Mini Challenge #1: Snowscape

Ok...let's get the ball rolling.

This challenge is going to be fairly simple. Here are the guidelines:

1) Your goal is to make a snowscape scene...of any sort. Can be a sunset....a picture of a glacier, tundra etc etc

2) Your final entry must be rendered out at 800x600

3) (Here's the real challenge) Render time for your image MUST be UNDER 3 minutes. Cheating by lying and saying it took shorter than it did won't help you...because even if you "win"....you still haven't learned how to properly optimize a scene (and therefore you're still losing out on those skills you could have aquired).

note: in accordance with rule #3, it should be noted that only 1 machine is allowed to render the image. So....you can have a dual-threaded dual-cpu machine....but no net-rendering or things of that sort.

4) The challenge closes in TWO weeks (July 18 )

5) Post your machine specs

6) This is a WIP challenge (although you are fully entitled to gracing us with your image on the deadline only)...so it's recommended that you start a thread in THIS forum (mini-challenge forum) in which you'll show the progress of your piece as the 2 weeks go by. Thread title format should be like this:

Snowscape challenge: Your name

That's about it. As for prizes....we will have a vote at the end of the contest. Whoever wins the vote will be allowed to choose a custom user title which will appear under their moniker in the forums (ie...right now the user titles are automatic...like "youngling", "deputy", etc...but you'll get to pick whatever you want )

Now...run along and make cool pictures! Should be interesting to see what kind of snow-shaders you all come up with

Oh also...I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement this in the forums, but it would be cool to have a little "trophy" image that will appear under the winner's username in the forums, similar to the "cgtalk award" banners that some users have over at cgtalk.

I'll talk to cammy about this one.

I have a Pentuim II 333Mhz, 64Mb SDRam and a wet sponge for a hard drive... what should I do?

LOL - nice idea and a real toughie! I guess it would be fairer if every scene was rendered on the same machine - but I am sure that would be a logistical and time consuming nightmare, so I'm happy to work with what I've got (though I'd suggest putting up your specs with your entry even if it's just for Kudos to say you rendered a particular scene in under 3 minutes using only a wet sponge!)

Hmmm... I do have a friend that uses dual Xeon with 3.5Gig of RAM... maybe I should have a word... hehe

Good point global. Added to the rules

Another thing, is not one renderer have the same speed, and I do my render on 9 machines at the same time so 3 min for me would be 30 min for someone else so it makes no sense T.

Sure!

Btw....I definitely thought about you John while making this contest....and I apologize that you're kind of "left out" (even though you're welcome to post your 2d picks and enter those). The reason I started with an image-based challenge is that most people (in the suggestions thread) wanted to do a lighting/rendering challenge.

The next challenge will be animationg-based though....so you'll be able to "exercize" your forte