Made in Blender, Animation Makes Top 5 In Autodesk Competition

Posted on by

chris-foleaIt’s nice to see that  Autodesk is open to other “free” software in their competition. This  was sent to us by Chris Folea who wrote: “We recently created an animation for an Autodesk sponsored high school competition within the F.I.R.S.T (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition.

The theme was  “Use biomimicry to solve a design challenge”.  Our entry took around two months to complete, mostly spent on designing, modeling, and texturing the transformer.  The competition guidelines were to create a 30 second animation using Autodesk 3ds Max, but we read the rules a bit more carefully and found out that it was legal to use Blender because it is free, so we decided to use Blender because of its fast interface. It made the top five in the entire competition but unfortunately did not win”

Congratulations to Chris and crew for making the top five!

Blenderartist discussion

You can see the other entries that we competed against here

The character used was initially designed for another competition entry for which we also used Blender.

Be Sociable, Share!

    Twitter



    Please support us

    • Nik

      And out of the top 5 entries i think this one was the best.

    • lich

      congratulations to the team!!!

      in my opinion only one beats it, but it was too close.

    • Akhenathon

      I think you should forget Autodesk. Blender is a very good tool, evolving each day.

    • Paul F. Chang

      What happened to 2.49 being released last week??? Where’s that at?

    • http://samsrandomjunk.com flyvin

      OMG! I am on one of these teams and the person who made most of our animation said we weren’t allowed to use blender! He’s an anti-blendtite!

    • Nathan

      Nice! Congrats yall, like the entry.

    • @flyvin

      Unfortunately, FRC made the rules in Autodesks favor. Anything but a very close read of the rules and it would appear that teams had to use Autodesk.

    • blazer003

      Ah, if only I would have known. When I was in high school I knew Blender pretty well, but I didn’t investigate the rules to find that you could use other programs, so I cobbled together an animation in 3ds MAX (which they give you, so I can’t complain). But so much of my time was spent learning how 3ds MAX did things. If I could have used Blender, I could have had a shot at winning the competition I think. But oh well. I like the concept of your animation. Very fun. I think the voiceover could be a little more clear though. Good job!

    • http://home.deds.nl/~mp/ ysvry

      good sportman ship of autodesk.

    • RNS

      Don’t trust Mayans Its a trap!

    • Alex Blank

      Its great news regardless of not winning. Congrats and I hope to see more stuff like it soon.

    • Ian

      I was also given the impression that only Maya was allowed. Still think FIRST is a great idea and good to see Autodesk being a part of it.

    • Cub

      They have to improve their PR nowadays. Good for the community, I guess.

    • http://www.blendergameartist.com xsinick

      To all students, the industry is based on what you want to use.

      eg. people like sketch up so now that piece of **** is a standard in the architectural world.

      Don’t be fooled Blender is the wave you want to ride ( i would say Softimage but I think Autodesk is messing it up already)

      not being biased but these are the truths about it .

      but using 3ds max for like all me professional career it was a headache when people expect it to perform the same way every time when it did not as it often had bugs and corrupted files.

      If you ever used it in heavy production environment you’ll know what I mean.

      Once Blender get the new cut tool is good riddance Autodesk for me.

      It’s no the tool but the artist?

      how ever says that do not know art history, as simple as the color blue is as a tool it spawned a whole movement in the art world .

      And a person using oils can give you a more realistic image that with a single black sharpie.

    • Hitechboy722

      Autodesk has done something you just wouldn’t ask others in the industry to EVER do. I belive this is a good example of healthy competition. Not the bull* that microsoft does!
      Blender was amongst the top five that says something about blenders standing. But even more can be said about the team that pulled it off.
      Congratulations are in order…

    • http://www.osysi.net Bmud

      Haha.. FIRST.. Every year the animations just get weirder and weirder.

    • amoose136

      I had no idea FIRST had a animation contest. I guess I’ll have to get involved again.

    • JayJay

      I’m a beginner who just started out with blender and I’m really impressed to know dat blender is capable of teaching this expensive mayans a lesson

    • Ballz

      I and jayjay are beginners but am a year old with blender today and happy to hear that blender is better than 3dmax and other and it’s hard to understand them but wit b3d (Blender 3d) I got to create and compose my first 3 mins of cg animation as close to transformers. Blender keep it up and when is the new version coming out and please what u do please don’t let it software exceed 15mb

    • http://th3w-san.deviantart.com Th3w-san

      Man FIRST is so awesome. I remember a couple years ago one of the guys on our team did a model of our robot in Inventor. Took the two of us four or five hours to get Inventor’s vector format converted into a file that Blender could import so I could render it :D

    • playbass06

      Thank goodnes you can use Blender!
      I’m part of the saftey animation this year for FRC 1986, and was struggling to go from Blender to 3ds Max. It’s just a completely different setup. I gotta say, the automatic motion creation tools for the biped is nice, though, but it doesn’t help you beyond basics…

      That animation was in Blender? That was my favorite one, and I had no clue it was. Nice!