3D Buzz

» see 3dbuzz.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Before there was a tutorial for everything, there was 3D Buzz. Jason Busby started the company in January 2001 out of Dickson, Tennessee, where he was also Director of Animation at the Renaissance Center, and he began recording what the site called VTMs: video training modules. You downloaded one, watched a man build a thing from an empty scene to a finished shot, and then did it yourself. In 2001 that was close to a new idea. Most people learning 3D software were working from a manual and a prayer.

The subjects were 3ds Max and Maya at first, then level design in Unreal, and eventually whatever the team felt like teaching. Busby wrote the books too. Mastering Unreal Technology ran to two volumes, co-authored with Zak Parrish and Jeff Wilson, and for a stretch in the mid 2000s it was how a lot of people found their way into Epic's engine. By the end 3D Buzz had more than a thousand hours of video and north of 275,000 registered members.

What people actually remember is the tone. Busby and Parrish taught in a loose two-men-at-a-keyboard way, with the mistakes left in, and that style is now so standard on YouTube that it takes an effort to remember somebody had to do it first on a dial-up-era website with a download queue. The giving-away part was there from the start as well. A Game Developer interview from GDC 2004 is titled, in part, giving it away for free, because even then a large share of the catalog cost nothing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the VTM years ~

A VTM was a file you fetched and kept, not a stream. That detail sets the whole thing in its period. In 2003 the modem at home ran at 56k and the phone line was billed by the minute, so a hundred megabyte training module was most of a night and a decision you thought about first. A free catalog does not help much when the download itself is the obstacle. TTNet broadband made that kind of download ordinary around 2006, by which point I was headed into computer engineering rather than animation, and 3D Buzz was teaching a craft I was never going to practice.

The audience was never only artists. The site drifted into programming courses and mathematics for game developers, and into the kind of very long project-based series no publisher ever commissions. For a self-taught person with no money and a good connection, 3D Buzz in 2005 was one of a very small number of real options.

~ the day it died ~

Busby died of cancer in 2017. The tributes from the industry went up that September. 3D Buzz kept serving its library after that, but nobody was making the new thing any more, and a training catalog goes stale fast when the software underneath it ships twice a year.

The end is datable to within fifteen hours. On 10 January 2020 at 07:39 UTC the Internet Archive captured 3dbuzz.com as its ordinary self, around 29 kilobytes of normal website. At 22:46 UTC the same day it captured something else entirely: a page headed The End of an Era, carrying a letter that begins "Hello everyone" and gets to the point in two sentences. 3D Buzz, Inc has closed its doors. Subscription and recurring payments have already been suspended. Hacker News did not find it until the 14th, where it collected 300 points from people who had learned their trade there.

~ the final gift ~

The letter calls the page itself the final gift, and it meant that literally. Below the goodbye was a list of download links to every piece of training the company had ever produced, free, with no account. Somewhere over 200 gigabytes of it, covering 3ds Max and Blender through to Unreal and Unity, plus the drawing and anatomy courses. The letter closes on the company's own long-running sign-off, "Remember to always look, listen, and learn," followed by a last line wishing everyone "goodbye, good health, and good luck."

The internet did what it does to a 200 gigabyte giveaway. That first archived capture, the one from the night of the 10th, already carries the words "downloads temporarily disabled" where the links were supposed to be, because the server was being taken apart by people trying to save it all at once. Within days the community had torrents up and mirrors running, and the catalog survives in those copies rather than on any machine 3D Buzz ever paid for.

A company whose last official act was to hand its entire inventory to the people who had bought from it is a rare thing to find in a shutdown notice. It reads like somebody settling an estate.

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