** Contest... any ideas for CONTESTS and PRIZES next time?? **

darthviper: They might go on at the same time with one starting a month or two after the other.

darth_steve: I already addressed that by saying it would be open to orginal design, but still with existing tv/film properties probably. Otherwise it opens up the subject matter too much for our site. We'd be getting all sorts of things then. It's complicated. Then people could say well... my design looks like Star Wars to me. All of this has to be thought out but I know I don't want to open the subject up too much. I want to limit it or we'll have 100's and 100's of all sorts of things entered.

But if you want to create your own TIE or something go ahead. I just think unless you are very imaginative it makes the whole process much longer b/c you have to start sketching stuff, and thinking about the design/purpose/use/how it functions/etc. But we're definitely not gonna do an "original only" competition. Part of the reason we want to do this is to help bring some new content to the site so it has to fit within our subject matter. We're not really interested in cowboys, indians, horses OR boats and cars.

You know.. the bigger these threads get the less likely others are to read every single post. So people are probably gonna keep asking these same questions over and over SO don't be upset if I don't answer some questions. For example, I've already mentioned twice that the purpose of this thread was to see if you guys had ideas on who I should contact about prizes. But you guys can continue to bounce around ideas... that's ok. But I may not reply to all of it. I've emailed about 35-30 places since yesterday so far with one respone from RightHemisphere.

Zaphod: LIke I said already... if it's a characater contest you can design or do one already designed as long as it's within the subject matter. Lets move on from that.

 

i think the reason u might be getting so many ideas for the comp and not for sponsors is the title of the thread

'** CONGRATULATIONS to all in the contest... any ideas for the next?? **'

kinda says ... "give ideas for a competition"

 

Yea. But I keep asking for other information. Digimation says they are interested so now that's two. WOO-HOO.

 

nah its okay....

and thats cool about Digimation...

got my pm from Nick and he said that he showed my model to Alex Lindsay and he wants a copy to use for training and stuff within the PXC.

 

Any other places I should contact. I have Autodesk, AmbientLight, Digimation, RightHemisphere, FXhome, 3Dtotal and ZOO Publishing, SOFTIMAGE, Pixel Corps again, Digi-Element, CG Academy, E-on software, Character Animation Tech., Zargon Studios, NEWTEK, DAZ3D, Pixelogic, eyeonline, ART VPS, Next-Limit, Pandromeda, e-frontier, Stash Media, Sideshow Collectibles, Gnomon3D, and Digital-Tutors who have all graciously donated prizes. I've contacted:

-Ballistic Media (no, thanks for supporting the community)
Futurenet Publishing (Imagine FX, 3D World)... in contact looking good
CGchannel
-CGnetworks (CGsociety/CGtalk) (NO, thanks for supporting the community)
*CG Academy*
*3Dtotal*
-Alienware (no)
*Alias/Discreet Media/Autodesk (only training materials prizes)
*Softimage*
-TurboSquid
-Hash Inc.
-Okino
*RightHemisphere*
-Caligari
-Eovia
-Sidefx (Houdini)
-Chaos Group (Vray)
-Splutterfish (Brazil)
www.starwars.com
*Newtek*
-BOXX (not at this time, try Oct. for 2007)
-DELL (no)
+Pixar/Renderman
*Digimation*
-ATI / Nvidia
*Pixelogic*
*FXhome*
+Gentle Giant Ltd./Cinemaquette/Master Replicas
*Sideshow Collectibles*
*Digital Tutors*
-Curious Labs (e frontier)
*DAZ 3D (Bryce)*
*eyeonline (Fusion)*
+MAXON... (in contact looking good)
-Corel (out of office)
-Luxology
*CAT (Character Animation Toolkit)*
+cgCharacter (ACT)
+Natural Motion (Endorphin)
-ART VPS (looking good)
-Cebas
*Digi-Element (World Builder)*
*Nextlimit (Real Flow, Maxwell Renderer)
*E-on software (Vue D'Esprit)*
*Zargon Studios (Absolute Textures)*
-Form-Z
EI Tech. Group (Electric Image)
+Marlin Studios
*Gnomon3D
+Arete
+Credo-Interactive
+Dosch Design
*Pandromeda (Mojo World)*
+Wondertouch (Particle Illusion)
+ThirdWishSoftware (Magpie lip-synch)
+Realsoft3D
+Realviz (Matchmover)
+McNeel (Rhino3D)
+InteractiveFX (Amazon Paint)
+Artbeats
*Stash Media*
*e-frontier (Poser)*
Di-O-Matic
*AmbientLight
Absolute Textures


