know about
image hosting sites,
well, that could be useful for you.
Also, a thing that I really enjoy, you can have 10,000
private messages
because having only 50 private messages was really annoying
because I'm always sending and receiving private messages.
So that was a big plus for me.
And there's some other stuff. Let's go check it out.
Okay, here we see the CG Society forums.
There's CG Society News and Announcements, CG Society
General Discussion,
CG Society Member Introductions, CG Society Chapters,
and CG Society Collaborative Short Film.
In the general discussion, there's not a lot going on.
There's not that many threads. And in introductions, it's
just people saying hi and it's a bit slow. Hi and but not
many replies like one or two. Maybe five if you're lucky.
And I guess they're trying to make a collaborative short
film.
Not really sure how that's going, but it's getting a lot of
replies, so it's probably good.
I'm not really sure.
I don't really have that much interest into it because I
know how these things work.
They're most likely to fail.
I'm not being negative, but it's from my experience.
But in the CG Society general discussion, there's like this
huge 135-page thread going on.
It's just people posting pictures.
You're not allowed to post unless you're giving a critique
or a picture, and I think that's pretty cool.
it looks like it's very good for building relationship and
rapport with
the community and see what everybody else is doing without
having to go
through whip thread by whip thread by whip thread and they
seem to be enjoying
it a lot and the form is still slow I wish you would fix
that I'm on broadband
and should not be so slow so it's pretty and you get to see
what some of the
members look like pretty interesting stuff
that's all this and I guess it's helps for improving and
etc my buddy another
cool thing with being a CG side you members you get a
discount of about 5%
on stuff and more when they're having promotions it's
really good if you're going to buy the
ballistic publishing books and stuff like that because you
save some money and you're going to
need that money because shipping is damn expensive with
these books um you can save 5% on these and
you buy more you get a bigger discount and will save you
quite a bit of money to pay for the
shipping for the future episodes I will be reviewing this
book and two others so
watch for that I hope you enjoyed this episode you can send
me comments at
Archer X I don't know witness you can send me emails at ol
ivier
O-L-I-V-I-E-R
at archerx.com
or archer
at cgcast.com
and I will reply to that if I can.
If you have comment suggestions,
send them what you thought of the show.
If I suck,
if I rock or whatever.
And I have some other
stuff planned out. Also, you can
join the
YouTube group if you want to share your videos
on youtube it's uh youtube slash group slash cg artists and
stuff well thanks for watching
hope to hear from you soon and i plan to do more videos
peace ciao of me son just of all adios
information and you can see the film what's surprising is
uh
the friend in me
