Challenge #964 "Christmas [Fast] Food" Voting CLOSED

Helge · December 13, 2021, 11:36pm

This week’s theme: Christmas [Fast] Food

Which entry would you like to see win?
(If you cannot decide, pick up to 2.)

linuus
HuggiesXXL
LatvianGambit
Froppy
Boder
mali_zweipunktnull
fcharr
parclite

0 voters

After 2 days of voting, a winner is declared: The voting will close on: Wed, Dec 15, 2021 11:00 PM.
The winner picks the theme for next week.

If the winner doesn’t supply a theme before Thursday 22:30 GMT, the organizer will select the theme. In this case, the winner’s theme will be used the next time we are lacking a theme on Thursday 22:30 GMT.

Having selected the theme, the winner will not be eligible to enter that week. They may however still submit an image, but it won’t be included in the voting.

This week’s winner:

Pure Entries

• linuus: The Escape

• HuggiesXXL: Wrapping up a long night in Shinjuku

• LatvianGambit: Gingerbread house

• Froppy: Christmas fast food

• Boder: Coookies und Mooolk

• mali_zweipunktnull: Marshmallow & Cookies

Open Entries

• fcharr: The Pine Cone

(open entry, due to all the assets I got from Shop :: Cone Head (franciscocharrua.com).)

• parclite: Christmas Cookies

(The wooden board is from an earlier weekend challenge. The cookie material is adapted from this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_te4DFF_X4. The penguins are partly from this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c4WBb8wdnI)

Non-competing Entries

• Helge: XmasBurger

• OLG: Burnt Christmas Dinner

• rigoletto: Merry Christmas

flloyd · December 15, 2021, 6:55am

I’ve been reading here for a few weeks and it’s often very interesting and you can learn something. I myself have tried several times to design something appropriate to the topic without participating. Invisible participation

But now I have to ask something and get rid of it. I understand the two categories “pure” and “open”, but now the votes here mainly go to 2 posts, 95% of which come from an existing scene (Cone Head Shop) where an ice cream was simply added and to a scene where finished pieces from a previous participation in the contest and finished pieces from several tutorials were simply put together to make something “new”. And not to the scenes that were actually built or “challenged” over the weekend.

But sticking together existing pieces and objects has almost nothing to do with a weekend challenge, where the aim is to create something thematically specific in a certain “tight” time on the weekend. The scenes from fchar and parclite look nice, but are 90-95% “recycled”. If this is the “open” category, I can simply put assets from blendswap, blenderkit and other sources, as well as objects built earlier, together in 15 minutes and then call them “open” and then I had almost zero effort. This encourages not, to spend a lot of time thinking up and creating scenes from scratch.

If there is such a large proportion in a scene made from recycled objects, it shouldn’t be “open”, but in fairness simply “non competing”.

Otherwise it doesn’t make sense to call the whole thing “Weekend Challenge” because otherwise there is simply no challenge to a “new” scene when simply putting together finished objects or objects build from tutorials.

That’s nothing personal against the participants here, but in the spirit of a challenge or a contest, you shouldn’t just put together what you already have and enter it as participation?

Millani · December 15, 2021, 8:13am

Coming up with an idea, properly placing the objects, choosing a camera angle, setting up the lighting… all of these things together can easily take up a few hours of your time. And I think most people here only have a few hours to spend on the weekend challenge. So I think recycling is fine, as long as people throw enough new ideas into the mix.

(also, recycling is good for the environment )

flloyd · December 15, 2021, 9:13am

Serious?

Putting together finished objects from tutorials or simply adding an ice cream to an otherwise finished scene should take many hours? And that’s the idea behind a contest and a challenge?

As I said and asked: Then just take the finished objects from the Blender kit and free 3D websites and put them together. And ready for the contest? Strange.

Cosmo_Wander · December 15, 2021, 9:45am

work in progress

Helge · December 15, 2021, 10:22am

Let me try to clear things up a little:

Every participant can choose to enter an open or pure entry. If the entry is open, a few additional rules apply:

1.) Entering an open entry:
Using pre-made or external resources is fine as long as you call the entry open and state (along with the entry) which parts are new and what parts have been reused.

