CompuServe Thread

Sorry Dan, I must have missed the first part of this thread. What is the contest?

>>contests and whining… Hey Big Dan the K… Mild musings from a maniac modeler here. Your contest confuses my small brain. The Catch-22.5 is that the best models (those most likely to win) take a tremendous amount of time, resulting in a slight reluctance to give away all rights, especially with the enhanced pleasure ofsubmitting an entry fee. As a great model will often take 50-100 hours of work, you may not receive many entries from professional modelers. To dig up a "long forgotten" model for submission and "polish it up some" is also problematic: a) an old model is not likely to be one's best work or even representative, unless one's skills have stagnated or atrophied, and b) "polishing" old models is often more effort (i.e. headache) than creating from scratch. Your judging catagories also confusing to me, as 1 & 2 (model detail and rendered quality) are usually inversely proportional to 3 (render speed). The weighting that would result by these catagories would suggest throwing out catagory 3. Your specification limiting the materials to the stock 3DS materials lib causes additional befuddlement, as almost no one uses the stock MLI as anything more than a starting point. Does this preclude custom texture maps? Bump maps? 3rd party SXP's? If so, judging catagory 2 (rendered quality) will certainly be disadvantaged, as would be catagory 3 since all detail would need to be modeled. This suggests throwing out catagory 2 and 3. This leaves catagory 1 (model detail). But, ah, the philosophical questions begin to pop up: is a better modeler and grand prize winner one who a) models wonderful detail with many faces, or b) uses clever texture and lighting to make a model LOOK better than the next entry? Or is a better modeler one who can create with few enough faces to please even a VR programmer? Also, if a detailed tree model falls in StudioForest and no one is around to render it, does it page to disk? I, too, thought this contest was in the humor catagory when I first read it, but from later messages it seems otherwise. So here's my deal for you: my entry is the "long forgotton" model of the space shuttle on the 3DS CD-ROM (geometry/clipanim/shuttle2.3ds – the one that launches the JKJ satelite). They accidentally screwed up two of the maps in the CD authoring process, so you can have the pleasure of "polishing" it as necessary. <g> I did it a long time ago before I learned many clever things, so it is not my best work. I already gave it away, so it's easy to do it again. If I win, I'll donate the IPAS's to your user's group for door prizes. For my entry fee, I'll buy you $10 worth of chips and dip when I visit your user's group someday. Where and when is it, anyway? Is it a long walk from Tennessee? I'd like to visit some user's groups, since I don't have one. Your's sounds like great fun! I just got done with a pile of jobs (and have too much free time just now, judging by this message) and need some R&R. JKJ (now un-whining) PS. Perhaps the new Showcase forum about to open would be a good place for your clients-who-are-looking-for-modelers to go hunting.