Hot 3D Action: $2.3m to be won. (in Contests)

confussed....

The contest is titled 2.3mil to be won, but prize says 300k what prize or prizes are actually being offered?

$300K from Blast, and $2M from an Admin. character, for a total of a $2.3M prize.

Gonna try to get a submission or two in before the end of the month, but we will see what my schedule permits....

Here are some examples of other 3d models I have played around with in the past using other software though.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92113496@N00/

Hmm... I want to model the shield in this picture. Would it relate to CB in any way? =D

If you are going to participate in this contest, I would you to provide a wireframe version in addition to the solid rendered version. We will check the wireframe to make sure that everyone made what they said they made. ;)

Pixel...That could be a tower shield.

more like a Mithril Shield imo.

Should I post a rendering of the wireframe here, or send you and actual file for verification?

giving the audience something to look at is always good ;)

Either one is fine by my BarzooMonkey :)

Mithril/Tower shield, here I come! This will be fun =D

wow bravo b-day chick

Here is my wire frame:



I can provide a 3dmf or dfx file, also, if required. :)

My wireframe of that terrible crossbow. =)

By the way, yes that arrow was completely hand made, there are just a bunch of points grouped together to make it smooth so that it appears black.

Man, its so hard to find good camera angles with tall objects! I'll provide my wireframes a bit later on. I did also offer th00p my original 3D files, but I'm considering making it public to everyone here =D. Enjoy!



Ya know, I should make a wall of CB armory/weaponry. That'd be fun... maybe I will if more contests are held for art. Let's bring out the artist of CB players!

Well now that Pixel Sage posted his shield I guess I can follow with my own.

I decided to try to do something to experiement with ray tracing and lighting a little bit. The shield and sword are complete 3d models and I have wireframes available. All the shadowing, lighting and reflections were generated as part of the modeling process to to create more interest in the renderings.

     

I will add wireframes for the models in my next post.

[SNK3R Edit: Fixed body text; linked image to full original size.]

Here are the wireframes for the selected scene... if you want seperate wireframes for each object let me know and I can supply them.



Let me know if you need anything further on the source models... and lets get some more entries!

not to hijack the forum, but I was having trouble formatting the HTML for my post, so I forgot to include the title for the photos "Impending Doom" as you can see the fireball coming from behind in the reflection on the sword and shield ;)

I thought that pretty much summed up CBII in its current state :)

Awesome stuff, VP. I'm thinking of opening up my own contests for 3D art, probably using Blender3D. Its free too!

I think I'll put my ELS and MS together =D. See how that looks.

I think this will be my final entry. Wireframe for this is provided as well, finally, haha. Elven Long Sword and Mithril Shield, whee!

Until I get my new laptop, I'm stuck with my basic '3D' tools. :)

Wireframe

Coloured

Another rendering of my models...



I thought a photo without all the reflection and added lighting and shadowing from the fireball would help show the actual models a little better.

Gonna try to put together one more different model for the contest before the month is over, but we will see how time permits.

what programs you all using?

I know that Pixel (I don't count for much) uses Blender3D. Quite the amazing free program, once you know how to use it.

Dude, Blender3D rocks. Its 100% free, yet its becoming insanely powerful. Who needs Maya? =P

I am using lightwave 8.5... the 9 update comes out this summer, not sure if I will invest in the upgrade or not, because 8 seems to have everything I could ever need as a hobbiest

Not sure if anyone has used lightwave or not, but the thing I like most about it is there are two seperate programs. One for the actual modeling, and one where you send your models for texturing, and layout for rendering.

It gives you a better feeling of an actual "film studio" and allows you to utilize scripting for lighting effects, and motion.

I don't know how blender is, but the older versions of maya was all in one, as well as brice, and poser...

Last one for the month...

I wanted to post a photo of the sturdy Axbow, and mighty seeker arrows in all their current prosperity!! Anyone that is using, or used an Exbow, feel free to replace Assassin with Executioner as you see fit.



here are the wireframes as well



Any questions or comments let me know. I'm glad this contest came along, it has been a while since I did any modeling, and it was good to get back into it for a while. Good luck everyone, and lets see some more 3D!!!

kewl... please don't close this just yet. I've got some CB related 3D stuff that I never released... I need to dig it up :)

Are animations allowed? The rules don't specify it has to be a still image, and I've got a really cool one I'd like to enter. It should be done tomorrow :)

thanks

My opinion is nothing more than an opinion, but I say animations are probably allowed =D

Just to clarify, you are judging on what criteria? Quality, number of entries (I hope not), any specific style, etc?

another meaningless opinion (mine) but if the animation is derrived from true 3d models, I see no reason why it shouldn't be eligible,

Introducing, Blacksword of Nan Elmoth!

