Two years and many more to go cgTantra is here to stay.
What started a couple of years ago as a genuine effort at creating an online forum for the Indian CG Community, www.cgtantra.com is today, a formidable portal with an army of loyal users who swear by it.
The portal is celebrating its 2 nd anniversary on 3 December at one of Mumbai�s most creative destinations, Whistling Woods.
Celebrating along with the CG community will be none other than Pixar Animation studios which will hold a session on the making of CARS. Also lined up is a comic book art session by Virgin Comics, Mighty Pencil Interactive session which will highlight the skills and value of traditional drawing, Creature design interactive workshop by Siju Thomas, from CCX studio, VFX Process checklist secrets, by Mike Seymour, Emmy Nominated visual effects artist from Australia.
There will also be an award ceremony to felicitate the members of cgTantra to appreciate and encourage them. “Apart from a few ongoing challenges and the challenges conducted earlier, the awards and honors are basically to inspire and thank the members who are putting up enormous amount of additional time theyâ€?ve spent to Share, Learn and help fellow members” said Chand. These awards will be called cg Tantra honours.
Speaking exclusively to AnimationXpress.com Rebatikanth Chand, co-founder and administrator shared ” cgTantra was started to support every creative and technical artist – anyone using traditional & digital medium to tell a story or a concept. Our vision was to enhance the quality of creative works in all genres related to art, animation, gaming and visual effects to international quality as well as to provide a platform for the unknown talents to be brought into the limelight. We started with a small group of 10 member team 2years back. By the time we reached 100 members, we had many professionals from various studios contributing and lots of students from all over India joining us. With contribution from every member, we decided that, we all Learn, Inspire, Share & Grow together. By the time we have even realized that, 2 years have gone by and we have already reached 5300 members”.
The members of cg Tantra forum are all set and excited about the event. Anish Mohan shared, “cg Tantra has really done me wonders. It’s been a great meeting place and has opened a world of opportunities too many including me. I have made some great friends here who are open about critics and sharing cg gyan. I am totally excited about the upcoming event and about meeting my longtime online cg artist friends.”
Another member Akash Karmakar shared the same sentiments as Anish, “Iâ€?ve been a member of CgTantra for past one year and I’m really happy about the fact that it has completed two full years, with a huge number of members now. It has kind of united the Indian artists from an isolated drop to a strong community, which I think is the core for any revolution, be it war or be it music or art.”
Along with celebrating their second anniversary, Tantra team plans to revamp their portal.
“One of the great things of cgTantra.com is the participation of artists who post incredible work taking time out from their day to day schedule. This has motivated us to go ahead and pack more features, articles, tutorials, coverage for all the members. As based on our experience and what we have learnt from people inspire us, we are involving lots of senior professionals from all over the world, who will be sharing their experience and guide all the students and novices on cgTantra to give there best. As our journey has just begun, we have lined up lots of events and will be hosting exciting contests in association with software & hardware majors to promote quality artists and push the quality to International level. Also, with an extended technical support and entirely changed coding in the backend, the new cgTantra will be more user friendly, robust and dedicated as ever to serve the entire CG Community” remarked cgTantra Co founder Abhishek Chandra.
“The event is being organized in association with Whistling Woods International and as of now, we have Autodesk and Aditya Infotech as the platinum sponsors and Apple, HP are the gold sponsors. The other sponsors are PIXAR, Wacom, nVidia, Softimage, Rhythm and Hues and Toonboom. We are also privileged to have the support of ABAI, Tasi, Asifa, Women in Animation and our media partners including Animation Xpress.com and Animation Reporter”, concluded cgTantra administrator and Partner Gokul K.