I recently participated in my first CG Challenge. If you do not know what CG Challenges are, I'll briefly explain. A CG challenge is a small project made up from someone in the 3D Rendering community to motivate the participants to create work, to improve their CG skills, and possibly to win useful prizes. 

The CG Challenge that I participated in was hosted by Clinton Jones, a Director, 3D/VFX artist, and Photographer. He also has a youtube channel that is pretty informative for someone like myself who is trying to learn more about CG in general. 

Clinton teamed up with PNY, a leading manufacturer of memory modules, flash memory cards, USB drives and other computer products, and NVIDA to offer awesome computer components to the top three winners of the competition.  Because I am so new to the CG world, winning a prize was not a motivating factor for me. I had no illusions of me winning this competition. 

This challenge was called Dynamic Machines. 

‍

What is Dynamic Machines

Dynamic Machines is a community-based 3D art contest where Clinton challenged you to build a machine that would show a silver ball entering and exiting the machine. The goal was to guide a chrome ball from the starting platform all the way to the finish line. You had free range to do this any way you could imagine with any 3D program. In the end, everyone's Dynamic Machine would be combined into a single, rendered video.

This challenge had specific rules in place so after someone's project was rendered, if done correctly, it would perfectly line up with the next person's render. Doing this, allowed these individual renders to be combined to create a huge montage of all of the individual submissions. The final montage was released last week with almost 2000 individual entries, creating over 3 hours of content. 

My Submission

My personal goal for this challenge was to just finish a render and submit it. The challenge was live for two months. I submitted my entry at the three week mark. I had a few things going on and I did not have a lot of time to devote a whole two months to this project. As a result, I had to keep my entry simple and safe. The CG process is extremely new to me so a reasonable goal for me would simply be to finish the project. Below was my submission. 

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Results

You can find the three winners here by clicking on the winners tab. In my opinion, these winners have four things in common.

(1) Amazing render quality
(2) Cool concepts
(3) The ball is interacting with the environment
(4) The background has interesting movements

If I had to rate myself in these four topics.

‍

Render Quality - 3.5/5

I am very happy with the quality of my render. Although the lighting is well lit, it could be more interesting. It doesn’t depict a specific mood that adds to the narrative of the ball on its journey.

Cool Concept - 2/5

If this was a school grade, a two out of five is a F. However, this is fine with me. Because for me, the F is for Finish. I just wanted to complete the entry in a time frame that fit my schedule, and in order to do so I had to keep it simple. This render was less of a conceptual challenge for me and more of the technical one. I wanted to get a better understanding of the production process and get used to the workflow of the programs used in the process. 

Ball Interactions - 3.5/5

I think the ball breaking the glass on entrance and exit was really cool. I am also impressed with the sound design I was able to come up with. The audio of the glass shattering and the ball rolling on the surfaces was good. However, my entry was lacking a more thought out narrative of the balls journey. If I compared my entry to the other entries, my entry didn’t interact with the surroundings. It did not trigger other elements in the environment that triggered something else that created a more interesting narrative. 

Intriguing Background - 3.5/5

I like the background. It is simple, symmetrical and easy to look at. There were entries that were even simpler than mine that looked better. I really enjoyed watching the submissions that had really detailed environments. They used the elements in the environment to interact with the ball.

‍

My average score for this project is 3.125 out of 5.

It may seem like I am very harsh on myself on the grading scale, but I truly think I can improve in each of these areas. Feel free to watch some of the entries and shoot me a message letting me know how you think I should be scored.

‍

Full Video

Click Here to see all 1900 submissions.

My submission is at the end. Time marker 3:26:40