F1 Challenge 2006
The sixth edition of the Blender F1 Challenge has begun! CurtisS is once again hosting his yearly fast-futuristic-car modeling contest.
The Blender F1 Challenge began simply enough with a “challenge”. In the spring of 2001, I posted an image on the original Blender community forum (at blender.nl) of a newly rendered F1 concept car touted as “Schummi’s New Ride”. It was red, and had the famous prancing horse logo on the side. I had been using Blender for 6 or 7 monthes at the time so I was quite proud of actually finishing a model. That was until another Blender user (who shall remain nameless…) posted a comment that it looked like “80’s technology”. So in reply, I challenged the “other” Blender user to create a better F1 future car. Meanwhile, several other Blender users were watching this forum thread and asked if they could join the challenge to create a F1 car of the future. Needless to say, the rest is history as the Blender F1 Challenge, now in it’s sixth year, has become the most popular Blender users contest ever. THANK YOU the Blender community for that distinction!
To give you an idea of the level of the competition, here are the winners of the previous years:
If you need inspiration, check out the galleries of the previous contests. Also, last year’s winner Vincent Tcheng Chang has written three excellent tutorials (2003, 2004, 2005) on his entries. They’re in French, but the artwork is exceptional and it will help you in your design process.
Entries will be accepted starting on March 18, 2006. Entries close Saturday, May 13, 2006 at midnight (just before it turns to Sunday) Pacific coast USA time. Oh, and read the rules.
i really like how the red and white one seems to be in motion to crash.
Just to make a correction:
“last year’s winner Vincent Tcheng Chang has written two excellent tutorials (2004, 2005) on his entries”
he actually write three of them; the third (from is 2003 entry) is here: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dawang/blender/makingof/mak01/make01a.htm
it is maybee the most comprehensive of them; and althought it didn’t win the first place (rated in 2nd or 3rd don’t remember now) it is also a great picture :D
This challenge is great, but in the Niel forums some users asked themselves if they could use POV-Ray to make the render. So they asked to Curtis, if he could change the rules to be able to use POV-Ray in render.
The answer for this petitions, was ‘No’.
Because using POV-Ray is for ‘expert’ blender user, and the newbies in blender can’t use. Almost all know blend2pov (of RCRuiz) because we read blendernation news ;)
It’s easy to use, in fact is the same thing config yafray and pov-ray, because we need configure the settings of yafray to make the render with POV-Ray.
In the rules say:
“Only blender official releases are permited”, so this mean the new features like ‘nodes’ are not permited, because the nodes exist only in cvs (for the moment).
Well, with this I do not try anything. But I hope in the next F1 Challenge the rules change.
@kainho: thanks! I’ve updated the article.
@madman: I guess that when you’re running a contest, you just have to draw the line somewhere and there’ll always be people who disagree with you. But even so, I’m sure you could create a great entry, right? :)
I will do my best. :)
It is comments like Madman’s that sometimes make me think “why do I do this contest every year”. It is too bad that he feels this way but the contest needs to fair at all levels. i also keep the contest to official Blender releases for a more selfish reason… I DO verify that the F1 entry was created in Blender (for the top 5 favorites entries after voting) and I do not have the time to figure out if an entry is within the rules when non-release features are used. Allowing post-processing was hard enough to deal with.
In reality, I am tired of defending the rules of a contest that I have sponsored for 6 years. Perhaps Madman would like to try his hand at it? The Blender F1 Challenge will continue but this is likely to be my last comment on the rules.