Legend:
- 2nd contact
* confirmed prizes
+ new non-spam email

 

We purchase all our 3d and effects software with Autodesk, do you want me to find out from our I.T. guys who their contact is at Autodesk?

 

What we're looking for is a Marketing/Public Relations contact. In that order. PR tends to work with media mostly. But some companies only have Marketing/Sales. So maybe sales will work if it's a small company or maybe they can point us in the right direction.

 

Pixologic is pretty tight on giving anything away. They probably won't sponsor-up anything until the Character/Organic modelling contest.. and only after I show them the entire contest layout. But I'm confident they'll participate this spring/summer when we do the contest.

 

Updated sponsor list. Up to about 20 now. Got ahold of somebody from Autodesk which is good. They have a lot of products.

NOW I will take some suggestions about the contest. DVeditor and PadawanNick are helping me with the next contest but what do you guys think. Should there be separate 2D contest? I'm in favor of keeping it 3D with 2D elements if you like. Should contests have themes? What type, subject, genre should they be?

 

Wow, you have a good sponsor list now. That's really awesome.


For Ideas, maybe it shouldn't be just limited to Star Wars so that more people will be interested. Possibly a new idea might be making a Digital Matte, where they make a model but it's untextured and they draw over a Global Illumination rendering of the model to make it look realistic. It's how they do a lot of stuff now adays.

And of course there's all of the modeling, texturing, animating types of challenges. You just really have to choose. Maybe you should talk to some of the people from CGTalk or places like that because they could give you some more ideas.

 

No hardware yet.

Well I have to add, I couldn't go over it all at the time, that SCIFI 3D is just that... SCIFI. Any SciFi. We're not a Star Wars site. I know over the years... lots of SW models, WIP dominated by SW, updates dominated by SW, we're on TFN, our banners are all SW. We're gonna remarket the site as SCIFI.. what it was meant to be. Notice.. the SF3D banner has changed? No original work on it yet, but everything else.

So this contest will be any and all SciFi, including franchise work. Problem is people at CGtalk can be a bit stuffy.. and they like to ridicule and frown-upon those that do artwork based on existing materials. I think it's silly personally. I'm sure most of us started off recreating something. And I'm sure all of us are heavily influenced by existing materials. It's just pompousness as far as I'm concerned. Plus... maybe.. I'm starting to consider the actual possiblity that they see a contest here as competition to them. They wouldn't even donate ONE single book to our contest, or CGsociety membership. So I'm not really gonna ask them for advice on anything even though I am on good terms with some of their staff still.

SO... the contest will include any and all SciFi. Franchise, original work from a franchise, or all original. We love SciFi, tv/films, anime/comics, CG, etc. It's that simple.

I noticed at CGtalk there isn't modelling challenges. It's contests for a finished piece of work that is complete with environment and theme. I'm not sure if we want just a modelling contest. That's what we did last time and the judges were confused and thought it was for a finished piece of work when technically it was just for modelling. I was thinking... Environment (Interior/Exterior), Character/Creature modelling, Craft, Animation, maybe Compositing since a sponsor is talking about donating a $5000 copy of Fusion. But I'm not sure what type of contest we should have, what people are capable of doing in 4 months, should it be specific themes or just general themes (like "war" in general as opposed to "heat of battle" or "spoils of war"). I like the idea of giving people more room to be creative and not coming up with really specific themes to limit or narrow the creativity.

 

So, how about starting a new contest soon?

 

I have A LOT to do. I'm just trying right now to figure out what kind of contest to do, do we allow teams, 2D works, will there be themes, etc.? So many things to work out. NOT to mention the fact that there is still no official online pages yet. I'm trying to get Aceman at SFM to help me make them but he's really busy. I want to get a placement holder up so we can promote it weeks before it starts. But I'm no html expert and I'm having trouble getting it going. Sponsors are pretty much squared away.

