Neil_cg

Firstly, I want to congratulate a lot of the entrants into the 3d awards – there has been some very good animation in there and I am by no means saying I think I deserve to win or even get shortlisted with this thread, but I do have a gripe with something.


Looking through the animations that got into the voting stage, I’m finding some of them are making it quite hard to take this competition very seriously.

We worked on a project a few months ago which featured an entire island modelled with 300+ buildings, featuring camera tracking and a fair amount of particle flow, which I then spent a further 3 days editing just for this competition.
Again – I must stress I’m not getting on my high horse here, I was happy to take not getting in. Until I spent much of today watching some of the other entrants, and while there is 90% of very good work in there, theres 10% that I find it quite insulting to have been placed below.


Here’s a link to our entry:
http://www.visualisationone.com/nordre.avi

Some stills:

I’m not expecting anything to change and I can appreciate the work jeff put into running this – I just wanted to see what the general verdict is.

Maxer

I'm still waiting for your animation to download but if the screen shots are representative of the entire animations let me say its extremely good work. Having said that I'm finding it hard to understand why you're upset, the judges obviously felt that there was something about someone else’s work that was better than yours. It's all based on personal opinions anyway, what looks great to one person might look bad to another and that's just the way things are. I'm pretty sure the judging process is very intense and everyone is given equal consideration so I wouldn’t take it personally.

__________________
“There is no spoon”
http://devinjohnston.cgsociety.org/gallery/

Neil_cg

You've got me wrong here - it's not that i'm upset at all, or that I expect anything to change. It's just after seeing the lower 10% of animations that got through i'm finding it very hard to take the competition seriously.


Please dont misunderstand me - this isnt arrogance and i'm by no means saying this is better than even half of the projects on there. But worse than all of them? I'd like to get some public opinion before I quit my job.

Ian P

Hi

I work with Neil so I may be bias in my opinion of the quality of his work but, while I agree that all creative work is judged subjectively and personal opinions come into play if all the work is of a similar quality. There should be little room in a competition of this calibre, open to some of the biggest and best names in the industry, for poor technical ability. Some of the animations I looked at were poorly rendered (flickering in animations etc) badly edited and in one case the soundtrack played at twice the speed of the video and then ended halfway through.

It is upsetting to work so hard trying to get every detail of a project this large correct and then be beaten to the final round by work that has been so carelessly thrown together.

AJLynn

I'm also waiting for the download. I'm a bit confused, I haven't watched any of the entrants, but you're not saying your entry wasn't accepted, are you? If it's as good as the stills make me think it is, I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the short list, but in general the standards on these competitions are high and anything that's not good either won't make the cut or won't get high votes.

From everything I've seen, Jeff does a great job putting these together, and the judging is sound, so I wouldn't be concerned about whether the eventual winners will be chosen well.

Neil_cg

You should check them out (like I said, 90% of them are incredible)

And I am indeed - this didnt get through to the voting round.

Jeff Mottle

Neil, I never saw your animation submitted, so I think it might not have been uploaded sucessfully. I know you guys sibmitted a lot of still images and many if not most of them were passed onto the final voting round.

__________________
Jeff Mottle
CGarchitect.com

Neil_cg

It was in folder 3939, I checked the file sizes after it was uploaded and they matched exactly.

Jeff Mottle

I went back to the database to check your entries and I did find your animation however it was corrupt and we could not play it, which is why it did not make it to the final round. All I saw was green and a music soundtrack. While I would have loved to contacted everyone who's work was corrupted, there unfourtately was just not enough time to do that given the really tight deadlines we had to meet for the Mundo Conference this year.

Every year animations get submitted that are corrupted, do not get uploaded in a standard format etc. Next year I plan on revamping the 3Dawards and one of the things I will be increasing is the judging period, so there is some window to contact entrants who's work is incomplete, missing, corrupt etc.

I would definetly enter this next year though. Sorry it did not work out this year.

__________________
Jeff Mottle
CGarchitect.com

Neil_cg

The green playback with sound only isnt what happens when it's corrupted - we get that here on some computers playing back the very same file. Does it flash too? some of them flick between green and pink for some reason.

Thats exactly why I asked you (as ian p.) a few days before the deadline if it was ok to use h.264 inside an .avi. - and you said it was.

I even asked if you wanted it in a standard mpeg which would be guaranteed to play and you said not to.