Welcome to june's patch notes!
Hiya everyone, Timothy here! Let me welcome you to our first monthly update, which we’re calling Patch Notes!
We’re doing this to shine a more public light on what we’re working on, the resources we’re expanding, and hopefully give you a clearer look at what goes on behind the scenes.
This month has been a big transition for me personally. At the beginning of the month I was still doing contract work, which meant the majority of my time was focused on that. With that now completely changed, you’ll probably start to notice things moving a bit quicker than you’re used to.
One of these changes is introducing these Patch Notes, but we’re also actively doubling down on all the academy content and reaching out to more industry veterans to help us build lesson material. And that’s not all, we also want to bring back some things that had to take a backseat for a while, such as more frequent get‑togethers in our voice chats, community spotlights, and building more resources!
I’m honored to be in this position because of you, and I’m excited to bring you more awesome content with your support 💖
Let’s dive into some of the things we’ve done this month, starting with…
ACADEMY UPDATES
Specifically for Beyond Academy our focus this month was on starting the FIRST GROUP SESSIONS!
But not only that, we've also been working hard polishing and adding all the content that was made over the last months, bringing you a couple of new lessons and makign ton of improvements to already existing lessons.
We also have 5 lessons in early stages and a couple more that are getting closer to be released next month.
- NEW LESSON: TEXTURING FUNDAMENTALS with George Shao
Learn how to texture your first asset inside of Substance 3D painter.
- Added lesson banner, text and images
- Made lesson available to all Academy Students
- Next month we will be adding all video and exercise content
- NEW LESSON: BAKING IN SUBSTANCE PAINTER with Piotr Zaras
Learn how to bake inside of Substance 3D painter to transfer highpoly details to lowpoly models.
- Adding new tutorial videos and video thumbnails for all videos in the lesson
- Adding missing baking settings video
- Setup Various Exercises to help you get to grips with the concepts in the lesson.
- Added images to the entire lesson
- LESSON UPDATE: REFERENCE GATHERING With Timothy Dries
- Replaced all video blocks in the entire lesson with appropriate video content and thumbnail images.
- UPDATE: HIGHPOLY MODELLING with Justin Frazee
- Replaced all video thumnails for video content in lesson.
- Polished all images throughout the lesson
- UPDATE: INTRO TO UNWRAPPING with Andrew Lytle
- Replaced placeholder banner image
- Edited all images for lesson
- Added multiple exercises to lesson
- Polished all lesson text content
- UPDATE: POST PROCESSING with Angelo Tsiflas
- Added video thumbnails for all videos in lesson
- Update: INTRODUCTION TO LIGHTING with Salvador Sanchez
- Added final images to lesson content
- Added final video thumbnails to all lesson videos
WEBSITE IMPROVEMENTS
With our latest push for launching Beyond Academy we had to do a lot of work on our website to do all that hard work justice.
- Overhauled main landing page to feature all the educational content we have on offer currently.
This includes
- Main home page overhaul
- Academy Landing Page (Early access only currently)
- Added mentorship page on landing page
- Various improvements to layout and ease of use that are site wide.
- Portfolio leaderboard visuals have now been fixed
- Each banner now showing the full image per person
- Fixed Academy Resources previews across all different lessons
- Added patch notes to site
- This is now a monthly feature that will be used to share updates to our community
WORKSHOPS
On the workshops front we've been improving our outreach and structure for future workshops, we're now working towards a better variations of workshop content by expanding our own workshops topics we are looking for. Not only that, but we're also happy to let you know that next month we have 3 workshop guests coming to share their knowledge with you!
So keep an eye out for those things to be shared with you soon in our Discord!
- NEW WORKSHOP EARLY ACCESS: Essential Portfolio Presentation Techniques with Ed Greig - Workshop is now available in early access for Workshop Members
- NEW WORKSHOP EARLY ACCESS: Core Components of Composition and Level Art with Kim Aava - Workshop is now available in early access for Workshop Members
- NEW WORKSHOP EARLY ACCESS: Master Materials that Scale with Hugh Chew - Workshop is now available for early access for our workshop members
Community improvements
Not sure what to call this section, but it's still important stuff!
These are some of the items that fall between the other categories and are more experimental (Something I personally love tinkering with during my "off-time")
- Added Community Spotlights to Stream Introductions, so selected community artworks are now being showcases before each stream.
- Setup Backend Systems to reintroduce "Community Spotlights" on Social media and Discord (These are coming next month)
Thanks for your support,
Your Beyond Extent Team 💖