 

I like that we've gone for all SCIFI this time. My little cousin just got a Dr Who book from the excibition with lots of concepts and great pics to work on. I'd love to enter...I've improved greatly with modeling since my appauling 'palpetines office WIP'. I'd also love to finish my Endor Imperial Bunker, because that was going well, however, I got cought up in some animation for someone's fanfilm.

I think we should do a series of contests. Basically like what's been said already: A modeling theme, an animation theme, a texturing theme etc. Although it puts boundaries on the creativness, I do think it would be wise to have some limitations on the type of theme. For example, if we had an animation theme, and just said 'be creative and make a sci fi animation', It'd be hard to jusdge, because there'd be so much difference in the animations. One could be a dog-fight, whereas another could be a character animation. I know it wouldn't be as open as that, but that was just an example of what could happen, thus making it difficult to judge.

Another idea would be to have different skill categories. E.g 'Beginer', 'intermediate', and 'advanced'. I know we've had lots of donations, so perhaps we could give the best prize to the winner of the 'advanced' group, a fairly decent prize to the 'intermediate' group, and a relitivly cheap prize to the 'beginners' group. That way, there wouldn't be so much difference between the entries quality wise, and perhaps making voting/judging (and the whole contest for that matter) more interesting. As for deciding who goes in which group, a contestant could show previous work and such to a judge, and then the judge could put them in where they feel they need to go. That would prevent an advanced worker entering in the beginers section and then walking away with an easy prize for example.

Like I said, they're just suggestions...think about them.

 

Waht? Did I kill this thing?

 

http://joek1010.dnsdojo.com/scifi3dcontest/

There's the link to the Non-Live TEST page for the main contest page. We're still working out a lot of things but it's not a dead project. The only that has happened in the past couple of months is we are getting more sponsors, SCIFI-MESHES had a hdd crash and lost their entire site (thank god we didn't move there last month), and I got my taxes done. But don't fear ...it's still on.

 

Can't get to the page, tried firefox and IE.

So scifi3d is actually moving over to Scifi-Meshes?

 

Well I can't read any of it but it looks pretty good.

 

Like doesn't work with me...

 

It was down to either going to SFM or with the Tim Brazael guy. So I'm glad we didn't actually move yet but TFN is asking me when we're going to move. The contest was always setup to be hosted at SFM b/c we need forums.

The url has changed.. http://joek1010.dnsdojo.com/scifi3dcontest/ b/c of problems with it.

 

What language is it?

 

I hear some people still have trouble with it so it might have something to do with the weird IP address. I'll get the files on our server soon.

If you do see it then there is no language thing going on. It's in English. There is just temp text installed in some places even though it looks like a real language.

 

I don't know, it's really weird language--not a computer code, not Italian, Greek, Russian, German, Spanish, closest thing it came to is Portuguese. When I go to the page, it has a bunch of scifi3d stuff, then it has a big thing written out in some language. Here's the first paragraph:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam quis odio vitae est nonummy facilisis. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum gravida tempus sem. Suspendisse quis elit eget risus rutrum feugiat. In tempus fringilla libero. Sed auctor rhoncus ipsum. Nullam porta felis a dolor. Quisque quis augue id enim facilisis sodales. Sed ac orci iaculis nisi porta laoreet. Sed sollicitudin neque hendrerit diam. Donec at purus ac elit ultricies tempus. Nam rhoncus felis accumsan ante. Donec elit ligula, ultrices gravida, ultricies in, vulputate at, mauris. Sed feugiat iaculis massa. Phasellus odio odio, egestas sed, tincidunt et, bibendum ac, ante. Suspendisse dictum semper elit. Pellentesque condimentum erat vel eros. Donec lacinia metus ac diam. Suspendisse faucibus odio non turpis.

 

Like I said it's just TEMPORARY text b/c all these things haven't been written yet. The main thing right now is the layout and design.

 

Yeah but you said it was english...

Anyway, if the contest is interesting, I'll try to take part of it.