NWDA & Planetside Animation Contest Announcement!

[leafspring]

Now that's timing. I ordered my new rendering hardware the day after this contest started. 
Looking forward to participate. And the prizes are indeed awesome.

[domdib]

An intriguing contest with fantastic prizes!

Q about rendering - since the individual stills are quite small, and the final animation will in any case be rendered out by Planetside, is there any guidance on the quality settings for each individual still?

[Tangled-Universe]

An intriguing contest with fantastic prizes!

Q about rendering - since the individual stills are quite small, and the final animation will in any case be rendered out by Planetside, is there any guidance on the quality settings for each individual still?

In TG2 animations often the required render detail is less to get a good looking image, because the camera is moving and thus eliminates small scale detail.
However, to get a good idea about the potentials of a scene it is better to render at higher settings than the settings would be for animation.
Ultimately we will have to adjust the render-settings anyway to get the submission properly/reasonably animated and optimized for the render-pc's.
So you will not have to worry about it too much, but of course we encourage contestants to use sane settings. No TG'er likes unnecessary long rendertimes

For a good guide on rendersettings look here: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6442.0

Martin

[Zylot]

Wow, what a contest.  Guess I'll need to push my descent 2 level editing off for a bit.

[plugsnpixels]

For those who aren't familiar with it, the free Plugs 'N Pixels ezine (a long-time supporter of Terragen) is found here.

The contest winner will have examples of their renders displayed in a feature article describing their relevant TG2 workflow in issue #19. Promotion of any commercial business related to the winner's use of TG2 (as a TG2 illustrator/animator, developer of TG2 add-ons, etc.) can also be included in the article as part of the prize. An example of the winning artwork will also be featured on the cover as a promo for the article.

[Hetzen]

Looking forward to have a crack at this, and I see people have already started. Would it be possible to set up a sub forum in the gallery for this competition?

[Tangled-Universe]

Looking forward to have a crack at this, and I see people have already started. Would it be possible to set up a sub forum in the gallery for this competition?

That's something for Oshyan to decide I'd say. It would be easy to track submissions this way of course, but perhaps too much stratification could be an argument against it.

Looking forward to see your submission WIP Jon

Cheers,
Martin

[Tangled-Universe]

As some of you may have noticed, the forums have a new board dedicated to Work In Progress (WIP) posts for the contest.
You can find the board here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?board=21.0

Hope to see the number of entries growing

Martin

[sjefen]

That's great. Easy to keep track on what and who's in

Regards,
Terje

[inkydigit]

excellent comp idea...sweet prizes too, though does World Machine run on a mac?

[Tangled-Universe]

excellent comp idea...sweet prizes too, though does World Machine run on a mac?

http://www.world-machine.com/download3.html

[dandelO]

Quick question on this, I may enter, depending on available time and inspiration.

Must the animation be camera movement? Is it possible to keep a static camera and animate the containing world/scene?
I think this might be a silly question since the rules state the scene should hold up under different camera angles but, if the scene were to move/change around the camera then, surely, these would be classed as different FOV's per frame.

Cheers!

[FrankB]

that's a great question. I think the original "spirit" of the contest idea was to animate the camera. But you're free to *also* animate anything else.

Regards,
Frank

[dandelO]

Thanks, Frank. So, just to be clear, the camera *must* move?

Martin.

[Oshyan]

I can't speak for the NWDA crew on this, but as a sponsor and judge (and renderer), I think if you can create a compelling animation without camera movement *and* display it compellingly in the thumbnail format, then it's a legitimate entry. That being said it's much more critical to actually animate non-camera stuff for your entry (rather than just manually changing settings and rendering separate images) as it will be harder for me to animate it for you just from some thumbnails. So hopefully you already have Deep + Animation.

- Oshyan