Hi everyone. We're very happy to announce the winners of the Musical Instrument Challenge. The standard was outstanding and judging was tough. Without fruther ado the winners are:

1st Place - Andoy
2nd Place - Allufrio
3rd Place - squarehead

Honourable mentions:

Vilandra
Santis
TheJimReaper
Stevehewitt1950

You can view the winning images in the gallery here. Don't forget that the image you see is not usually the full size image. You can click on most images in the gallery and get the full size original image.

Sadly 2 members who were in the running to place in the results didn't comply with the rules:

Smokey posted a stunning render of a drum but didn't include a wireframe in the final entry thread. This cost the member a top 3 placing. johnny posted a super looking Fender Stratocaster. Problem here was the final entry thread was this member's first post and therefore no work in progress images had been posted. This cost this member an honourable mention. As we've been hinting at, we're going to enforce the rules. Perhaps by mentioning names we can encourage members to read the rules carefully.

Regards
3DKiwi

Your mission should you choose to accept it, is to model a clown. It can be a real clown or a toy clown. It is up to you. For this challenge to give less experienced members a chance at winning something we will have 2 experience levels:

Beginner grade: Started 3D and or C4D in 2007 or 2008
Open grade: Been doing 3D from 2006 or earlier

We rely upon your honesty for this. So if you started in say 2004 and then had a break and have only just started again even though your combined experience may be less than a year you would be in the open grade. It's when you started not the length of time in total that determines your grade.

When you post your images in both the WIP and final entry thread please indicate what grade you are in. If you don't enter the grade we will assume that you are in the open grade.

Each of the top 3 winners from each grade will each receive an award under their avatar and have their image featured in the winners section of the gallery.

We are going to be enforcing the rules on posting WIP images from now on. Some members seem incapable of reading the rules as to posting wireframe images and don't post a wireframe. Also some members think that by posting the same final images in the WIP thread and the final thread that they qualify. We actually want to see a partially finished model / image in the WIP thread. Again we will be policing this one a lot more rigidly in future.

Some members also don't seem to understand what we mean by disabling hypernurbs in the wireframe image. We want to see the raw and unsmoothed polygons so that we can better see how you did the modelling. This means disabling all hypernurbs objects. That's done by clicking on the green checkmark on all hypernurbs objects in the Object Manager.

You have from now until Friday, May 23, 2008.

Judges for this challenge: Cafe Staff

1. Deadline Midnight PST (Pacific Standard Time - North America), Friday, May 23, 2008.
2. No time limit i.e. take as long as you like to do the modeling and texturing.
3. No imported models / meshes / scenes. Reference images or imported textures are fine. This means for example that you can't import a Pose model and stick clothes on it. You have to model the character yourself.
4. Members can enter multiple times.
5. The Cafe judges reserve the right to disallow any entry if in their opinion the entry contains objectionable, offensive material or blatant advertising.
6. No post work is permitted. It has to be modeled and rendered in C4D or using a C4D renderer like Vray etc.
7. Maximum image size is 1280 x 1024 for the final entry thread and 1024 x 768 for replies in this thread. Please compress your jpeg images. Anything over 300kb is too big.
8. At least one WIP image in wireframe and solid render are required as a reply to this thread. The wireframe render should be done as a Cel render. Check out our cel rendering tutorial here if you don't know how to do one. Disable hyperNURBS in the cel renders so that we can see the polygon construction.
9. No remote hosting of images. All images to be uploaded here. Just press the "add this attachment" button to upload each image.
10. At least one wireframe image and one final image are required. You images can be montages of smaller images if you want.
11. All final entries must be made in the proper "Final entry" thread located here.
12. You cannot use models etc. that you have previously modeled. You must start everything new and specifically for this challenge.

Judging will be based on modeling, texturing and presentation.

Good luck and have fun!!

Hi everyone. I've been busy again.

Here's a 28min 34sec tutorial on compositing objects in your scene into background photographs. This makes the objects / models look as though they were in the original photograph. The tutorial shows 2 examples, one using a background object, a plane and the plane has a compositing tag with the compositing background option enabled. Lights are set up to cast shadows.

In the second example GI is used and I show a different technique than the previous one as GI can't be used when you have the compositing background option used in conjunction with a background object.

The tutorial also demonstrates getting the aspect ratio of the rendered image to match the aspect ratio of the photograph. Important otherwise the photograph will be distorted.

This is a remake of the original compositing tutorial and covers a lot more content and goes into things in more depth. That tutorial was badly out of date.

You can download the tutorial from here.

Have fun

3DKiwi