Hi all,
I wanted to supply some answers to the competition prolonguement and composition discussions.
we have to prolong the competition to give everyone a change to use 2.4.
If this bothers you, please have a bit of sport and use the extra time to enhance your entry or entries, or create additional ones. We did not plan to do this in advance, we have had a lot of work fixing issues and the mac and Linux builds have already been released with much delay. In the end we had to make a choice and we chose to prolong. There you go, maybe try to use the time creatively instead of complaining. Remember that submitting 2 entries gives you double the chance of having at least one winning entry.
Regarding compositing, we have to draw the line somewhere. Sure, you can composite a background sky with clouds onto of a few buildings, but then again if we allow this, you can render a chair and composite it into a photo of your living room, leading to much more discussion about what is possible and what not.
This is a render competition, the point is to produce an image with octane for submission, not to use octane as a part of a complete vfx pipeline.
Post processing is allowed for noise reduction, filters and simple things like adding motion blur effects.
If we allow adding non rendered content directly in submissions, it becomes difficult to draw the line as how far people can go and much more discussion will arise.
It is a competition, it's not meant to be easy, if you want a nice cloudy sky, find a good HDRI map
Radiance
PS: sorry for typos I'm on my iPad.