THE Sculpting Challenge 006 - 1 week delay - new idea to have a chat about!

[Tom-3DT]

Hi All,

We are working on something a little bit different and need a few days to see if it could work. We thought we would also get your opinions on what is proposed in the meantime.

Firstly the subject, we have a good idea for the next one, but as we have this timeout we would like subject suggestions for future challenges from you guys too!

Ok here's the deal, we are thinking of opening up every 2nd or 3rd competition to an 'Inter Forum Challenge' which we will call IFC's from now on

It will be like a very simple version of the Dominance War, with any competing forums showing the same brief in their forums and then all the WIP's etc for their members happening in their forums too, ours will run just as usual here but then the differences will happen when it comes to submitting and voting.

We are thinking along the lines of;

Every forum has a separate final submissions thread here to post in, then voting is as follows:

Round 1: To decide each forum's 5 leaders/representatives; All competitors within that forum vote for their top 5 within their own forum to go through.

Round 2: To decide the winning forum; A new thread is made with the top 5 from each team being shown. I have thought about this a lot and the only way I can think of doing it is with a panel of unbiased judges, agreed?

Every competitor on the winning forum gets the latest issue of '3dcreative' magazine and the 5 winners get '6 month subs'

Round 3: To decide the 1 winner for the print; Only the 5 in the winning forum are up for this and any competitor across the entire competition can vote for their individual winner, or anyone member here who qualifies with the post count.

Ok, so that's the idea, feedback welcome!

Tom

*Edit, changed the word 'team' to 'forum' throughout as suggested below

[Sathe]

Sounds awesome man!, I got a bit confused with the use of team of first, required a read over, would it be better to just keep the "team" as forum.
Also, With unbiased Judges, do you have any thoughts on how you would Collect them or where?
Finally, Thanks, Looking forward to it if you can get this going!

Edit: My First idea would be "Aliens"

[M3N7H0L5]

cool idea!and yeah i agree with sathe about the "team"..
"Aliens" is cool!I suggest "Alien spaceships"
other than that,looks solid..

[chrisskinner]

Sounds cool!

I think it would be a good challenge to design some kind of vehicle, be it mechanical or organic. It would also make a nice change from all the character work that's normally associate with ZBrush and Mudbox.

First vehicle challenge might be along the lines of: Futuristic/Alien Motorbike and so on.

[JHarford]

The beauty of the sculpting challenges was that they were simple and easily accesible. They had many many entrants, due to the simple nature of the brief, the base mesh and the rules. This all seems quite large and will no doubt scare of a lot of people ( as well as attract others )

Tom, I didnt see you mention sculpting anywhere, does that mean these IFC's , are going to be more free and open, with actualy modeling in max, and other programs included, to achieve the result of the brief?

A lot of us enter these challenges for fun, with the intention of doing well, and hopefully winning. Majorly increasing the timeframes cuts a lot of us full time workers out.

I'm up for doing this every 3rd or 4th challenge. The inter forum activity will be good for threedy, and the challenge will be tougher. It would be nice to have some judges too, preferebly those who aren't involved in the community at all. Guest judges from the special effects world, people who can look at the objects for what they are.. at the ideas and execution with a fresh mind.. perhaps a traditional sculptor, or one of the traditional concepters frmo weta.

Mudbox and zbrush are pretty much built around their ability to make organic work, designing a vehicle in it, would not be really possible from a base cube, but if we ar allowed to chuck a 100 subtools at it, it may be possible. Still, that's not where the softwares power lies, and if I want to make a vehicle or motorbike, i'll do it in max or maya or xsi, where it would be quicker, easier and more accurate.

People love characters, and lots of guys here want to be character artists or be good at organics, zbrush quickly gives them that feeling after a few weeks of training, another reason why the sculpting challneges were popular, and zbrush is, they make people feel good about their work. So if it's still a sculpting challenge the option to do something organic/hard surface mix would be most preferable to me. Like the machine flesh challenge that kicked of cgtalk's big competitions.

phew.

[Tom-3DT]

Yeah it will be the same sculpting challenge, same kinda time-frame and simplicity too, I guess really only the voting and amount of entrants are the real changes.

[gumby666]

I think it's a great idea.
Would really inspire forum members helping each other out too. If everyone stands to win a copy of 3dcreative then people would really start to offer advice and crits to strengthen their forums entries.
Maybe it could be a monthly or bi-monthly challenge.

Topic idea:
Carnival/Freak show

[MonteCristo]

One thing I do wonder is about the time-frame. What do people think about this? As Jharford correctly says, it's great for keeping this bite-sized and achievable for those without a raft of time on their hands. Unless we can come up with a way of keeping track of this, I don't enjoy the prospect of keeping tabs on it. You know how it is. Inter-forum stuff tends to be a tad more 'serious', so while it works fine in our own spot to keep things down to people's honesty, I'm not sure whether it will fly in a wider sphere.

Any suggestions?

[chrisskinner]

I agree with alot of what you say JHarford about not making the comps too complicated and enjoy character work alot more than vehicles.

Suggesting vehicles was merely an idea, like I said they don't need to be mechanical, could be an organic living and breathing type of transport.

I think keeping the challenges round the 4 hour timeframe is the way forward.

[M3N7H0L5]

Originally Posted by chrisskinner

Suggesting vehicles was merely an idea, like I said they don't need to be mechanical, could be an organic living and breathing type of transport.

just like zerg's air unit..

[Intervain]

IFCs sound really great

I enjoyed watching the latest challenge [sadly couldn't find time to participate] but I think a 4hr time restriction was what made the previous ones particularly fun [this one would go more into a workshop category for me] and challenging - especially with a mesh that has a shape, like the head It's not easy to conquer the restrictions of it...

Anyway I think having those brackets would make it easier to organize across multiple forums - people wouldn't have to spread themselves thin [it's easier to find 4 hours ]

I'm all for aliens btw or forest creatures or underwater inhabitants... or something else entirely

[kazmamurat]

interesting,

maybe the subject may be something like recreation of a movie or a game or a part of history etc... so everyone can find something to do, (organic, inorganic) otherwise, i think subjects like "alien" or "vehicle" can be too specific for different branches of cg.

and i m agreed harford and monte about "more serious" thing.

[Sathe]

With timeframe, i thought about it, if it was to solely be a sculpting exercise i personally would like to go back to the 4 hour mark, I couldnt find any time to do more than that.

[MonteCristo]

Ok. Seems like the concensus is to stick to the time limit. Anyone have any ideas as to how we might enforce it?

[Sathe]

hehe, if anyone had Zscript knowledge they may be able to script in a timer into a Ztool. so the timer starts/continues when you load the tool.