NWDA & Planetside Animation Contest Announcement!

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi everyone,

We would like to invite everyone to our 2010 NWDA Contest. There are some great prizes to win, so read on!
This years' contest title will be "NWDA & Planetside Animation Contest".
Important is that this contest is open to everyone who's interested, regardless whether you are a registred "Deep" or "Deep + Animation" Terragen user, or a user of the Terragen 2 Free Edition.

Contest Theme/Goal:

The goal of this contest is that each contestant creates a scene of choice, with a strong focus on realism.
However, other than the usual still, your scene needs to hold up from different camera positions and angles.
Every contestant creates 6 shot each with a different camera position and perspective, with these 6 shots mimicking stations of a camera animation path.
You will put these 6 shot together into one image that you submit. This image will serve like a little animation story board.

These are the contest rules:

- Theme: True 3D and Animation. By True 3D we mean that your scene must "hold" at different camera positions and angles, in order to be animateable.
- Submissions: one submission per person.
- Submissions must be natively rendered within TG2.
- Image format and size: 6 still images, 640x360 each, combined to a 1920x720 image (3 columns, 2 rows). Maximum filesize is 1 MB.
- Images below a certain minimum quality threshold will be rejected. We only accept submissions of finished work.
- Postwork: allowed, but as minimal as possible; levels, color-corrections and the like are all allowed, except for adding elements to the image.
 Please keep in mind that the more postwork your image needs, the less suitable it is for animating.
- Contest Start: today !!!
- Deadline for submission: August 14th, end of day CET, but you can submit whenever your work is finished.

NB. Contest-rules may be subject of modification

How to submit and submission conditions:

Please send your finished work through email to: nwdacontest at hotmail.com

Information needed with submission:
- Storyboard title
- Your name

Please be aware that by submitting an image to this email address, you agree that the image can be posted in the contest gallery on NWDA along with your name and that Planetside will gain non-exclusive rights to use your submission for promotional activities, which includes the storyboard and/or animated-storyboard.

You can find the contest gallery here.

Contest Jury:

- All NWDA members, Oshyan Greene (Planetside), Stewart McSherry (Xfrog Inc.) and Stephen Schmitt (World-Machine).

The contest prizes:

1st prizes:
Terragen 2 Deep + Animation License
XfrogPlants Bundle, all 1,300 plants in .TGO-format
Fully animated storyboard
6 NWDA products of choice
PlugNPixels magazine, "making of" coverage

2nd prizes:
4 NWDA products of choice
World-Machine v2.2 Pro license

3rd prize:
2 NWDA products of choice


We heavily recommend to create a Work In Progress (WIP) of your project in the following board:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?board=21.0

This way everybody can keep track of each others progress and also exchange ideas/tips/tricks and other useful discussion.
We are looking forward to seeing your submissions. Game on!

Best regards,

The NWDA and Planetside team

[Tangled-Universe]

reserved this spot

[Seth]

Best contest and prizes ever

[neuspadrin]

Best contest and prizes ever

agreed... id love to have those xfrog plants

[sjefen]

Those prices are really insane
Should be motivating enough

- Terje

[Zairyn Arsyn]

those prizes sound good, 

time to get to rendering!
brainstorming!

(scratches head until something happens) 

[kevnar]

So basically you want a potential animation with only every 1500th frame displayed in a storyboard layout? This may be a contest I can actually enter.

[MF_Erwan]

What if I want to use a terrain (I have a large one in the Pyrénées mountains...70MB!) or free objects, like the 15 free plant objects from Xfrog?

Erwan

[Gannaingh]

Wow!!! No there is some motivation for us! Good luck to all participants and thank you to NWDA and Planetside for putting on such an awesome contest!

[old_blaggard]

Nice contest, and nice prize pool .

[kevnar]

PS. What would you say is the approximate cash value of First Prize, if one were to buy all those things?

[Oshyan]

You can use objects, terrains, and other resources, as long as you have rights to use them and to allow others to use them. Planetside will be animating and/or rendering the scene, so we will need to have access to all resources.

To clarify: if you have Deep + Animation already and you decide to animate your scene yourself, you are free to do so. We will then simply render what you have animated, although we may choose to adjust your animation parameters if we feel it's necessary. Your scene itself will remain untouched unless we feel it necessary to request modification from you. If however you are not able to animate the scene yourself, your entry will describe 6 potential camera positions along an animated path and Planetside will then create an animation of your scene, potentially including those camera points.

You are free to animate additional parameters like cloud movement, water, etc. if you have Deep + Animation, or to include suggestions for animating additional parameters if you are using Deep or the Free version.

Also note that the length of a suggested animation should not be too extreme. 1 minute or less is a good target. We won't be able to spend forever rendering it.

As for the total prize value, it is in fact quite impressive if you ask me. The TG2 Deep + Animation + Xfrog bundle is $700. The 6 NWDA products could have a fairly significant value as well. WorldMachine 2.2 Pro is a $189 value. So there are some significant prizes here to be sure!

- Oshyan

[Dune]

This is really incredible...  Now all I have to do is find the time... where is it? Good luck, you all, I'll be looking forward to all entries!

[reck]

wow what an amazing prize fund, this is fantastic.

[Tangled-Universe]

Glad to read that everybody is looking forward participating this contest
I stronly recommend/encourage contestants to make a WIP-thread for their entry.
This proved to be working very well in the last contest and resulted in very high quality submissions!

Cheers,
Martin