2.) Voting:
Every voter can decide if an entry is worth winning or not, however, for open entries there are a few additional handicaps:

Indecisive voters are asked to favour Pure entries over Open ones.
In the event of a tie, a Pure entry will win over an Open entry.

Over time, we have had a lot of brilliant open entries which didn’t attract a lot of votes. The amount of work that went into an entry will (in most cases) make a difference in the voting. This is why you need to describe what makes an entry open when submitting it.

Are you sure? If I understand this correctly, apart from the (rather simple) wooden board everything in @parclite’s entry has been made for this challenge. And in my opinion, consulting tutorials hardly qualifies as recycling. (And I can see why so many votes are flowing this way. It definitely is a cute and well made entry.)

Why not? I don’t even think that using tutorials would necessarily make an entry open. After all, you still have to build the objects yourself. That being said, when creating my own entries, I usually spend a good amount of time on arranging things and getting the lighting done. This can very well be the most important part of the process. The most brilliant objects can look like crap with poor lighting but even the worst models (a lot of my stuff falls into that category) can look great if placed and lit properly.

You could do that. In most cases, it probably wouldn’t get you many votes, though. But most importantly: Where is the fun in that? If someone slammed a bunch of random stuff together in a few minutes, without spending time thinking, lighting, placing things,… - why bother going through this in the first place? I mean, there is no money to be won, there are no fancy prices.
Just have fun, learn/try new things and stop your Blender skills from getting rusty.

linuus · December 15, 2021, 10:27am

I’m always surprised of how people vote in these. I for example felt much better about my entry this time than I have about my entries in the past that ended up winning.

It’s just one of those thinks you have to accept that everyone values different things in the images, and don’t judge the same aspects you would. Some people value modelling more, some materials, some composition, some colors, some humor or story. It’s very hard to predict who will win, I find.

Edit:
But yeah somebody who just downloads a bunch of assets and quickly slaps it together isn’t going to win. Having an interesting concept and spending time on lighting, composition etc is needed to catch people’s eye.

Helge · December 15, 2021, 10:39am

Well, at least I can tell you how I decide what to vote for:
Usually, we split the votes equally between me, my wife and the kids. And you are right, there is a huge range of criteria every one of us applies.

Renato_Bonfanti · December 15, 2021, 12:34pm

I see this from some angles…
There is a official rule, while you are not violating the rules and it is the same for everyone, i do consider fair game.
Sometimes i vote for the most visually appealing scene, sometimes for a work which tried to do something original, or strange. So while someone having a lot of already made resources will give him a advantage in time , which can be used for fine tuning the scene, for me is not always a win, but certainly helps a lot, but i can’t say to other people how they must vote.
By principle i don’t add stuff ‘premade’ from sites because for me the challenge is most about learning, and to add premade models while my modelling skills are weak it does not help.
For someone who is already very good at modeling, adding models from old work make sense as the person can focus on another things like lighting, composition, etc.
I do think someone should not be denied to competing, when is not violating rules, it is almost like saying a very fast runner should not be allowed to run, so the heavy people can win the competition.

flloyd · December 15, 2021, 1:00pm

Don’t refuse to participate, but maybe the rules should simply be adjusted. For open posts and / or posts with a high proportion of recycled objects only give half a point or something.

No.

Someone who picks up mostly existing objects is not a particularly very fast runner, but someone who is already near the finish line and then just walks over.

flloyd · December 15, 2021, 1:09pm

But it should make a difference whether you use a small part again in a scene or whether you only build a small part from scratch.

Take a look at the picture of the Cone Head Shop and you can see that only one ice cream was added to it. Otherwise nothing new or different.

I think that’s disappointing if you see it as the contest or the challenge and during which the pictures of the others, which were apparently created from scratch, are then rated identically.

Perhaps it is a good idea to rate open posts or posts with a high proportion of recycled objects with half a point and pure posts that have been created from scratch with a whole point. That would simply be an incentive to not recycle too much of the existing objects.

And then maybe more people will take part in the contest again?

Renato_Bonfanti · December 15, 2021, 2:00pm

If were to be adjusted i would do like samba schools are evaluated in carnaval, divide the elements in categories, and count the points, where premade stuff would not count points, would be like:

-modeling

texturing
-lighting
composition
etc.

