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Content Creator’s Guild is now launched and available. CCG is an online community and article site for digital artists that want to show off their creative designs as well as connect with independent, licensable content vendors. Content Creator’s Guild is, in fact, two sites:

Content Creator’s Guild Community. This is the social networking site. You can show off your music, artwork and videos on your own page or on a community page.

Content Creator’s Guild Magazine. This is the place to go where you want to look up facts, articles, links and the like. We don’t actually call this a magazine.

The why behind Why CG? you can find on my Content Creator’s Guild and Me page.

The Internet is being filled with comments on the recent passing of E Gary Gygax, the creator of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. If you are between the age of 40 to 60, you probably remember the game’s first rise in popularity in the mid-late 70′s, and the various scandals it produced, including a terrible movie with Tom Hanks. An incredible number of conventions in both offline and online games – especially MMORGs like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. What is particularly interesting is that Gygax himself was greatly influenced by writers such as JRR Tolkien, writer of The Lord of the Rings; he then systematized the conventions of the fantasy genre into the first pen-and-paper role playing game – that in turn greatly influenced the mechanics of these computer games.

Roman Ormandy, CEO of Caligari has announced that Caligari Corporation has been acquired by Microsoft. Caligari TrueSpace is a Windows only 3D modeling and rendering product. According to Roman, the reason for this is to enhance Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

I would also estimate that a portion of this will get rolled into Microsoft’s XNA game strategy for creating Xbox 360 and PC games.

The 3D graphics market has been in a constant state of vigorous consolidation following the early price wars between Alias Maya and Lightwave and the subsequent acquisition of Alias by AutoDesk – owners of Discreet and 3D Studio MAX.

In the 3D mid-market, recent years has seen the collapse of Eovia and the acquisition of its products by DAZ Productions and e-frontier. The majority of e-frontier America’s products were then acquired by Smith Micro.

This bloodbath will continue.

I was asked by chikako on the Meshbox NING about the controversy over the ArtZone terms of Service. ArtZone is a community site run by Daz Productions, Inc, a provider of high quality Poser compatible content and software vendor. The broad rights granted under the ArtZone Terms of Service to DAZ have outraged hundreds of artists who typically assume that ArtZone was governed by the same TOS as DAZ other sites. Let’s look at the section that is outraging people and why DAZ might require these rights. Read the rest of this entry »

For the third year, NORAD has selected Meshbox character Toon Santa™ as their official site Santa for tracking Santa Claus journey on Christmas Eve. Toon Santa is a character created by Meshbox Design in 2002, with subsequent updates in 2006 and 2007. Toon Santa also has his own website at http://www.toonsanta.com.

Since his creation, Toon Santa has been joined by Mrs Toon Santa and in 2007, Taika the Elf Girl. Meshbox has also released Toon Santa’s Christmas Village 2006 and 2007, and Toon Santa’s Christmas Classics – royalty free soundtracks that are licensed to production houses, animators and artists.

I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that RB3D (REALbasic 3D) was also eliminated from REALbasic 2007 R4. RB3D was a 3D implementation that was effectively a wrapper around Quesa. Quesa is an open source 3D framework (using OpenGL) for MacOS X, Windows and Linux. Except its for the most part a clone of dead Apple technology and never got much traction anywhere except on the Macintosh. Read the rest of this entry »