3D Buzz is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

3D Buzz is shutting down

3dbuzz.com

300 pointsvoid_nill37 comments

Does anyone have any insight on why they're closing their doors?

Edit: I did some searching. Heart breaking stuff. What an incredible way to remember Jason and the Community by, by releasing everything they have to the internet. Wonderful stuff.

"Unfortunately, 3D Buzz is closing its doors, not without giving people a final gift (more about that below). You may or may not know that Jason Busby, founder of 3D Buzz and one of the principal partners, dying from cancer back in 2017, and that affected 3D Buzz greatly. Besides founding 3D Buzz, Jason was Director of Animation for The Renaissance Center in Dickson, Tennessee, and was also the author of the books Mastering Unreal Technology Vols I and II."

https://magazine.renderosity.com/article/5641/3d-buzz-is-clo...

Their content was gold back in the day when I was trying to break into this field. I may have to download the MMO videos for good memories. I always wanted to purchase & complete that series but I lacked the money & time when they were being released.

I never thought I'd see Dickson, TN mentioned on HN. If you're around the area you should visit the Renaissance Center. I remember it mostly from the planetarium when I was a kid.

I remember visiting back in 2000 or so, when I was considering a career in animation. I ended up going to MTSU for their animation program (and subsequently getting into tech instead), but I still remember how cool the Renaissance Center was.

I grew up nearby and have never heard of the Renaissance Center. I'll go check it out soon!

> Most files listed below are available on this torrent: 3dbuzz.torrent. Some files are currently missing.

Looks like either the torrent itself, or the set of files the torrent was created from is corrupt, or containing different versions of some of the zip files, because the torrent does not completely verify against the zip files that 3dbuzz originally released to the public on their website a week ago.

Someone on Reddit made a torrent too, and the first torrent that person made had some issues too but then that person made a new, fixed torrent that verifies correctly against all of the zip files that were originially released to the public by 3dbuzz.

Here is a link to the torrent made by the person on Reddit, that verifies correctly for all of the files: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1bljXeR1xv9Tp...

It looks like they've updated the 3dbuzz.torrent file, and now it's 4GB larger than the versions on reddit.

> All files listed below are available on this torrent: 3dbuzz.torrent

> now it's 4GB larger than the versions on reddit.

Note that the first one they posted was bigger too, and in both cases, most of that extra size is coming from the following duplicate files:

  ai-programming-behavior-systems-part-01.1.zip
  houdini-director-volume-ii-part-01.1.zip
  mathematics-algebra-part-01.1.zip
  mathematics-trigonometry-part-01.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-01.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-02.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-03.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-04.1.zip
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-01.1.zip
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-02.1.zip
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-03.1.zip

However, the new torrent that they posted does indeed include the two files missing from the Reddit torrent (which were also giving 404 when they originally realeased the files a week ago):

  xna-volume-2-part-01.zip
  xna-volume-3-part-01.zip

I am currently verifying the new torrent, but I have to leave any minute now so I don't have time to see what the result is until I get back but I think probably the new torrent they posted is going to verify correctly. We will see.

Edit: The new one is already reporting some files fail to verify as the first one did.

For reference, in this comment I am talking about the torrent file 3dbuzz-2020-01-13.torrent from the 3dbuzz website with SHA256 hash sum:

  e3adc900ff7d8bcb286119a059f216ea57a37096e84488c737f0db5b8e8eaeb5  3dbuzz-2020-01-13.torrent

Hm. Now the link to their new torrent leads me to 404..

The link currently posted on their website is https://www.3dbuzz.com/3dbuzz-2020-01-13

It looks like the link should have been https://www.3dbuzz.com/3dbuzz-2020-01-13.torrent

So it does.

For reference, the 3dbuzz.torrent file that I was talking about above that failed to verify some of the files has the following SHA256 hash sum:

  346306376c94abbb140ff89b76c016eca1c2d6346b822266c2918bf50fcd45f5  3dbuzz.torrent

In the meanwhile between then and now, I also wrote out the following about which files were failing to verify. This additional information is largely useless now that they have switched to what I assume is a good torrent. But just in case someone downloaded the bad torrent (bad in the sense that it fails to verify for some of the files), I will post that information here anyway and then maybe someone will find this and learn that they should download a different torrent than the one that they used originally instead.