But is just because i worked with too much paperwork so my mind works in some rigid ways…
And i advise against some mindsets which drain your lifeforce.

linuus · December 15, 2021, 2:23pm

People are open with what parts are new and what parts are re-used, so it’s up to each voter how to weigh that in their voting. It would be strange for the people holding the contest to decide that votes for open entries are worth half as much. People voted for it knowing it was open

linuus · December 15, 2021, 2:26pm

I guess there could be separate polls for open and pure but that would only create more drama because people draw the line for what is pure very differently.

I, for example, often use photo textures, like the ground in this week’s entry or external post-procssing, and say it’s still pure but some people only accept it as pure if everything is made in blender.

Helge · December 15, 2021, 2:32pm

Indeed, in theory we could think of a bunch of distinct categories which make up an average entry. Each of these would have an importance-factor and a pureness-factor assigned to it. Each voter would then have to rate each entry based on all categories. We would get an entrie’s overall points by adding up all of the its category-points (multiplied with the respective factors).

I’m making a little fun up there but this actually is a difficult topic. (One we have never found the perfect solution for.) It isn’t even possible to give a definitive answer to the question: “Is this entry pure or open.” The answer is “It depends… on a lot of things.” (It actually is fine to use some pre-made objects within pure entries.) This is why we went with this:

The creator decides (in accordance with the rules) if the entry should be considered pure or open.
The creator adds a description to the entry, stating why it is open…

And as @linuus stated: With this information, each voter can decide if an entry should win or not. Actually, I currently don’t see a better way to keep things accessible, fair and simple at the same time.

rigoletto · December 15, 2021, 5:05pm

You make a weekly family event of it? Nice idea

parclite · December 15, 2021, 5:15pm

For me the weekend challenges are a way to better learn Blender and the time constraint forces me to actually finish stuff (my hard drive is full of partly finished Blender files which I lost interest in). Furthermore, video tutorials are an important source to learn Blender, so for me it is only natural that I also use them for a weekend challenge. What I try to do lately is acknowledge the sources I learned from, but even that can only be partial because all aspects of my entries I have learned from a tutorial sometime in the past.

The Pure versus Open discussion might get even more diffuse in the future, now that Blender has an asset manager. I tend to start using it for materials, part of which will be literally copied from other sources. This means that also for the weekend challenges I will probably not create new materials when my material collection grows. Will that make the entries Open?

fcharr · December 15, 2021, 7:13pm

A year ago, most of my entries were pure: Everything, including the procedural materials were done from scratch. Participants would submit entries using downloaded elaborate background images and characters generated by the make human and Manuel Bastioni addons, claiming they were pure entries: The integrity of the participants in the challenge is currently pretty high, compared to past challenges.

I am currently working a job that leaves me exhausted: Weekends are for resting. It took me 2 days to create the ice-cream. The cone head project was done for a monthly challenge, from scratch, a few years ago. Everything I bring to this challenge has been created by me. My characters are reused models that I created using what I learned from tutorials. Looking through past works in order to create something theme relevant is actually quite challenging for me at the moment.

If the rules were different, my entries would be different.

OLG · December 15, 2021, 9:45pm

I am going to add my 2 cents worth since that’s twice what it is worth.

Skillful lighting and composition are remarkable skills on their own. This is from someone who doesn’t have those skills. I can model moderately well. I sell individual models consistently in my cnc store. I also just graduated from a 3d animation and VFX class. It was very evident to me how bad my skills were even though I could model better than 95 percent of the class. They very quickly passed me up. I did get better but I still suck at it.

And also this is for fun and to learn. There are many different facets to a 3d environment. Modeling is just one of them. There are 3d professionals who never model anything. They purchase them or have others model what they need.

So after all that hot wind, I am always impressed in the renders you all submit every week. Amazing to great efforts and everything in between.

Helge · December 15, 2021, 10:10pm

If I’m not mistaken the impact of pre-made materials has never really been specified (like textures which are a similar topic.). As long as these aren’t super fancy node monsters which save hours or days of time, this probably doesn’t matter all that much.

I’m not sure if the asset manager will make that much of a difference, though. Until 3.0, Blender came with the BlenderKit addon (which seems to be gone now). There have always been a lot of ways for recycling old or external resources. For now, I don’t think that this requires changes to the challenge, but I guess, we may have more open entries in the future.