Render Wires

Since I previously provided wires for both of these objects, I don't believe I need to provide wires for this specific setup. If it is required, however, let me know and I will provide it. I'm just too lazy to export one now =P

I am not judging on "Number of Entries" that would be retarded. As far as the other criteria goes, I want you all to try your best. So far I'm pleased with the turnout we've gotten from this contest, I hope there are some last minute stragglers that are still going to enter. :)

Here are the wires/WIP screenshots...

And here's the animation

Now, to be fair... this contest seemed like it was geared more towards people who haven't used 3D before, although I see that some people have entered who have done 3D before... I do it for a living, but not this sort of thing. This was more or less new territory to me, but I was quite pleased with the end result. I was going for a still that I made a long time ago, but couldn't find the source files, so I recreated it, but better :)

I'm fine if this is disallowed to be an entry in the official contest (because it's an animation, because I've been doing this for a while, etc) but had to share it anyway. If it is allowed, all the better. :)

FYI: It was done in Cinema 4D with metaballs and thinking particles. The first full test took about 5 hours to render, the second one (shown here) took just under an hour. Hope you like it. (and I hope all the links work)

Disallowed because you have experience? I see no rules saying you have to be new, and there's no way to prove it anyways =P.

Nice animation by the way. I haven't used metaballs much, but you got a nice touch on it. Keep it up!

Ascent: wow, that's likely one of the first bits if 3D animation to come off this site...nice!

Yay, finished the Vorpal Blade! Provided render and wireframes. This actually deviated from my original design, but still came out decent.



Wires

yeah looks nice ascent... amazing how sometimes the simplest objects (metaballs) can come together to look good with the right touch!

Man I am really liking what I'm seeing. I wish we had more then 2 mil for this contest! Anybody?

I'm going to update the VB soon with a design on the handle. Here it is rendered without reflections and shadows (raytracing): click!

Wow, reflections does wonders. This is likely my last edit for my VB.

thanks, guys!

Metaballs, particularly in Cinema 4D are not always terribly useful, to put it mildly. :) I'm having a blast playing around with them.

There's some really nice stuff in here (and strong competition), and hey, we're all learning as a result of the contest -- that's the important thing...

ascent - I haven't found metaballs extremly useful in lightwave either. The only time I use them is for extremly "blobuous" objects like slugs, pickles etc..

The other somewhat offbeat use I have found is to create a metaball in a seperate layer than my object, when a target is needed for motion paths or scripts. In the layout view, I set the metaball to be "not seen by camera" parent the object to the metaball, and use the metaball to create the motion.

There is an object called a null which is available in layout that is truly designed to be used for the process I described above, and is automaticaly invisible to everything, but sometimes when designing collisions etc., it is easier to have something in the design window (nulls are only available in layout) to optimize positioning of multiple objects, and create a motion path.

Anyway seeing what you did with the metaballs I am modifying the fireball from my first model I submitted and may create an avi movie of a fireball engulfing the camera just for fun. I am essentially doing what I described above, using a single transparent metaball to parent a volumetric light (the fireball) and constrain the area of the light output...

We will see what happens, as you may know rendering a single volumetric light with no other objects in the scene can be a VERY lengthy process depending on the textures used. I created a quick example last night that was upwards of 3 minutes per frame rendering time (3 hours per second of video to create a scene)

For anyone that cares, wallpaper of VB:

Click here!

well looks like I won't make the deadline with the "FB movie"... I started rendering it at 9:00, and I am only on frame 90 of 120....

I added an additional texture displacement to the volumetric light, which increased the rendering time for the middle frames much more than I had anticipated.

Oh well it was fun anyway, and gave me a little more experience with volumetrics.

Thanks for the great contest! Hopefully we will see more contests of this nature in the future, I actually had some other ideas late in the month I never had time to get around to.

Great job to everyone who placed entries, and best of luck to everyone!

Even though it's June 1st on the server, it's still may 31st on my end. I will count your entry still Velvet.

Hopefully Velvet did not cancel the render, haha.

Its still the 31st on my end too! 10:38pm, to be more exact.

well I went to bed last night with like 10 frames left to render, and when I checked it this morning, it was finished, but somehow the AVI file was corrupted?

The reason I think it was corrupted is that I rendered it using a MS MPEG 4 V3 codec I have used a bunch of times in the past (even used it on test renders for this scene), when trying to play the file it tells me codecs not found. If I view the file details for the Avi, the data rate is listed at 1kbps... the other files I have are in the 200's so I don't know what happened.

