Several readers have reported receiving an email saying that CGSociety, a cornerstone in the computer graphics community for over two decades, has announced its retirement. This closure, effective from January 8th, marks the end of an era for the platform once known for its vibrant and creative community with a forum that still contains pages of useful and regularly referenced advice.
In the email, the team behind CGSociety expressed deep gratitude to everyone who contributed to the platform’s success, including its founders, moderators, forum leaders, and active community members. They acknowledged the significant impact the community has had in shaping the platform and thanked them for their dedication and support.
With the announcement of its closure, CGSociety has encouraged its members to download any personal content, such as images, artwork, and important conversations, before the shutdown.
This retirement marks not just the end of a platform, but also the loss of yet another once important community that has fallen by the wayside as enormous social media companies become the go-to location for content and communities. CGPress would like to extend their gratitude to CGSociety for all its work over the years and wishes the staff all the best for their next endeavours.
To be fair though… the site didn’t die because of some enormous social media company. They had a significant role in the downfall themselves. From drama around moderation, the completely failed redesign of the forum that – to this day – made parts of the forum unusable and then last but not least banners from 2019 that are still there for contests that have been over for over 4 years! It has been dead for years, they just didn’t make it official.
The biggest loss will be the maxscript forum where most of the more “advanced” knowledge has been for years and will be lost forever.
Wasn’t parts of the maxscript forum lost much earlier? I remember some drama here.
The redesign was a tragic disaster. They took a great looking, well functioning forum, and made it visibly unreadable and broken. Real shame.
I used to visit that forum religiously since around 2003, many times a day. Participate in discussions, learn things. It was a great community. Then the redesign came out of nowhere, like a suicide. I gave it a try but it was just not the same, not even close. Whoever made that decision, I hope you realize that you killed something really great.
I hope someone figures out a way to scrape and save all the maxscript forum data!
That’s true, loosing of maxscript forum would be serious impact of 3d Max community.
btw, I made copy of it for my self by httrack.
Yo Martin, any chance of uploading that somewhere, like archive.org? I couldn’t get httrack to get a working copy of the maxscript forum…
It’s been effectively dead for years but it was once THE place for news, discussion and collaboration. It’s sad to see an (official) end of an era. I met creative people I otherwise would have never met, I won a competition years ago and consumed endless feeds of inspiration. Thank you to everyone involved for giving us a place like that year after year!
Totally agree with you, back in the early 2000’s when I was a student I lived on that site. It was the go to place for everything 3D related. Even after completing school I went to the site multiple times a day, the forums was filled with so much inspiration and good conversations.
Those were good times. It seems like we will never have such a place again. The younger generation is focused on something else, not on sharing knowledge. All I see are a bunch of short video aficionados who do the bare minimum to get results.
Very much agreed, we lived through a golden age a trully magic era, we were part of the early pioneers that built the industry itself, something that no new gen will understand or comprehend, makes us unique.
Will they upload the text info/images somewhere to download?
Killed by AI
Now what did Adobe Illustrator do this time?
I remember when it was CGTalk. The best place at the time for Maya/Mel help and general discussion. I probably had at least a couple thousand posts.
Also maxunderground……
And highend3d
Maxunderground became CGPress -we’re still here! 🙂
I love you friends… but I will love you guys more if you try to have the same spirit of before… totally dedicated to 3ds Max community like before, with more attention even for little things about max community, max plugins heroes, max script masters… look: why you guys don’t try to contact and try to make have any help or participation from the guys who continue to keep Max’s soul alive?? Example: our lovely brothers Eloy Andaluz, Changsoo Eun, Clovis Gay, Tyson Ibele, Marius Silaghi?? I only mentioned some, but have also the long list of max veterans…
Make also a forum for us!!!
We did try this with MUForums 10 years ago but it never really took off. Already most people had moved to social media, and I can only imagine it’s even less viable now, unfortunately.
Thanks for the feedback. We are currently considering what people would like to see in the future for CGPress and how to remain relevant, so it’s good to read your views.
Discord is the new thing at the moment 🙂
I tried Discord, but it was really messy! Its user experience was totally nonsensical. By the way, what happened to Twitter is really sad. At least it could be a platform to keep people updated with any type of news and, at the same time, let people discuss about the topic. It was going very well until the disaster. What I see nowadays is a lack of engagement from the community. Maybe people are really upset. I’m really upset, tired and anguished. This year’s end is becoming hard to me.
Discord is great for asking questions and having people answer nearly immediately. I use it for a lot of my tools/render engines and various plugins like Axiom/ODtools for Houdini. The developers are on there and will answer you if you have issues.
It’s not the same as a news site like this and I don’t think it will ever be. It’s not meant to be.
It would be upsetting to me if this site was dedicated solely to 3dsmax. In truth I’d like all 3d software and (2d software) to be covered.
+1
I am only barely interested in 3dsMax so if this was only focused in it i would not come here. Just pointing my pov.
yup, cgtalk was my daily grind lol. Best place to go and catch up on the latest news, info or forum chatter or the new shiny tools. I remember those really long post on people going back and forth when new versions of max or maya was released.
Miss the days on cgtalk when you would see the latest book release from ballistic publishing. I picked up a few of those art books.
CGtalk was what got me wanting to do 3D in the first place in 2005. It was really awesome back then. People loved to help one another. I agree that it has been dying over the years. First the site redesign was a fiasco, then nothing was being moderated and it was killed with spam.
Still its sad to see something that was so iconic in this industry, not exist anymore. On a further note. Discord channels have pretty much killed the forums.
Classic case of it it aint broke, don’t fix it.
Regardless I doubt they would have survived the current era of social media behemoths without fully embracing youtube/reddit/Discord etc.
It feels like every online community is kind of nebulous and fractured.
‘Society in general to shutdown in 2024’?
CgSociety did not died because of “enormous social media companies”. It was a suicide.
And it’s gone…
CG Society killed itself
Overmoderated
Outdated, never adapetd
No updates
Old ads
Unhelpful old people
It was dead over 5 years ago.
Good riddance!
Has anyone downloaded this site ?
I registered my CGtalk account back in 2002, so it’s been a couple of decades. I was very active around early-mid 2000s, but by 2009 I had grown tired and had other issues in my life. My whole point of being there was to learn from others so I get a career and a regular job, but that never materialized, even though I got pretty good in many areas as a 3D generalist. There are other aspects to it. Lots of nostalgia from that Forum, but sadly a huge waste of time for me. I wish they’d have the whole thing archived, for future generations. The last new “clean” design of the site was absolute horrific trash.