Weekend Contest Winner: Sixth Sense Billionaire
I think a combination of good weather (at least here in Europe), the World Soccer Championship, and more vague themes resulted in a somewhat lower quality of entries across the board this week. As such, I’ve decided to personally pick a winner – the community voted entries are still listed below, of course.
I picked Thomas Nordstrøm’s ‘Sixth Sense Billionaire’ because it was well executed and it captured my attention – you need to explore the image before you fully get the story. Good work! You also won a one month silver membership ($50 value) and $50 in render credits by RenderStreet – congrats! I expect your next weekend contest entries to look absolutely stellar now, of course ;-)
Please email me at bart @ this site so we can discuss next weekend’s theme and so I can help you claim your prize!
Read on for the other entries.
NelsonLlajuayu
AspiringAnimator – The REAL Avatar
Joel – DOGGY Ad
Dear Bart,
I personally think that every weekend contest should have your input, especially when money or a prize is involved. If some one wants to cheat and votes are weighted 100% then it is all to easy to win. This being said I know it is time consuming to pick the winner each week but a compromise should be put in place. Something like your vote is worth 10 and you would vote on Sunday. I love the weekend contest and in no way do I want them to be removed. Just stuff I have been thinking about.
P.S. Good choice for this weeks winner :)
Yeah! Great Idea!
That’s great input, thanks! I’m thinking I may need to restructure these contests any way, I’ll do a new post where everyone can weigh in.
Thank you! I’m happy to be the winner of this contest. And also surprised as I got few votes, thank you Bart! :) I just counted my weekend contest entries and this was my 17th. All of them made over a weekend exclusively for these Contests. So if you didn’t think my image was the best please give me cred for my effort. Personally I held Joel’s “Doggy Ad” for the winner. Initially I thought it were an real Ad, It looked so convincing.
I just typed out this big apology, but realized you may not have been referring to my comment. So just in case, your work never entered my mind when I made my comment. It was more about the ‘rules’ of the contests. I have no doubt it was made over the weekend, and it was done well. And congratulations on winning. Sorry for hijacking this discussion before even saying that.
I read your comment, but I didn’t understand any of it to be directed to me in anyway :). Thank you though for taking that in to consideration. Also, thank you for your compliments. :)
Perhaps if we were to see these challenges as “weekly challenges” instead of just weekend challenges, where you can work on a theme in your spare time the whole week, and then on the weekends, you present your work and get votes (personally, I hold out on my voting until the last day, but I wouldn’t say that should be a “rule”).
I know that I see contests go by, simply because my weekends are so often busy, but I may have a little more time dispersed throughout the week. Just a thought.
About the comment about the low quality of work, I do get where you’re coming from, and I think it could be better said. It’s a sensitive topic. Though, I do see Bart’s point, too, and I don’t think it’s necessary a bad thing to point the issue out. I think if anything, it should motivate people to do better. “Low quality” isn’t always about skill level–sometimes effort is perceivable.
We’ve seen contests here where people clearly gave a great effort. Even with a person who’s not the best modelers around, you can see inspiration reflected in their effort. You can visibly see when someone’s given something their best effort, even if it’s not the best result in the world.
Though, some contest themes are rather vague or tricky to meet with both an idea and an effort, esp. just over the weekend, and that’s usually where you see people’s drive just sorta taper out.
I don’t think folks should take offense or hurt over the issue. It’s not really anyone’s “fault’ here–sometimes we get a tough theme, and sometimes we get a low turn-out of entries. It’s only natural that we’re not going to see the same level of participation every contest, esp. whenever we have topics that winners choose, which can be as personal or esoteric as they like.
Anyways, I think Bart was perhaps just a little frustrated by the fact that this contest was a special one where Render Street generously donated a prize to the contest, and the overall turn-out wasn’t as great as one would hope. Maybe he wanted to be a better host to Render Street’s generous prize. I don’t want to speak for him here, though.
But speaking for myself, seeing some of the entries, quite a few of them were pretty simple–I mean, simpler than simple. And I only say that because I’ve seen better efforts from some of those folks. Once you’ve seen better efforts before, you want to see better efforts next time, and not a regression back to “my first week in Blender.” The bigger competition is that these are sorta more competitions with ourselves than anything–a challenge we take to raise our own bar.
Overall, it’s still good to see participation in these contests, and I hope we not only see more contests, but continued growth among the participants, and even development to the contests themselves.
Well said, I almost completely agree! Though one of my favorite parts about the weekend contest is that it is such a short time. Unlike Andrew Price’s contests (http://www.blenderguru.com/competitions/) these are short and in way level the playing field for everybody (Professionals have the same short times as amateurs). Community growth is crucial, Also being versatile as an artist requires a time limit I know many times I stop a project because it gets too complex or I don’t have a deadline. I hope Bart is willing to make changes to the “weekend challenges” :)
Blender On!
Perhaps if we were to see these challenges as “weekly challenges” instead of just weekend challenges, where you can work on a theme in your spare time the whole week, and then on the weekends, you present your work and get votes.
(Personally, I hold out on my voting until the last day, but I wouldn’t say that should be a “rule.” Just a personal preference here.)
I know that I see contests go by, simply because my weekends are so often busy, but I may have a little more time dispersed throughout the week. Just a thought.
I highly agree, It takes me at least three days to learn the techniques I want to incorporate in to my design idea. I have gotten to a Monday morning with a mess of a mesh a few times and thought damn, I think it takes the fun out of it having to stress on a time constraint.