CGSociety and CGTalk are shutting down.

OccultMonk

CGSociety and CGTalk are shutting down next year.

[EDIT] I am all for AI taking over repetitive tasks like retopology like UVW and texturing. My previous text was too long so I deleted it. I still think AI is based on 'stolen' art as human learning and machine learning are not comparable. I also see many unforeseen consequences when it's used to (partially) replace creativity.

myclay

In my personal view, CGSociety /CGTalk sank because of;

• unhealthy favoritism for Autodesk products.
• News you got fresher and more broad (software wise) and more "concentrated" (deeper knowledge) from other sites.
• no changes done to the forum layout to favor art creation and showcase.
  Majority of forum layouts look like this nowadays; ART, techie stuff, general stuff etc.
• competition took over the portfolio side and professional art dumps.
• Other Sites implemented Stores so Artists could sell their own Assets and tutorials.
• the societal parts where mostly ignored and other sites could take over in relevant areas.
• not sure if they are all connected but a major Merger/Buyout/Overtake happened to the Workshops section.

zetheros

I'll be both concerned and relieved once AI learns how to actually interpret a 3d model and retopologize it, UV unwrap, and weight map it for animations. Maybe somebody will finally automate the tedium for us. As fun as it is, I don't want to spend (more) years of my life pulling quads and pushing verts to make a engine ready lowpoly, if there's an AI alternative that does it just as well or better.

Also CGsociety is shutting down? That's news to me. The website is still up.

myclay

https://cgpress.org/archives/cgsociety-to-shut-down-in-january-2024.html

Next Year January 2024.

zetheros

OccultMonk said:

Why bother when you can generate stuff, and why bother when noone cares anymore?

cuz it's fun, and people do care. Learning is fun, pushing yourself is fun. If I were the last person on earth, I'd still be making art even if there is no audience or money involved, lol

Lets not kid ourselves, artists are still 100% relevant. The only real use case that people are using AI for right now is jacking off to cat girls and making stupid memes

OccultMonk

zetheros said:

I'll be both concerned and relieved once AI learns how to actually interpret a 3d model and retopologize it, UV unwrap, and weight map it for animations. 

I agree with that. AI would be great for automating repetitive tasks. 

PolyHertz

Damn. CGSociety / CGTalk is possibly the biggest archive of maxscript knowledge online. Whenever I need to look something up regarding maxscript that's the site I turn to first.

sacboi

Yah what a waste of a longtime resource but really no surprise so basically been busy archiving, screenshooting stuff authored by Robert Chang - Steven Stahlberg - Andre Cantarel....among others I think worth the effort too salvage cos waybackmachine aint gonna help here, due to many of their sub-forum and main links are fubar.

NikhilR

Thankfully we still have CGPersia and CGpeers lol

myclay

https://store.3dtotal.com/blogs/news/3dtotal-is-undergoing-a-refresh
The galleries from 3Dtotal are since 12th December 2023 no longer accessible. 3Dtotal refocuses on publishing.

iam717

mmm never grabbed on to any of the shutting down/revamping sites mentioned, just never rubbed me right i guess, posted and got nearly no traction so that is my reasoning for just staying where i learned anything from, p.c. -  tried "up lifting" g.a. but then that scenario "collapsed" and back to p.c. it was. 

An Blender (anything) isn't really "calling me" either so, guess stubborn in my ways already, most i did with blend is uv organization(packing) (nothing else) and even then i still had to fix it.  

This is also why i was trying to get someone to start something when i commented about the funneling of talent/traffic... besides searching how does one find any new locations of idk, forums/tips/tricks/video/guides/tutorial/scripts?  seems crippling and the situation of the people "who are wanting things to go wrong" seem to be getting their way and no traction on the opposing end.

As for "backlogging things" i always liked .pdf's filled with the info's needed, just more neat than folder with html's and imgs everywhere, anyway.

All the best to those i suppose. 

JacqueChoi

Very sad.
I started off as a CGtalk user back in the 90's. Way before CGchat and Polycount.

I prefer forums and archivable formats over what this space morphed into (Discord/Slack).

I mean the free-flowing conversation is nice for some things, but being able to perform a deep search on specific subjects broken into threads seems like it has much more utility than a live chat that gets scrubbed after a year.

Noren

CGTalk shutting down is a shame because of the lost knowledge, but I feel like the forums had become an accessory / support forum for their paid school/course offerings years ago.

MattQ86

Man that's a shame. The Hardcore Modeling Challenges were some of the first showcases of God-tier CG I remember seeing on a forum.

