As we’ve been browsing our CG RSS feeds, hanging out on the forums and watching the Twitters we saw two training sites get mentioned more than once this week and we thought they’d be worth checking out for our readers participating in game mods or thinking about testing those waters.  While neither one of these new entries excited us that much there is a right place to start and it’s our privilege to share it with you as well.

Does it feel a bit chilly in here?

CGLearning?  Mostly meh

While CGLearning seems be getting some attention we feel like the site’s tutorials are really a mixed bag at this point.  Some of the 3D tutorials are actually pretty good and we’re really impressed with some of the ZBrush training that will have you modeling, sculpting and texturing that high detail Doom monster in your head pretty quickly despite the complexity ass-backward interface of the program.
Most of the other content seems a bit generic and uninspiring, particularly much of the 2D Photoshop and Painter training given the amount of amazing tutorials in those areas available all over the web.  However, our biggest concern is actually the medium they’ve chosen, as visual artists and with the complexity of the applications used in CG it’s far more intuitive to watch actual screencasts of someone teaching you then it is to read their text and look at a pretty screenshot every so often.  The site makes up for it to some extent with its good organization, searching, browsing and filtering options but unless you want to learn ZBrush we recommend giving CGLearning a pass until better content is up.

Warmer...

CGvids.com is closer but not great

Let’s move on to a somewhat more exciting resource for learning skills you’ll need to jump into the visual areas of game modding with the very recently launched site CGvids.com.  The first thing you’re going to notice is that this site realized that video is the best method for teaching CG.  The site is attractive, well organized, and the focus is on some of the software used most by the gaming industry with high-end choices like Maya and 3DS Max as well as the very capable open source alternative Blender.
Let’s dive into the videos–this is where the site becomes substantially less impressive.  Some of the videos are relatively good while others are rendered unwatchable by horrific audio quality or heavily accented English.  One of the videos we watched was really solid and helpful except that the person recording the tutorial included his young son in the recording. While no deal breaker, it is a bit annoying hearing him try to explain what his dad is doing.
The other thing that’s really odd is that all of the videos are hosted on YouTube and often seem like they aren’t even made for CGvids.com but rather the site is offering you a well organized front end to the content that already existed on YouTube.  Beyond that the limited resolution on YouTube also makes the videos more difficult to watch and see what is actually being done on screen.  Maybe we should have taken the hint when we saw that all the videos were submitted by ‘Administrator.’

Now we're smoking hot!

The Guerilla CG Project on the other hand is all kinds of win

Two strikes and both newcomers are out, but the good news is that we definitely have a great recommendation to get you started.  The Guerilla CG Project hasn’t been around that much longer but it’s infinitely better if you want  to learn the fundamentals of 3D.
First of all, let’s talk about presentation; the site looks fantastic and all of the core Fundamental Videos have beautiful intros and credits, nice music, usually well recorded voice and slick motion graphics to help you understand what’s going on.  The best part about this is that the Fundamental Videos are also generic and can be applied to whatever 3D program you get your hands on.  It’s the same techniques and concepts in your open source options like Wings 3D or Blender up to your multi-thousand dollar professional tools.  Thankfully, the high resolution videos hosted on Vimeo also look much better then anything on CGvids.com–crisp and clear is how we like it.  
The main reason that these are all at such a high level of quality is that contributers are working with consistent music, titles, sound and graphics as well as being required to follow a specific style guide, add motion graphics to demonstrate things clearly and edit all the pieces together before submission.  This is the single best place to start if you’d like to get into 3D for any purpose.
Another nice thing is that there is also a well organized section of software specific videos that live off site similar to CGvids.com except that they seem to be a much higher quality selection and they are not the focus of The Guerilla CG Project.  Once you’ve picked up all the fundamentals this section will give you a good idea where to start with more specific software and more advanced techniques but they never try to trick you into thinking this is anything more then a map to other training that you may want to check out next.

Roundup thoughts

It’s no secret that we like games around here and we think that modding and game development is important to our community, so we’re going to make this CG and Game Modding Roundup a biweekly news piece here at Icrontic where we’ll cover some of the most important CG news, talk about the resources to work on game production as well and we’ll highlight exciting game mods and indie developers as well.  Two weeks from now we’ll be talking about some SIGGRAPH 2009 developments that are relevant to gamers like lots of new real time rendering technologies and we’ll be talking about more advanced training resources sometime in the future.  With that we’ll leave you with a little more news before we go.

A few other items of interest:

• The very high-end visual effects application Houdini is having a 50% off sale on their Master Bundle with a commercial license costing just $5,545.  For those of us working on a more modest budget who still want to get into Houdini’s super cool procedural workflow, particles and dynamics goodness you can check out the Apprentice version with limited outputs and a non-commercial license for free or jump on the Apprentice HD with lightly limited restrictions at only $99.00.  Cool!  Details at Side Effects Software.

• GameSpy featured some very in-depth interviews with Bioware about the Dragon Age Builder Event and the Toolset that users will be able to get their hands on for taking user generated content to a whole new level in the upcoming game Dragon Age.  The tools look very much like what Bungie wanted to do with Forge and it looks like it’s going to be an amazing toolset and distribution platform for people who want to try some modding but are a little intimidated by an API.