OTOY Forums

Hi all,

With the well received new pre2.3 v4 release, and people returning from holidays,
i think it's time again for a competition.

However, I think we need something new instead of another general image or animation competition.

My idea is the following:

OctaneLive material database competition

* Hardware prices (GTX400 cards) and software prices (lifetime licenses, licenses)
* An open non-themed image competition, where use of new functionality is encouraged (eg emitters etc...)
* When you're image is done, you must submit all your materials to the livedb. (which will be cleaned up and much more categories added before the competition starts
* We will have a preference for fully procedural material & texture macros, however submitting imagetexture based material & texture macros or combinations is allowed.
* A procedural material or texture macro, with user friendly custom input parameters (wood grain size, cement grain amount, etc...), will be worth more.
* All materials have to be useable, eg they must be in correct unit scale of one meter per unit etc...
* Some of your materials could be removed by us. (poor quality, incorrect scale, use of copyrighted texture or other data), however we will be relaxed about things.
* When posting your final render, you submit all your livedb uploads, eg like 'materials/organic/vegetation/leaves/bayleaf'.

We'd start the competition after we've written and posted a tutorial on the new macro system and how to make procedural materials, so everyone has the same headstart in terms of knowledge.
We'd judge the competition 50% based on your livedb contribution and 50% on the rendered image.
The number of uploads is not as important as the quality of the materials.

This competition, when propperly arranged, should bring all octane users a very complete material library rapidly.
We will, before we start it, post a pre-2.3 v5, with some procedural nodes added so you can make tiles/bricks, use spectral data sets, and non-linear mappings / multi-point gradient mixing.


This is just an idea, not a solid plan.
I'd like to hear from our customers what they think of the idea and what comments they have on it.

Radiance

Cool, I'm in. It will be a good way / motivation to learn.

How much time will be available for this competition?

matej wrote:Cool, I'm in. It will be a good way / motivation to learn.

How much time will be available for this competition?

Not sure, i'm throwing this idea onto the forums to see what people think.
I'd go for the usual one month, but everyone's ideas are welcome in this thread.

Radiance

Sounds good but my initial thought is that most of the people likely to be participants or winners may already have GTX4xx cards or enough licences and therefore not be especially interested in those prizes. Perhaps some alternatives in that case?
Also I think people like myself with minor talent for rendering would feel the situation was somewhat hopeless in regard of producing a prize winning scene. Perhaps a second tier to the competition for the 'most innovative' or 'best single' material. In this way I can mess with macros on a 'cube' to learn all about them and still submit something.

Excellent idea Radiance!

I agree with pixelrush though, a pure material competition (maybe with facultative demo render image) would be nice for everybody to experiment with octane procedurals instead of focusing on a WOW render image... I think most of us should be able to do the first while only a few are in the league of wow renders, and most of them have already won something

I can imagine how many excellent materials will be added to the liveDB, not to say how much "advertising" is that

I think the idea is great and it will benefit all of the Octane's customers - having access to LiveDB with large amount of good quality materials will be IMHO something remarkable and I can't wait to see it happen

pixelrush: As for the prizes - I think that even if someone have already got a GTX 4xx card, having another one isn't really a problem

I do agree, most of the usual winners might win again if they don't have a big commercial job going on.
I'll be happy to hear about alternative ways that equalize the chances for everyone, yet giving the same result, a large, great collection of ready to use drag and drop materials for everyone to enjoy for free.

Radiance

radiance wrote:...yet giving the same result, a large, great collection of ready to use drag and drop materials for everyone to enjoy for free.

this IS the real prize of this competition, both for users and Refractive team

Sounds awesome, but wont people start to stress about how perfect there marco is? or having one at all? or making one? since that is at least 50% jugded.

Excellent idea! Maybe you could change the percentages a bit make the material worth 60 to 70% and the image worth the remainder. In this way the contestants would feel like they can spend more time on the material and less on the image (but still have an image included which is good too). Or just require the standard material scene, although I think it would be better to have a good evaluation scene. This sounds like a lot of fun, I just wish my modelling skills were better.