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FGT3D Santa's New Ride Winners Announced!

We are very excited to announce the winners of the FGT3D Challenge themed on Santa’s New Ride! In this challenge, the works submitted by participants must be a 3D rendered image. And Jury paid attention to the visual appeal, storytelling, and technique. Thanks to all our beloved participants, jury and sponsors. Theme Christmas is coming soon! Santa Claus is on the way to deliver gifts again. But Santa is coming a different way this year, he may ride a motorcycle, may drive a Lamborghini, or even get on a rocket! Please create your 3D render and show Santa’s new ride in your mind. 1st place: The Paramount Ride - Shiju NK What our jury says > Fox Renderfarm Team: Scene and lighting both show loneliness feel, as Santa carrying vaccines reflects the current covid19 situation and gives the world some hope even it's in the dark. Almost painting like texture and color further reminding of lovable Norman Rockwell style. Great work! > Miho Aoki: I'm based in Alaska, and I see snow every day. This image does look like a small old gas station in winter here, though we don't have these old pumps anymore. There are very fine details on Santa and also on other places. I see the snow on the yellow metal numbers by the pump is half melted: it shows that the artist cared about the details. The lighting is excellent too. The thstronge of delivering vaccines is very timely and also resonates with the story of Alaskan dog sled teams delivering serum to a town to stop the diphtheria outbreak in the winter of 1925. This image makes me ask a lot of questions, like why is it a moppet? Can it fly? What has happened to reindeers? It'd be nice there are hints for these questions' answers in the image. > Frank WANG Yefeng: My top choice for the competition goes to “The Paramount Ride.” This rendering utilizes melancholic cinstrongatography to put us in deep contstrongplation of the challenges we went through in 2020. Black humor accompanies the sadness in the composition. The creator wittily transformed Santa’s vehicle into a Vespa scooter and the gifts into a package of the very much needed Vaccine. Details such as Santa’s gesture of looking at his watch shows that time is a pressing matter in this holiday season. With an intersection to the world’s current context, “The Paramount Ride” is not only exquisite in its technique but also profound in its content. It makes me wonder: is this beard biker in red our savior, or is he an incarnation of our lives’ disorder? > Kariem Saleh: This strong and funny concept really speaks to all of us after 2020. The image has a nice choice of colors, lighting and composition. Texture details are in all the right places and never distracting. This is a timeless snapshot of what we are all going through right now and might be a good rstronginder on anyones wall of the great efforts that we all made together to get through this difficult time. > XP-Pen Team: Visual Appeal——It is very detailed. The light, the snow and car marks in the snow all are dedicated!Storytelling——Feels a bit lonely and sad story, touch our hearts.Technical——Pertect! > Graswald Team: Lovely idea with a great reference to our current situation. The snow looks wonderful, I like the composition, the pose of Santa and the use of Red and White. Great job! > Textures.com Team: Excellent work overall, tells a story, beautiful lighting and use of color. > Texturebox Team: Modelling and lighting good , idea santa lost his deers and using a Vespa for disturbing gifts but it sestrongs he will be late. 2nd place: Heavy Metal Santa - Vinicius Villela  What our jury says > Cenay Oekmen: The Character is very interesting. I do like the Cartoon look. The Skin shader works nice. I do also like all the small details like the Fur part. Very good Framing. > Kariem Saleh: This one has a brilliantly funny general concept. The character design and modelling is very well executed and appealing. Excellent composition and very nice overall shading and coloring. Very well done! I wonder what kind of presents he actually delivers ;) > Corona Renderer Team: This one nailed the cartoon look with just enough detail but not too much, so that it didn't fall into the uncanny valley of realistic yet cartoon, but went fully cartoon. I also love this Santa full of attitude! The good use of depth of field then rounds it out nicely. > Graswald Team: Love the idea and the execution. The different materials look spot on (the hair, the belly, the fabric) and makes you wanna watch a Pixar movie about this character. Great storytelling and impressive implementation! > Textures.com Team: Great concept, fantastic modelling, and the materials and shading are top notch! > Texturebox Team: Santa's workshop looks like cyberpunk , texturing is good, I feel inside a game in this render. 