Activity for this winter

[Samo]

Hi there

On last winter we had an activity that consisted in archivis rendering, you can visit the gallery of works here:
http://www.yafaray.org/gallery?g2_itemId=3657

This winter we would like to organise a new activity, but this time we would like it to be different than what we usually do, which is rendering stills. This time we would like it to be about rendering an animation. For instance

• We can render an animation using sintel production files
• A camera tracking exercise using blender tomato.
• Rendering an animation based on a topic chosen by the community

Please input your thoughts and advice on the contest in this thread. Thank you for participating.

[Manuel_Ramos]

My favourite topic:
The birth of cinema
Info here:
http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro.html
Google it...
It could be great since this is the first motion pictures contest on yafaray and could be less pc demanding.

[Samo]

one of the things I would like to propose is that the winners and any other top quality entry could donate their stuff, models, textures, a making off text etc. and we could make a DVD with it

Another requisite we could test this time is that it will be compulsory to use the blender compositor for the post production phase.

[Samo]

I have updated the thread with a poll, please vote.

[Samo]

Thank you for your votes, keep them coming.

[Samo]

It would be great if people voting could as well write some lines on why they have choose a particular option and what they want the animation exercise to be about. Thanks.

[stoneage]

I voted for Camera Tracking and Still.

I am interested in using Yafaray to add cgi to film or video and I think this would be an interesting direction for Yafaray to move in. It also gives more freedom for entrants to limit the render time for their submissions as not everyone has a production capable machine available to render animation with.

I voted Stills for similar practical, render time reasons.

[projecteagleeye]

I voted for the animation and thought about something like a funny clip.
This is a topic were all artist can show of their modelling skills and overall creative ideas.

[Samo]

what do you think about packaging the best entries into a DVD, with a making off text,
for funding more ambitious activities
would you be willing to share your models that way?

[stoneage]

I don't see why not

People often ask about render settings and material libraries, so there might well be a market for it.

[projecteagleeye]

I would really appreciate it, you can then make your art more populare and have a more detailed look "behind the scenes" of someones else approach of modelling, texturing (and depending on the topic; animation).
How would you make the DVD available, only for contest winners or buyable for everyone?

[Samo]

Buyable for everyone, the idea is to get funds for more ambitious endeavours, we don't get that many donations. I would like to organise a meeting for developers (and users), a sort of code sprint.

[Samo]

This is the proposed format of the contest:

Topics of the contest
“Oblivion”
“Attack run!”
“Winter”
“The birth of a new era”

Deadline - 21 March

Categories:
Still
Animation

Still Category

• Minimun resolution must be 1024 x 1280 portrait or 1280 x 1024 landscape, in PNG format.
  
• Post-process and compositing of different YafaRay render passes is allowed, using Blender compositor.
  
• Midterm evaluation.
  
• Work in progress thread.

Animation:

• Minimuns: resolution Youtube HQ 864x480 px. / 30 seconds / 25 frames per second.
  
• Post-process and compositing of different YafaRay render passes is allowed, using Blender compositor.
  
• Compositing against real footage using camera tracking techniques is allowed, using Blender tools.
• The entry could consist in a short story, a commercial or a stop motion short film, but based on the contest topics.
  
• Midterm evaluation.
  
• Work in progress thread.

General Rules:

• The winners will be chosen by non-contestant community members
  
• The winners’ works in both categories and any entry deemed good enough will be included in a DVD which will be sold on-line on the YafaRay site, to support the project activities and the voluntary work of developers and platform maintainers.
  
• The content included in the DVD will be released under a copyleft license. Be sure the content you use in your work (textures, sounds) can be released under such a license, either because you have created them or because they are original copyleft as well.
  
• We will request authors of the works included in the DVD to add pre production and post production material as well as a making off text to increase the added educative value of the DVD on-sale.
  
• Contestants are encouraged to ask for help from the community to get computing power to render works in the animation category.
  
• Groups of contestants is allowed in the animation category. Every member of the group should be stated at the beginning of the work in progress thread.

[_Mo_]

Sounds like fun. If time permitting, I'm in. Especially if this will mean that those few bugs in 012 will finally be solved and the version released.

About the voting system; I support the idea to put the community on vote, it's just that since the participants can't vote, the number of voters is low (if I look the points in the last competition, no more than 10 people casted their votes) and thus the "sampling" is less representative. Maybe do a 50/50 between community votes & Yafacrew selection? Or somehow attract more people to cast their votes (by placing an "ad" on blenderartists, calling for people to vote what they would want on the DVD, for example)

So I suppose the competition will last 3 months and starts at beginning of winter?

Also, is there a prize for contest winners?

[Samo]

The Yafaray crew is part of the community, so they will be able to vote, but just as every community member else.

In order to avoid someone cheating the system, the voting should be always kept within the known members of the community, so we will keep new registered users out of the voting process, to avoid someone creating fake accounts to get himself the first place (it is not the first time that it happens), or asking others to do so.

If the DVD is successful, the money will be used for a code sprint, that's more or less the idea. In that code sprint we would like to bring together current and past developers (Bert, Jandro, Michele) specially current active coders (Olaf Arnold and Pedro Alcaide) and the main platform maintainer we have now (Gabriele Ferreri), but also people working on new developments such as rubdos (network rendering) and a person who is working now on the memory leak issue, and to bring Darktide (Rodrigo Placencia) to Europe for a few days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_%28 ... lopment%29

This event will be open to users and to other free open source raytracing communities, particularly Luxrender. This is the main goal in 2012. Besides, the DVD should be the first yaf-shop product of many more to come.

We won't pay directly for development time and coders' work, that's a practice with many secondary effects we are not sure we should take on. YafaRay for the time being is a project based only on volunteer's work. The idea is to give those volunteers more support.

At the moment, we have not decided on prizes. The time frame for the contest is the whole winter season, from December to March, to give animators more buffer.