CGDive 2026 - What's in store?

So happy when i got this email from u . So i'm an 3d animator i hopefully in the future we might be collaboration togather to do somethings great ! Happy new year everyone.

Wishing you a great and a happy new year, Todor! Please take the time and take care of your health. I discovered your YouTube channel because you were going in depth with the topics, what other channels were just glossing over, and that can only come from doing the work and coming up against the problems and not from chasing clicks, so that is a good direction. Regarding ai, it’s a tool and someone else will be using it anyway, might as well learn to use it properly. Looking forward to see what you discover :). Cheers

Hey Bro - the lessening of YT engagement is a direct result (as I understand it from others) of AI becoming the gateway of content Being accessed, sort of a click-less means of having your stuff accessed and used … ?? Uncertain of this is so for YT, but apparently, it is so for regular content. Something like that.

wepale! im new in 3D modeling, thus i hope learn more from pros to start my journey.

Dear friend, I wish you good health. I am about ten years older than you, and working at the computer exhausts me mentally much more than any physical work does. My English is quite poor, so I cannot attend courses that would otherwise be very useful to me and would save me a lot of time—especially when it comes to Python. As you mentioned Python, it is a fairly easy programming language, at least compared to many others. There are some Python tutorials in Serbian and Croatian, which I can understand, but otherwise I have to translate everything myself. When it comes to animation in Blender, I fully support you. If you decide to create courses about Blender animation, modeling, or sculpting, I would be very interested in all of that. I have plenty of time and motivation to study and learn. My suggestion for you would be to create more serious tutorials or full courses for people who support you on Patreon. That way, people could, in a sense, give something back and thank you for your work. If you happen to know of any artificial intelligence tools that can translate speech-to-speech into Serbian or Croatian (not just subtitles), I would be very grateful if you could send me a link. Kapwing is quite expensive, and it only offers about one hour of so-called dubbing translation. I wish you good health, happiness, and success in 2026. Best regards, Dalibor Zekić

Hey Todor, happy new year to you! I also have a standing desk, it really helped my back pains, also more sport, workouts, gym, etc, are great help, I can recommend. Take care!

Hi Todor! Great to hear from you and happy you are focusing on your health and new projects. Fewer but higher quality videos fit your channel, of course online courses are useful too but once you have made some, which you have, then I guess you just have to wait until things change enough to warrant a whole new course. Also I'm sorry you're not getting good feedback on your videos as much as before. It is true some of it might be AI, but as for me, like you said lots of bad things going on in the world right now and maybe that also has an effect, I have not been able to follow my favorite creators on youtube because life has gotten much more difficult and it leaves me less time to spend on my hobbies. Hope things get better in the future. Getting this post in email lifted my spirit up a bit so thanks.

Same kind of goals for me in 2026, Todor. 38 years now… time to make some muscles to enter 40’s in good health. Since the AI boom my inner artistic side got a bit heart broken and I stopped creating art for a while and start experimenting on creating tools. And since the hype is going down now… I feel like I might be back modeling, rigging and even learning animation at some point. We will see! I think people is getting tired of the AI art slop.

Dear Todor, Thank you for your email and your wise words. I am one of the quieter YouTube users, partly because my life does not revolve solely around the digital world. Only sporadically do my work tasks require me to “browse the internet” for content that will help me. So I could only skim through your rigging tutorials, which I really appreciated, and then the job I needed them for was already done. When I recently had to build something again, I realised that everything is completely different and that I would actually have to start from scratch on some points in Rigify. This actually reflects quite well the state of the knowledge we need for our work: it is fleeting. What we need today is obsolete tomorrow. This is not a good basis for much YouTube content and makes it difficult for dedicated artists like you to maintain the model as a livelihood. Nevertheless, I wish you the courage and strength to achieve your goals. Your desire to take care of your health is a good starting point. Best regards

I've always enjoyed your videos. Rigging is something I've always wanted to be good at but every time I looked into it, there were way too many steps to remember and way too many details that, if you didn't know about, would mess up your rig. I'm sure I'll try again some day. Meanwhile, just as with you, I focus on other projects. None of them require rigging skills. In relation to armatures, my latest frustration is with binding cloth to one. The new cloth system requires an armature to work and I've thus far failed to find the right approach to binding vertex groups to one. Admittedly I've only just encountered the problem and have only tried to figure it out twice. The feature is so new there are practically zero tutorials about it. The official one in the Blender 5.0 manual is for people fitting clothes to a character. I'm trying to attach ragged sheets to a bone that collide against a body for a ghost character. Same problem exists for flags and the like. Maybe you'd like to explore that subject at some point. As for AI, I'm seeing filmmakers go all in with generated video, which means all producers will have to whether they want to or not. All this at a time when big time movies are claiming they don't use CG when their shots are filled with it. I'm expecting the conspiracy theorist crowd to lose their minds at some point. I'm seventy-four years old so I'll let the younger and more energetic crowd tussle over all that. Glad you're doing well. Thanks for all the fine body of work you've produced.

Hi, Todor! I usually skip reading these newsletter emails but I'm happy that I read yours. If you ever release a course on CloudRig, I'll be buying it in an instant ;) For 2026 I plan on releasing my short film, which will be rigged thanks to what I'm learning from your courses. I hope you have a happy new year! PS: I love seeing the positive reaction this letter got. I didn't expect as many people to be here already.