3rd place: Santa Is Crashing To Town - Hoang Nguyen What our jury says > Fox Renderfarm Team: Sci-Fi setting makes one wonder why Santa is from space? Does he live on the moon? Very attention to details, the smoke, the lens flare, gives more mysteries for the story. > Miho Aoki: This image presents a lot of anticipation. Is Santa OK? Did he try a new way of coming to the earth this year? Is he going to come out now? What will the police do? The image is very detailed and coherent and allows us to explore the details to look for clues. The lighting effect and smoky/dusty feeling are very well done too. > Frank WANG Yefeng: SANTA IS CRASHING TO TOWN” challenges our conventional impression of Santa’s pleasant arrival at Christmas times. The focal point of the composition shows a disastrous crashing site with gifts scattered all over the ground. The police cars put Santa (who is already in deep trouble) under siege, making the viewers question what could happen to him next. The protagonist here is ironically being depicted as an accidental “intruder.” The post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the image resonates with all the unprecedented events we encountered in 2020. This wrecked flying craft might serve as a metaphor for our time filled up with turmoils and unpredictabilities. > Kariem Saleh: That piece is based on a really cool and original idea. The atmosphere is sucking you in. All color and lighting choices in here are stellar and spot on! Now we finally know how Santa travels around the globe so quickly. > Cenay Oekmen: I love the Idea of a Santa using a spaceship capsule. Overall composition is lovely. Nice and Gritty. > XP-Pen Team: Visual Appeal—— The whole layout of dense and strongpty place distribution is very reasonable, the atmosphere is also very clever, the details are full, is the kind of common at the first sight, but the more you see the more taste of the map, the new mount is the space cabin this idea is very good.Storytelling—— The cabin that landed on alert is actually Santa's new car! It is so imaginative!Technical——Perfect! > Texturebox Team: I think the idea is unique than others. Modelling and texturing is very good. Santa is not from the earth and is really good. Honorable Mentions: Santa's New Ride A Phoenix Hope - Kay John Yim  What our jury says > Miho Aoki: I was immediately drawn to this image. This work took the idea of a "new ride" to a very different level. If Santa Claus, who brings wonderful joy to all children, wishes a new ride, it might be a supernatural one like this. It looks as it can go anywhere beyond the speed of light. The sense of the three-dimensional space, scale, lighting, and details of the image are excellent, and they all contribute to the happy feeling of the scene. > XP-Pen Team: Visual Appeal—Both the light shadow and the final effect are fantastic, and the idea of the phoenix as the new vehicle of Santa Claus is really interesting. A little perspective+symmetrical composition+the red decorated by Santa Claus and the brightest yellow of Phoenix make the whole painting fall on the main body, which is very nice. Storytelling—The birds flying up, the movstrongents of the crowd, the deer on the moon, the Christmas tree in the street, the snowflakes like feathers, the snowman in the corner, this painting is full of stories.Technical—Perfect! > Corona Renderer Team: Lots of love in this image! To begin, I love that it looks like a conventional Christmas card in its colors and format, yet the subject matter is very surprising. I love the level of detail in this, with all those twinkling lights, the snowflakes, the reindeer taking it easy on the moon now that the new ride has taken over (nice touch of humour there!). Above all I love the "glass Phoenix" which makes a dramatic and powerful centerpoint to the image, and is very different from anything else we saw. > Textures.com Team: I love the dynamic and magical feel in this image. Santa's on the future ride - Hieu Trinh  What our jury says > Graswald Team: I am a big fan of CG Lego (and real Lego) and really loved this idea and its technical execution. I only wish you could see Santa more clearly or any other character that could have told a more interesting story. Santa's New Ride - Maynard Ellis  What our jury says > Cenay Oekmen: Really nice work, I do like the Lighting and Material settings. The overall composition is spot on. Congrats to the winners, and thanks to everyone for participating. Fox Renderfarm Team will contact the winners for prize distribution in the next few days. For more info https://www.foxrenderfarm.com/fgt3d-santa-new-ride-challenge.html Hope to see you soon on our next FGT3D Challenge! Stay tuned!