In particular, these are the files that failed to verify in the 3dbuzz.torrent file that 3dbuzz was initially hosting on its website:

  3rd-person-character-system-part-03.zip      (verification failed at 85.71% of  24.6 MB)
  ai-programming-behavior-systems-part-01.zip  (verification failed at 98.92% of  75.4 MB)
  houdini-character-rigging-2-part-01.zip      (verification failed at 99.45% of 291.2 MB)
  houdini-director-volume-ii-part-01.zip       (verification failed at 99.63% of 420.5 MB)
  legacy-series-maya-part-01.zip               (verification failed at 99.93% of 528.1 MB)
  legacy-series-maya-part-02.zip               (verification failed at  0.00% of     4 KB)
  mastering-3dsmax-dragon-birthday-part-01.zip (verification failed at 99.33% of 565.5 MB)
  mastering-maya-when-mechs-attack-part-04.zip (verification failed at 99.00% of 384.4 MB)
  mathematics-algebra-part-01.zip              (verification failed at 99.76% of 230.9 MB)
  mathematics-part-01.zip                      (verification failed at 98.96% of 263.1 MB)
  mathematics-trigonometry-part-01.zip         (verification failed at 97.37% of 136.3 MB)
  modern-javascript--part-01.zip               (verification failed at 99.51% of 536.8 MB)
  modern-javascript--part-02.zip               (verification failed at  0.00% of     2 KB)
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-01.zip (verification failed at 99.43% of 556.8 MB)
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-02.zip (verification failed at 99.56% of 564.5 MB)
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-03.zip (verification failed at 99.04% of 559   MB)
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-04.zip (verification failed at 37.85% of   5.6 MB)
  unreal-development-kit-part-15.zip           (verification failed at 99.44% of 357.6 MB)
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-01.zip      (verification failed at 99.17% of 528.7 MB)
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-02.zip      (verification failed at 99.69% of 546.9 MB)
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-03.zip      (verification failed at 98.85% of 322   MB)

The fact that all of these failed to verify in their last few MB of data has me inclined to believe that the issue was with the checksums in the torrent file itself. In practice this likely means that all clients that try to download the whole of that torrent will never finish downloading everything 100% because the verification will always fail for them too. Can anyone confirm or deny that this is the case if they tried to download that torrent?

> The peer distributing a data file treats the file as a number of identically sized pieces, usually with byte sizes of a power of 2, and typically between 32 kB and 16 MB each. The peer creates a hash for each piece, using the SHA-1 hash function, and records it in the torrent file.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Creating_and_publis...

Additionally, there are some duplicate files in that same 3dbuzz.torrent file:

  ai-programming-behavior-systems-part-01.1.zip
  houdini-director-volume-ii-part-01.1.zip
  mathematics-algebra-part-01.1.zip
  mathematics-trigonometry-part-01.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-01.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-02.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-03.1.zip
  modern-javascript-real-world-dev-part-04.1.zip
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-01.1.zip
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-02.1.zip
  unreal-tournament-2003-2004-part-03.1.zip

I was one of the members of 3dbuzz early on. It pretty much shaped my career. I now run my own video tutorial site (codemy.net) because I was inspired by 3DBuzz.

I got my first job because of content from 3DBuzz. Later focussed on web development and now I'm here working in a very good job / able to start my own projects. Most of it started at 3DBuzz. So this is a very sad day for me.

I remember when Jason passed away that was devastating. I reached out to some members (who are now working at Epic / Microsoft). 3DBuzz set me (and many other people I know) up for life.

same for me, Jason was incredible early in my career.

For those who don't know, 3DBuzz was a small pioneering company providing training material for 3D content creation suites.

At the time, it also was the only place where you could get training material for Unreal Engine (3/UDK). I can only imagine that quite a few people in the industry first got their start on UE through that material.

Moreover, it was a community with a forum/IRC and had a podcast running for a while. While I wasn't an active member of the community, in its heyday I used to visit the site daily. It was a great place.

As the founder Jason Busby struggled with terminal cancer, the site died down.