Temppe

Damn. I remember avidly drooling over ACantarel's helicopter WIP threads when I was starting my CG journey in the mid 2000's. Those WIP forums contained some real gold. I think they, and the 3d gallery, motivated and inspired me to follow this path.

There's no denying that the forums went downhill in their latter years though. So I'm not that surprised.

But I'm still nostalgic.

OccultMonk

I hope someone creates an archive of the forums.

Tiles

Well, the read only forum existed since years :P

An archived version is most probably impossible because of legal problems. And the wayback machine just archives the main page, not forums.
You could talk to the owners to take over the page. There is a link to the owner shakuro at the bottom. But it's most probably not worth the hassle. It would be a unpaid fulltime job. And you would need a webspace that is able to deal with the traffic. The page had over 300k registered users when i remember right. Maybe even more. So a cheap vserver will not do. And even keeping up a read only version would be a massive undertaking with lots of conversion work beforehand.

Sad to see it go for sure. But i personally have better things to do

thomasp

Their site redesign when moving from the old black-red naughties-style forums with the gallery on top to some barren shades-of-gray tablet-optimized thing (or whatever that was meant to be) with huge header images and microscopic text in the second half of the 2010's was awful to use for the longest time. Wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to be the final nail in the coffin for the forums.

As much as a read-only version would be nice and all: is there really still value in keeping the forums up for MEL/Maxscript stuff? I would imagine so many things must have changed even in Adesk software over the years that you would not get much out of coding tips from about 20 years ago. Several years back when I had to look up some Maya related code I went straight to Autodesk's own much newer forums. Even there - so much outdated info to sift through.

Anyway sorry to see a piece of CG history go down.

JacqueChoi

Wow.  My go to site when I was a student in the 90's.  Loved that Machine-Flesh contest, and Fausto's Marine.

Sad to see it go. 

bond1

Whenever I need to find some obscure solution to a Maxscript problem it's always CGSociety to the rescue, usually from a post that's more than a decade old.  I'm panicking a bit to see all that knowledge disappear.

PolyHertz

Yea I really think the Maxscript section of CGTalk needs to be archived before it's too late.
I'm trying to find a way to use "archiveweb.page" to archive as much as possible as a wacz file, but javascript breaks wacz linking and disabling it in chrome breaks formatting. The archiveweb.page dedicated browser shows the page with correct formatting without javascript, but I haven't been able to replicate it in Chrome. If can get past that it's still going to be really tough in the time left since there are over 18,000 threads in the Maxscript section (!), with the index alone being about 500-600 pages long.

OccultMonk

PolyHertz said:

Yea I really think the Maxscript section of CGTalk needs to be archived before it's too late.
I'm trying to find a way to use "archiveweb.page" to archive as much as possible as a wacz file, but javascript breaks wacz linking and disabling it in chrome breaks formatting. The archiveweb.page dedicated browser shows the page with correct formatting without javascript, but I haven't been able to replicate it in Chrome. If can get past that it's still going to be really tough in the time left since there are over 18,000 threads in the Maxscript section (!), with the index alone being about 500-600 pages long.

Hi, I am also very interested in this. If you manage to get it working could you maybe post the file somewhere? Thanks!

bond1

Yes if anyone figures out how to archive the Maxscript section of CGTalk, please let us know or share publicly.  Time is running out.  I've tried using httrack and also a program called Cyotek Webcopy, both without success.

OccultMonk

Time is running out. Did anyone find a way to save the the data from the Maxscript part of the forum? 

iam717

video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe40pxcjPpM

vid2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvE6C9OVisc

link1:

https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/

link 2:

https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

link 3:

https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

linux:

https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2

Probably going to need a linux user/friend/associate, or install it on a split drive or new ssd/nvme or whatever and do it yourself.

I tried to help, i did not do any of this but seems this is the best option.  //edit to get ahead of the future, b.s. do this to any other site you desire to keep, after this one.

PolyHertz

Well looks like CGTalk / CGSociety is no more. The good news is I managed to finish archiving the entire maxscript section as a wacz file (web archive collection zipped) just before the shutfown. Having some issues with indexed searches, but can directly browse the threads as-is. Going to see if I can fix some bad links and solve the search issue before uploading it.

OccultMonk

Thank you. It would be great if you could upload the file.

bond1

That would be an amazing gift to the Max community if you could share that.  Thank you.

PolyHertz

Here's a link to the CGTalk Maxscript forum as a single file. It's just a free dropbox link, so I think it's limited to something like a dozen downloads a day due to the file size, but if anyone wants to mirror the file please feel free to do so. The threads in the file can be viewed via https://replayweb.page/ , or the archiveweb.page program, or archiveweb.page chrome extension. The software needs some work to properly load clicked links within threads and for indexed searches, but thanks to it being open source (github link here) should be fixable with enough time/effort.

