About the Challenge

This year marks the 3rd annual CGarchitect.com Architectural Visualization Competition (AVC). As the only competition of its kind in the industry, the competition strives to uncover undiscovered talent through a series of challenges and qualifying competitions spanning four months.

Competitors will stretch their imaginations and skills to demonstrate their prowess in the art of architectural illustration and animation. While the ultimate winner and finalists in the competition will take home some amazing prizes, the goal of this competition is to promote architectural illustration and encourage its advancement through community participation and critiques.



2007 Challenge Introduction

While a successful architectural visualization or film needs to be properly executed from a technical standpoint (lighting, rendering etc.) the most engaging and important visualizations have risen to the top because they visually tell a story about the architecture. The best visualization artists are not only able to make an image look good, but they captivate the viewer and give the architecture life.

Each of the 25 competitors selected for this year's competition will be given the choice of one of five raw models to choose from. They will then be asked to describe the story they are going to tell and with one still image and animation visually tell that story.

Throughout the competition there will be mini-challenges, similar to the deadlines that a client might impose, where competitors much show their work in progress. A panel of expert judges and CGarchitect forum members will provide critiques for each of these challenges, however, unlike past competitions, work will not stop as competitors wait for scores. While we have teamed with some of the biggest companies in the architectural visualization industry to provide some amazing prizes, the premise of this year's competition is around personal growth. Therefore the feedback competitors receive during the competition is not provided to help them win the competition, but rather to help them grow as visualization professionals.

The winners of this year's competition will be announced at the CGarchitect.com Awards ceremony during the 2007 VisMasters Design Modeling and Visualization Conference in San Diego following SIGGRAPH.


New Rules

The rules this year have changed slightly again and will encourage more community and competitor interaction throughout the competition. There will still be a qualification round where 25 competitors will be selected to compete in the competition. These competitors will have mandatory mini-challenges to complete, works in progress posts and peer critiques, that will all be scored to help determine the winner of the competition. Sixty percent of the final score will be based on technical abilities and successfully telling their story, with the remaining forty percent being based on providing regular progress updates, making peer critiques and meeting several pre-determined mini-challenge deadlines.


Good Luck to all of this year's Competitors!