Enjoy Creating 'Art for Your Walls' and Keep Creating

With the theme of Costumes, Cauldrons & Concoctions, Renderosity 2020 Animation Halloween Contest received many great animation artworks. Congratulations to all the winners and everyone participated in the event. As the sponsor of the contest, Fox Renderfarm, the best render farm, is pleased to interview the second-place winner of the Animation Halloween Contest,Maynard Ellis, who is a long-time digital graphic artist and also an aspiring animator and game developer. Maynard’s award-winning work, Trick Or Treat, was animated with iClone 7, and the characters and environments were converted from Daz using CC3. “I had a great time making this and I am looking forward to doing more now I have worked out a good method for getting DAZ characters and environments into iClone,” said Maynard. Here’s the interview between Maynard Ellis and Fox Renderfarm, in which you can find out how he made the animation. Fox Renderfarm: Hi Maynard, could you give us a brief introduction about yourself? Maynard: I have been involved with CG art for over 20 years, primarily as a hobby although I have been involved professionally as a graphic designer on many occasions. I first joined Renderosity in 2004 and always aspired to be a vendor on their store which never quite happened, but this strange year of lockdown has seen me renewing that interest and I have several products that I am working on that should be ready soon. I have a broad range of skills that I have developed over the years and a real love for digital art and I am now spending time encouraging my teenage son to embrace some of this passion. Fox Renderfarm: How do you feel about being the 2nd place winner of Renderosity 2020 Animation Halloween Contest? Maynard: There were unfortunately technical issues with this animation contest which I hope the team at Renderosity gets on top of in the future as I don't think everyone's entry was portrayed in the best light which may have affected the outcome. Having said that I was pleased to feature among the winners. A lot of work goes into animation and I am pleased to have received some recognition for the effort. The encouragement you get from doing well in contests like this definitely helps you to keep pushing yourself to create more and to learn more about your craft. Fox Renderfarm: What is the inspiration for your work Trick Or Treat? Maynard: I was inspired by the Halloween theme and the desire to tell a story with my entry. You should always be wary of knocking on the door to a witch’s house and always expect some form of trickery and the simple idea of a witch poisoning a child with her brew seemed to be something that I could achieve within the limited time I had available to put this entry together. Fox Renderfarm: What’s the pipeline for the work? Maynard: I created characters in Daz Studio. I focussed on a stylized look instead of going for realism. I selected a pretty standard cottage environment in DS that suited the exterior of the witches house along with a bedroom interior scene. I converted the characters and environments for use in iClone using Character Creator 3. CC3 does a great job bringing DS characters into iClone and preparing them for use as iAvatars. I found that 3DXchange did not handle DS environments well enough and that the resulting iProps it created were not very usable for animations. After some online searching and trial and error I worked out a good way to bring environments into iClone via CC3 which kept every individual element separate and animatable which allowed me to easily animate both the door and the gate opening. For the most part I used standard animation clips that came with iClone and some downloaded for free from Mixamo, however this was not enough for the full range of animation the story required and I had to hand animate a number of sequences using iClone animation tools. The required sequences were crudely story boarded in a textual narrative leaving me to create a suitable animation for each clip listed in the storyboard. My teenage son who has been using Premier for some of his high school projects cut the animated sequences together and created the sound FX, voices and background music. We did not fully agree on the soundtrack but I put him in charge of that and due to time constraints I was not able to make some changes that I would have made in a perfect world, however having said that some of the SFX he created were excellent and really helped make the whole project work. Fox Renderfarm: Which part of this work are you most satisfied with and why? Maynard: I think I am most happy with how both the characters and the environment transferred from DAZ to iClone. They looked good and animated well which was great. I was also very satisfied with the fact that I collaborated on this with my son who helped me plan the animation scenes required and he cut it all together for me in Premier and he provided the sounds. Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties when creating this work? And how did you solve it? Maynard: There were many areas of difficulty that had to be overcome for this to work. I had to learn more about iClone than I knew and I had to get the characters and environments into iClone. The characters came in pretty easily with the tools iClone provided but the environment was more challenging and to get into iClone from DAZ keeping it looking great and also having the ability to animate things such as doors and gates etc. The traditional approach of using 3DXchange does not work as well as it should and I ended up taking a different approach using CC3 for both the characters and the environment. Fox Renderfarm: How long have you studied CG production, can you introduce your learning method? Maynard: I was a digital video editor back in the mid 1990's using sVHS and Hi8 tapes and digitising this footage to my PC. I also learnt a lot about digital design in the 90's which has held me in good stead as I moved into working with 3D to create art. I have not done a lot with animation, however I have created video and film based stop motion animations and in 2011 I did a few animations within DAZ Studio and one in particular one a contest held by DAZ. I have been self taught as an artist and love all aspects of digital art, film and photography and animation. Blue - Young red haired farm boy © Maynard Ellis Fox Renderfarm: Any other things you want to share with the CG enthusiasts? Maynard: I used to be very focussed on trying to produce photo real 3D art images and later I switched my focus to creating 'art for your walls' which is much more satisfying for me. Regardless of what you create and how you create it, just focus on creating art you enjoy looking at and that is all that matters. Be kind to your fellow artists and understand that art is very subjective and the important thing is to never stop creating and to always enjoy what you create. Morgan © Maynard Ellis

A Happy Hobbyist Shows the Beauty of CG

Sponsored by the cloud render farm Fox Renderfarm, Renderosity 2020 Halloween Contest with 3D theme, Costumes, Cauldrons & Concoctions, was successfully held. Congratulations to all winners and thanks to everyone who participated in this event. Each entry tells us a magical story. We are very honored to have the opportunity to interview the third-place winner, Morrigan Flebotte, who is a CG enthusiast from Canada. She used her spare time to create the work Ya Want Two Scoops, Sweetheart?, which was rendered in Daz 4.10, using 3Delight with a dab of PS postwork. Ya Want Two Scoops, Sweetheart? © Morrigan Flebotte This is how Morrigan described her work: “There aren't many places to eat out in the Unseen World, but hit the Woods and eventually you'll find Louwheeze's Malt Shoppe. No denizen of dark places can resist the luscious flavour of cauldron-fresh cockroach-cream and worm Eye-Scream! Treat yourself, you won't regret it... just don't forget to leave her a tip.” Here’s the interview between Morrigan and Fox Renderfarm. Fox Renderfarm: Hi Morrigan, could you give us a brief introduction about yourself? Morrigan: I am a happy hobbyist in digital art from Alberta, Canada. I live in a small town, where usually there really isn’t much to do – even before COVID-19! I actually have more work, now, since all my children are now at home for school which means I am a teacher by day as well as working part-time as a librarian. Computer art gets what’s left of me. Fox Renderfarm: Though it’s not the first time you win the contest on Renderosity, how do you feel about being the 3rd place winner of the Renderosity 2020 3D Halloween Contest this year? Morrigan: I am very pleased to have won third place; Halloween pictures aren’t something I am very good at. It was an exciting contest because there were so many interesting entries! Fox Renderfarm: What is the inspiration for your work Ya Want Two Scoops, Sweetheart? Morrigan: I think my inspiration was the waitress from The Emperor’s New Groove, which I had just re-watched recently with my son. It was her voice that kept whispering in my ear! Fox Renderfarm: How long did it take to finish the work? Morrigan: The piece took about three days – I was quite enthusiastic about it, so I kept sneaking away to work on it. The children are very supportive of my hobby, and would bring their work into my room so they could talk to me about school while I fiddled with the picture. Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties when creating this work? And how did you solve it? Morrigan: Difficulties... well, for whatever reason, I was having a problem with the material for her eyes, and no matter what I did they would only render white. In the end, I just accepted it and moved on, using hand-painting to bring them to life in postwork. Fox Renderfarm: Since you often share your CG works in the community, and also participate in CG contests, what is the biggest gain in your CG art journey? Morrigan: I think my biggest gain is the feedback I get from the community. I find that if I look at my pieces too long I only see the flaws, or the things I wish I was able to do differently. My style is not photo-realistic as so many other people’s are, and I wonder often if anyone else out there will like the results from my choices. Overall just a few kind words (or 3rd place!) is enough to make me continue to share what I do. Good Horse Goes to War © Morrigan Flebotte Fox Renderfarm: Could you tell us how you improve your CG skills? Morrigan: My learning style is quite random! I start with an idea, then enter negotiations with my software and my knowledge to see how far I can get before I either have to compromise or manage to discover something new or approach my problem a different way. Occasionally I will find a Youtube video that helps or win a new piece of software that opens up new possibilities. Hatchling © Morrigan Flebotte Fox Renderfarm: Any other things you want to share with the CG enthusiasts? Morrigan: The beauty of computer graphics is that with work anyone can bring an idea to life and share a vision with hundreds of other people. It’s amazing and fun!