Our mission is to establish a community of subscriber tinkerers and makers – equipping them to have the tools and assets they need to make amazing personal and commercial work.

Monasteries in history have been places where those with shared perspectives could come and perfect their craft and themselves. They often were places others just came to share food or resources and go on their way.

Started by CG Monks in 2018, the CG Monastery is an online co-op  – a collective aimed at enabling our subscribers to make great content for personal and commercial ends. It is our attempt to help our users make awesome work and fund continued development of assets and tools.  It’s about an open development where we hope to inspire others to take these tools and assets, help make them better and use them for making their own amazing works.

What it’s not

  • It’s not an online pipeline. Though we create and maintain pipeline tools, we’re not trying to make a place for our subscribers to host their projects.
  • It’s not an online school. We will have educational materials but we encourage you to check out one of our partners or another site for more in depth specific instruction.
  • Open Development – We believe in open development which is why cgmTools have been free since their inception. We’re expanding on that here and for the co-op that means source files, methods, concepts and all.
  • Content Creation – We’re making apps and want to show users how to do that. More soon!
  • Rigs – We want to make more full rigs available for use. The meat of the lastest work is behind NDA’s so we’re trying to get new stuff up as soon as we can

Good question and the specifics of the collaboration are something we’re still working through..

To begin we’ll be using a combination of:

  • Frugality – We want this to succeed and continue and so…
    • We’ll be trying to keep overhead low in terms of web tech so there can be more money to pay for development time, modeling time and more.
    • Buckets – we’ll be setting up some buckets to commission a new rig for example and let the co-op pick what we do.
  • Tech
    • Discord – We’re experimenting with this medium for doing live work sessions and direct communication with higher tier subscribers
    • Forum – Though not the latest and greatest, forums still fill a need and unless we find a better avenue, we’ll be using one.
    • Facebook – Though it won’t be our main avenue of communication for subscribers, it will probably be for non-subscribers (at least until the next iteration of it comes around)
    • Github – We have a number of repos we maintain

The Future

As this takes shape we’d love to look at ways of expanding the Monastery to be more than a CG Monks thing. We hope to find partners along the way to that share a collaborative mindset and might even take parts of this one for other projects and avenues of exploration.

Friends

Here are a few companies that helps us do what we do.