Anyhow, enjoy!

OccultMonk

@PolyHertz Thank you! Please keep us updated if they repair the search function in any of those :-)

bond1

@PolyHertz Thank you, you're a legend!  

Here is a mirror, I've compressed it to 7z format to get the download to 700MB:  CGTalk Maxscript Archive

Fogey34

PolyHertz said:

Here's a link to the CGTalk Maxscript forum as a single file. It's just a free dropbox link, so I think it's limited to something like a dozen downloads a day due to the file size, but if anyone wants to mirror the file please feel free to do so. The threads in the file can be viewed via https://replayweb.page/ , or the archiveweb.page program, or archiveweb.page chrome extension. The software needs some work to properly load clicked links within threads and for indexed searches, but thanks to it being open source (github link here) should be fixable with enough time/effort.

Anyhow, enjoy!

bond1 said:

@PolyHertz Thank you, you're a legend!  

Here is a mirror, I've compressed it to 7z format to get the download to 700MB:  CGTalk Maxscript Archive

 Thank you so much! This will be so useful! The last few days I've googled a few Max issues and would find a post that looks to be the answer i needed... only to find it was a CGTalk link...

gandhics

If anyone knows how I can host this on webpage, I can provide server space..

PolyHertz

@gandhics Not sure on the exact steps, but if you open the wacz file with 7zip and grab the warc from  archive > data.warc.gz > data.warc it should be possible to convert that back to regular web pages via something like warc2html.

gumtoo

PolyHertz said:

Here's a link to the CGTalk Maxscript forum as a single file. It's just a free dropbox link, so I think it's limited to something like a dozen downloads a day due to the file size, but if anyone wants to mirror the file please feel free to do so. The threads in the file can be viewed via https://replayweb.page/ , or the archiveweb.page program, or archiveweb.page chrome extension. The software needs some work to properly load clicked links within threads and for indexed searches, but thanks to it being open source (github link here) should be fixable with enough time/effort.

Anyhow, enjoy!

Thank you PolyHertz for achiving the forum. I tried the ReplayWeb.page standalone destop app and it loads the achive in about a minute. While search on html pages doesn't work, all the posts seems to be there even with images. One thing already useful is that if you seach for something on google and get a link to a post on cgsociety, you can use this link in the app integrated browser and get the page almost identical as on cgsociety. I just read a post with a question answered by bobo in 2008, very promising. Anyway, the archive is there, that's the important thing,  BIG THANKS to you !!! I'm sure it can be transformed in something very usable.

Klunk

personally the mxs reference thing is neither here or there for me it was somewhere you could initiate a thread on your solution to solving something, have it critiqued or other options provided (sometimes as hey I've a great solution to x, how about you ? threads). There is no other website currently that provides that. The Autodesk mxs/sdk just doesn't have that "vibe". It's a shame

alfonzx

hey so i just wanted to know since A.I is taking over all the skills how will we know which ones will sustain us humans unless all of you are bots

myclay

This thread is about cgsociety and cgtalk shutting down.
Edit; just realized that the first post has an edit about (imo irrelevant) AI talk, so you are not purposefully derailing. My bad for overseeing that.

In the context of this thread and if you where reading thru it;
It should have made it clear to you that Archiving, creating Backups and sharing Knowledge is important.
Think of it like a public Archive/Library. The more are in the know, the better it is for your library, economy and environment. Rebuilding is also easier since others can help you if a loss occurred.

Nurture and nourish.

Knowledge needs to get verified and sometimes it is outdated or turns out to be straight up wrong.
Just archiving won´t help. You need to actively maintain and verify if stuff is relevant, understandable etc.
The Polycount Forum has people willing to keep knowledge reachable, enjoyable for different skillsets and accessible for all. It boils down to building and emboldening a community.

Eric Chadwick

Plus one to that!

Alex_J

I dont know a lot about web stuff, so just ignore me if its a stupid idea but, as for an easy and compact way to host content, whether it is text or images or links, notion is pretty handy
a free account can host a good chunk of stuff
the main benefit I think is that you can dump a bunch of stuff into a notion database and then if you make it public anybody can duplicate that and then download as pdf or csv or whatever

so it is a pretty easy way to share stuff but also a really compact way to display a lot of stuff (like a spreadsheet but you can drill down into each item infinitely)

the downside is that notion cannot work offline, the best you can do is download as a pdf or csv. this breaks a lot of the formatting, but at least the information can be saved that way