This thing took way to long to render, so I may have to drop some of the textures on the lighting, and figure out how to get the "network rendering" features set up to work over a wireless network with lightwave.

Ohh well, hopefully someone will run another contest in the future I can use it for, but I am going to try to get it rendered now, from the scenes I was seeing rendered, I think it is gonna look pretty cool.

make an avi for a picture?

no shade it was an animation file comprised of 120 frames

Very nice, barzoo, th00p, velvet, Pixel, and Ascent! looks sweet. Maybe you guys can work on a new carnage blender logo, oooohh....

Okay, I'm glad to say this contest is at it's end. I would like to congratulate all the participants. I will be judging this today and either today or tomorrow I will have the results! :)

velvet pickle: you should try rendering out to individual images instead. You can then use something like VirtualDub (free, at www.virtualdub.org) to compile them all back into a movie (and do some basic effects as well). It's a pretty good tool, and it's open source, though I believe it's windows only.

While I'm on the topic of free/open source handy graphical tools, I should mention Jahshaka, which I saw when it first started (and there wasn't much to see!) but they've recently released version 2RC3, and it's quite nice and very usable. It's a compositing/editing type program. I've been using it for loading up alpha channel image sequences (rendered animations) and putting a background behind it, or adding effects like blurring, etc. It's not after effects (which I don't have) but it's not $700, either (which is why I don't have it ;-) -- you can find it at www.jahshaka.org. As for the contest.... there are great entries all around... nice job, everyone.

I am re-rendering it and saving individual frames now rather than making an avi file in one shot.... but thanks for the heads up Ascent....

I think we should come up with a cool 3d animation or 5 for the loading of CB.... something that would hook potential new users attention, but could be checked not to be displayed for the Vets that don't want to see it all the time?? Jon??

Anyway I said it once but great job everyone!

velvetpickle, movie animations on front page is a web no-no. I don't want to have to load up a movie or a large animation each time I visit the website front page (such as from computers at school and such). Movies should never be unsolicited, which is partly why flash ads get so annoying.

Otherwise, I'd like to see what you could cook up. You may have sparked interest for me to try and make one too... we'll see =D

*th00p_Dotson thinks that Pixel Sage and velvetpickle are in a league of their own, and that he should not be mentioned in the same sentence, except for something along the lines of "Hey, Pixel Sage and velvetpickle are about 900,000 times better at 3D rendering than that crazy little th00p_Dotson.

th00p! Ya gotta practice! I didn't get where I am on my first day, after all =D

I just think a small quick animation would be cool for first time visitors Pixel... have a link right below it that says "don't show this animation again". But the animation could be changed every month or few months and everyone would have to see it again :)

and thanks thoop... I have spent countless hours messing around with model after model that never materialize into anything. Also have spent a great deal of time working on tutorials and reading about others models online.

Actually velvetpickle, I think you can set it up so the movie only loads if you click it. Apple does it on their website, so it may be very possible for the front page as well. Of course, you may want to check with Jonathan to see if this is a good idea.

I just think it would be a cool "hook" however you set it up
.... although I guess any people who needed a hook, most likely aren't CB material anyway

I looked through each of the entries, and it was a very close tie, between velvetpickle and Pixel Sage.

I really liked this image by velvetpickle but this one by Pixel Sage won me over by its sheer realism.

So congratulations to Pixel Sage and everyone else who participated!

Notables: BarzooMonkey also had an awesome 3D model, and I wish there was a closer picture to take a look at this cool little castle.

P.S. Because of the trickiness of this contest, and because I am a good sport, I'm going to send out a few consolation prizes as well.

congrats Pixel Sage!! and congrats to everyone else who participated as well... hopefully we will see some more contests of this nature in the future, and more entries from everyone else in CB!

Thanks, Verifex! And congrats everybody, very impressive work! :D

Maybe if I get some time, I'll render a couple of closer shots & angles of the castle, and post them here...

Thanks, QBBlast[Vestax]Verifex! And congrats everybody, very impressive work! :D

Maybe if I get some time, I'll render a couple of closer shots & angles of the castle, and post them here...

Thanks all! Awesomeness! 2.3mil to use for my own art contests, mwahahaha. I think I'll hold special Carnage Blender 3D (haha, Blender 3D) contests for cb.pixelsage.com. Or maybe I'll use the winnings by selling them to make cards for people, so you all get a discount. Hmmmm choices choices...

Oh, man - I've been double posting/double CMing/hitting the wrong buttons all day! :P
Please excuse me while I get some more coffee...

;)

Congrats to the winners! As I said before, nice job all around.