I finally got around to prepare and announce the first Blender animation competition on Renderfarm.fi simply titled “Alien Life”. Largely inspired by Renderfarm.fi’s BOINC heritage and the recent NASA sponsored research findings at Lake Mono, this animation competition is open between the 6th of December 2010 and the 31st of January 2011 (closing time at 11PM CET+1).
In order to take part in the competition, a session must have the tag “Alien Life” written clearly somewhere in its description field. All animations of at least 25 frames or more that are uploaded before the deadline, meet the normal terms of use / policy for rendering on Renderfarm.fi and have a minimum of ten votes are applicable for prizes. A special competition and gallery page has been set up to display all the relevant information and competition entries. Prizes include 5 copies of Essential Blender by Roland Hess, 5 authentic Renderfarm.fi t-shirts with the overall winner receiving a copy of the “Chaos and Evolutions” training DVD by David Revoy.
As has been proven with the recent scientific findings, we need to keep a very open mind as to what “Alien Life” is. It’s now up to the animators to convince us the volunteers what the term actually implies. Now with these words I wish all participants happy Blendering!
I was thinking about entering this contest, could you provide a few more details. I’ve read through the website and think I have a good understanding of how to render my animation. Basically, I am wondering how to submit the finished animation. Say 2 scenes, rendered in 2 sessions, then how would I combine the resulting frames with composited images added in and submit that final result? Or say my animation has a mistake to it and I need correct it and re-render a portion of the animation and combine with previously rendered frames that didn’t need to be re-rendered?
@rarebit
Was going to watch the link that you put in your post, but…
“You may not watch or download BBC Content using BBC iPlayer if you are outside of the UK…”
@revolt_randy: This particular competition is actually about very much single animation scenes. In the future we’ll provide functionality for grouping animations together (in order to indicate that they are part of a bigger whole) and you will be able to post a link (or an embed) which will automatically be linked to all the sessions of that particular group.
In case something goes wrong, you are free to either send in a completely new session or fix the frames and just post the working version (as a Youtube embed for example) to the comment field of that particular session. So to cut it short, this one will be finished as it is, no sounds, just single animations. Hopefully by the next compo we’ll have the described functionality in place and can go about conducting it a bit differently.
Thanks for your interest. Hope you guys put in some participating entries.
Thanks prodigal son for the reply. My idea was basically to have an opening shot of the environment, then the 2nd shot would be the discovery of life. That shot would make heavy use of compositing images overtop of the rendered frames. In fact, the 2nd shot would probably need to be split into 4 different parts and composited separately. I know I am being vague as I may rework my idea into something that fits into the guidelines, which brings about this question… If I have 2 scenes within one .blend file, will they both be rendered as one single animation? Even if I can’t do that, I may still be able to work around the limitations. Another question, if fluid & smoke sims are baked, will they render and does the 2.5 add-on handle uploading the baked caches?
I’ve got my idea, but perhaps I should run some trials to ‘feel out’ your system a bit further…