My gratitude and regards go out to Jason's family and everyone who was involved with the site.

> had a podcast running for a while

This is oddly enough what I remember most about the place. IIRC it was very relaxed and felt like the hosts just hanging out talking about whatever, but was also engaging unlike many podcasts that try to do that.

If you don't want to download via torrent, note that many (maybe all?) of the videos are available on their YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/3DBuzz/videos

A lot of things seem to be missing. Blender, C#/C++, Android-Development, Modern Javascript, MMO Development, etc..

I remember taking the Houdini class. I've modeled a desk lamp. It was crappy and I knew it, but the teachers said it was an "amazing design" and encouraged me to learn more about the software. It truly was inspiring and a great community... Thanks for everything.

During my elementary/high school days, I remember their C++ videos for creating a simple, but fun mage fireball game in Windows console. It was a good introduction, for me, to object oriented programming. Really showed me that C++ wasn't hard at all and could be fun. Authentic videos where mistakes were made and showed you the human side of programming.

3dBuzz Variables and Data Types - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og_8Bx-l80k

Mage and Fireball - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=923ELha-L4Q

This is sad but it is SO refreshing to see something on the web that takes us back a decade or two - plain content, links, no banners, tracking or email subscriptions. Just people sharing a bit of their passions online. Farewell

For the non introduced people can anyone explain what 3DBuzz was?

3DBuzz was an educational subscription service website, launched in 2002 or thereabout; it offered what they at the time called Video Training Modules, mainly on DCC software (Autodesk products, etc.) and content creation for games. They had a lot of free content, too. In the beginning, if I remember correctly, videos were available for download and shipping (CD). Later, they implemented a video player; I cannot remember if they removed the option to download at that point. The site evolved and a community formed. They started offering programming tutorials. At its height, it was the best site for learning UDK (back when Unreal Engine had a hefty license fee UDK was the free version). The community was in decline for a long time before the death of its founder. One of their most prolific instructors now works at Epic Games. Over the years, many community members have credited 3DBuzz for their current employment.

This looks like a treasure trove on game art creation. Kudos for releasing them. Much appreciated. It’s so much hardwork and wonderful knowledge.

i know it signals the end of something people poured their hearts into...but i do enjoy reading these kinds of announcements. i find it fascinating to see how founders communicate to their communities and now-ex-staff. in a lot of cases, i find it inspiring.

Leaving with bountiful abundance to all who come after is the true sign of character. I heartily say, "Well done!"

Links to the files (torrent) on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/ekhzsd/comment/fdd...

I took the Mastering Maya class as well as several others when they initially came out more than a decade ago.

I learned so much, but also got such a sense of community working with the other students.

I'll always be grateful for that opportunity.

It was a gold mine back in the day. Through 3D Buzz I ended up taking one of their courses at the The Renaissance Centre in Dickson. I was 17 and it was only the 2nd time I ever travelled out of the UK, and the first I travelled on my own! Had a great time and I went on to do a BA in Computer Animation and Visualisation. I work in mobile development now and owe a lot of my early programming skills to 3D Buzz. Their C++ and MEL scripting videos were highlights for me. Rest in peace Jason.

Man, that's really sad. I followed the progress of Jason's sickness on fb (he was posting about it pretty regularly) and it was really heart breaking to see how fuckin cancer chews you up and spits you out. I still have two of the Maya courses from 3DBuzz on DVD at home. Just a week ago I was throwing away all of my old CDs/DVDs but decided to keep them for nostalgia reasons. I guess it was a good decision.

I recently learned that Jason died in 2017 and it was incredibly sad, even though I stopped using 3dbuzz a long time ago, it was an incredible tool when I started in the VFX industry, it was affordable incredible good training.

I tried to wget this and got a cert error. I believe this is due to a known bug in wget for Windows but would be curious if people on Linux see the same issue.

If you're using powershell, wget is just an alias! Install ps6 (core?) and it's much nicer.

try adding .exe

wget.exe

Damn, 3dBuzz is the reason I became programmer. Delphi video tutorials were first introduction to the topic and that's when I got hooked.

Thank you, for everything.

Thank You, seeding.

Again something I discover when they stop it

RIP

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