3D-Sphere is growing larger from day to day and so far it was only supported by the two admins which also founded the Sphere. Even that it looks easy; our daily fight with bugs, news and tutorials could be called epic. Our goal at 3D-Sphere is really to create something unique, something which wasn’t here before and this is obviously the hard part. When we started the Sphere I thought that after some time we would see also some interaction from our users, maybe some help but so far we had no luck. We were also surprised about the first competition we started almost year ago with prizes for more than 5000$ were nobody participate. Why we will never know for sure but from users I know and asked them I received a simple answer; iam not sure if iam good for it.
3D-Sphere News
Starting this day every user of 3D-Sphere can win a monthly subscription to Digital-Tutors, the world’s largest CG and VFX training library. With the help of Digital-Tutors you can get in touch with the most advanced and used techniques and workflows in the CG industry. The subscription gets you unlimited and instant access to the world's largest CG training library, new training each month, all project files, exclusive learning tools and more than 19,400 Video Lessons. We totally give away three monthly subscriptions. What you have to do to win this subscription?
After several weeks of searching we found a suitable player for our video tutorials which should be more compatible as the old one and as well causes less trouble. The reason why we decided to change the player were many; users had problems with the player and in certain cases they couldn’t play the tutorials, the player hardly supported streaming and many more. So as you can see it was time for a change and we really hope that it’s a change to something better. Also we use from now a streaming server for playing the videos instead of progressive download which we had before. This has several advantages and the most noticeable is the capability of seeking the video. This basically means that you don’t have to wait until the video is buffered to seek the video but you can jump to any part instantly. This also means that you download only what you watch and nothing more.
Upon some requests from our users we decided to implement a donation option using PayPal on 3D-Sphere. You can access the donate form from the right menu at any location of 3D-Sphere except the main page. The donation is absolutely voluntarilyand the user which will donate would not get any advantages from this. The donations will be used for running 3D-Sphere and improving it through components and stuff which are not open. Source or free. In this moment we want to establish a VPS allowing us stream our tutorials using RTMP protocols instead of progressive download and so allow also pseudo streaming which would mean the seeking options on all videos.
Like everyone we also need some rest and in hot and summer months more than before, so starting this day we have two weeks summer holidays at 3D-Sphere! During this time would be the support, news and forum online and under administrator maintenance, but we would not release any tutorial (we really need some rest from endless hours by computers J). Moreover we will use this time for developing and bug fixing on 3D-Sphere. One thing we would really like to change is our newsletter design and the appearance of. Even that this task is not so difficult, so far we couldn’t find any time to do so.