We would recommend having at least some basic understanding of Blender before enrolling in the course. 

The absolute minimum of Blender experience would be to make sure you have a familiarity with the user interface, resizing and switching the window layout around, knowledge of the most common shortcuts and completed one or two short and basic modeling tutorials. 

A good free resource available to all can be found here…

Blender Fundamentals 2.8

Everything has been tested using VLC, so while everything should play fine on all players, if in doubt give this awesome free player a try....

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

Sure. Blender Market has a 30 day money back guarantee. Just shoot an email to support@blendermarket.com and ask for a refund.

Yes, all videos will have subtitles (English), manually edited.

The Blender Market can send you an invoice and then deliver the gift to any given email; in order to claim the gift the recipient will need to create an account with that same email.

Upon purchase you’ll be given download links. If you need to download at a later time then simply create an account with the same email used to purchase and the downloads will be available on your Account page: https://blendermarket.com/account

At the time of release, an NVIDIA GPU card with a CUDA compute capability is required for full operation of both Reality Capture and Meshroom.

While it is true that Blender is one of the most fully featured 3d creation softwares out there nevertheless the CG industry moves so swiftly and is used for so many different purposes it’s very difficult for any one application to be able to keep up with all of the new developments. 

Photogrammetry is one such area that requires specialist software to convert the raw source imagery into 3d models. The good news is that there is a free and open source option that we demonstrate called Meshroom however, most of the time we use an application called Reality Capture which is much faster to use. 

Reality Capture is free to use up until the moment of export at which point it will calculate the expected cost of the export which usually amounts to less than a dollar. This isn’t a required step for the course though as we have included the exports in with the project files so that you can follow along if you wish. 

List of software used:

• Blender        Free
• Reality Capture    Exports requires credit (note not available for Linux - Meshroom will be required instead)
• Meshroom        Free
• Darktable        Free
• Agisoft Delighter    Free
• xNormal        Free (note only available for windows users, we use this for simple displacement baking and for very high polycount meshes. We also show a process that works for Blender. Quixel's Mixer is free and available to all and also comes highly recommended for this part of the pipeline too.)
• Gimp            Free (Gimp now has a very useful feature for PBR textures which allows us to perform a multi-layer clone)

List of recommended hardware:

• An entry-level DSLR or a mirrorless camera (if you don't have a camera, it's possible to photoscan using a smartphone)
• NVIDIA GPU card with a CUDA compute capability is required for full operation of both Reality Capture and Meshroom.

Creative Shrimp email: http://www.creativeshrimp.com/contact

Gleb's Twitter: https://twitter.com/gleb_alexandrov

Yes! We've just started a Creative Shrimp Discord channel here - use this link here to get your invite : https://discord.gg/nNReRkzWsh

While some of the videos were recorded using 2.9x we recommend to use Blender 3.0 and higher as this has some speed improvements for both linking and general viewport performance. More info here: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/EEVEE