Halloween has already passed but its ghastly presence still lurks all around. Halloween brought with it a flurry of creativity and great fun. Many famous computer graphics portals held different contests in the spirit of this wicked holiday to encourage and unite the talented artists and writers. And now the influence of Halloween’s visual delight is everywhere to be seen.

The Carnival of Evil on Renderosity.com has just been closed. The votes have been tabulated, and now it’s time to announce the winners!

3D & Animation category winners.
The first place winner is Penandink with the entry #156. This work was created in Poser 5 and Photoshop CS.

The second place winner is Robsfx with the entry #175. The image was created in Poser. The composition/lighting was adjusted in Vue for a better balance. The author used quite a few Photoshop tricks for the final touches.

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Renderosity - one of the biggest art communities - invites everybody to take part in voting on entries for the annual Halloween Design Contest - Carnival of Evil! The voting started on October, 16th and will be open till October 29th at 11:59pm CST (system time). The winners will be selected by the community. So, hurry up and make your contribution to the contest and vote for the best entry.

The winners will be announced on Friday, October 31, 2008.
Everybody could have taken part in this Design Contest. And there was no limit for participants. They could use any software and create anything related to Halloween they wanted. Don’t be indifferent and help to choose the very best!

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Here are some of the submitted works.

Entry # 59.
Software used: Poser7 and photo, PSP postwork.

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Entry # 94.
Software used: Rendered in P6, postworked in PSPXI.

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Does this fit with your idea? Are you a talented artist or photographer but you’re still waiting to show your work to the whole world? Then, this blogpost is perfect for you. It is an overview of the most famous Art magazines that are interesting both for reading and for self promotion at the same time. Don’t stay in the shadows, reveal yourself and your works! Let the world see your amazing creations and enjoy your art!

Learn how to get known to a huge audience by submitting your artworks to more than 30 of well visited art magazines and portals. This is a totally free kind of self promotion. Enjoy!

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Arriba
Arriba is one of the brightest art journals. It is open to contributors from all over the world, in an attempt to offer a global vision of today’s art variety. Feel free to contribute with: graphic design, photography, drawings, illustrations, texts and poems.

Read more here.

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Blanket
Blanket is a free PDF online magazine that is aimed at uncovering art, design and photography from the talented people who create it. Each issue they give a specific theme and encourage artists to submit a piece of original work that reacts to this theme. So, take the chance!

Read more here

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Halloween is not far off. And on this occasion 3D Buzz - one of the famous 3D resources among various artists circles - announced a new Digital Artists Competition: Halloween. Everybody can take part in this competition. For this, every participant should create imagery in the spirit of Halloween: “something scary, mysterious, creepy, or even just a traditional Halloween image”.

But this contest goes in somewhat different form. The main thing here is not your final image but the process of creation. Such aspect gives community a chance to see how the author is getting to the end result and to feel the art from within. That’s why all contestants will be responsible for keeping up a contest thread that covers how the work is progressing. There are three main criteria according to which each image will be judged:
- Attention to Artistic Style and Quality in the Final Image.
- Originality.
- Quality of Work In Progress Update Posts.

You can create your image through any digital means. It may be a 3D render, digital painting, digital photo, or otherwise digitally manufactured or processed image. Everything is eligible for entry. The image must be a JPG at a size of 1024×768, or up to the maximum resolution their software version will allow, up to 1024×768. The selection process and procedure will be kept in the following way:
The stage 1 is based upon the public opinion. Each 3D Buzz user can vote for three images he likes most. At the end only 10 works from amongst the entries received will be selected.
On the stage 2 the 3D Buzz staff will choose a winner and two runners-up. These winners will be announced on the following Nightly Hour Radio Show.

But what’s at stake? - you will ask. The Grand Prize winner will receive a one-year 3D Buzz Golden Ticket that will provide him/her access to every product in the 3D Buzz store at his/her request. 1st and 2nd runners-up will receive the following: The first and second runners up will each receive a $250 Gift Certificate to the 3D Buzz Store!

Final entries must be completed by 11:59:59 PM CST on October 31, 2008
Hurry up and don’t miss your chance!
Contest Entry Page.

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The 5th Peugeot Design Contest has been finished just now. The theme of the contest was “IMAGINE THE PEUGEOT IN THE WORLDWIDE MEGALOPOLIS OF TOMORROW”. The projects should bear Peugeot’s stylistic codes and must contain the following four aspects included in this design competition: environmental awareness, social harmony, interactive mobility and economic efficiency. Many talented 3D artists took part in it and coped with the task. But only three were chosen as the bestest. If you’d like to look at the works of other 29 finalists, follow the link “The 29 Finalists of the 5th Peugeot Design Contest Announced!”

Here are the winners. Please, take our congratulations!

Lou Ke from China with the work OXO took the third place.

“OXO” by Lou Ke.

The second place winner is Emre Yazici from Turkey.

“Ego” by Emre Yazici.

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SIGGRAPH (short for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) is the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. For the first time ever, this conference was held in 1974 in Boulder, USA. But right now SIGGRAPH is widely considered to be the most famous and prestigious festival that unites thousands of powerful and skillful computer graphics artists from all over the world and where they may present their recently created CG films and share their experience.

This year’s Annual Conference was held in Los Angeles Convention Center, California, USA from 11-15 August, 2008. About 30,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents took part in it. The jury was presented by nearly 30 masters from every corner of the globe who were entrusted with a great task - to choose the deserved winners in the following nominees: Best of Show, Jury Award, Student Prize, Audience Prize, and a special Well Told Fable Prize for SIGGRAPH 2008.

“Mother Nature” created by Meats Meier

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As we have already mentioned in our previous article “Peugeot 3D Models Design Contest“, PEUGEOT AUTOMOBILES has been organizing a competition between 20 April and 20 July 2008 called the “Peugeot Design Competition 2008 (number 5)”.

All people who wished to take part in this contest had plenty of time to submit their works. And PEUGEOT has already selected 29 designs amongst the entries received. The general rules of the competition were as follows: Entrants must design their project in accordance with the following theme: “IMAGINE THE PEUGEOT IN THE WORLDWIDE MEGALOPOLIS OF TOMORROW”. The participants should take into consideration Peugeot’s stylistic codes and their projects must contain the following four aspects: environmental awareness, social harmony, interactive mobility and economic efficiency. So, everyone had a chance to try himself and appear as an automobile engineer using all his creative imagination.

The selection process and procedures are rather complicated and consist of several stages until the winner is selected. The second and third place competition winners will also be announced. Now the voting is at its height. If you take part in voting and guess which project will win the Design Contest, you have a chance to win one of the 20 Xbox 360! At the end of the competition, PEUGEOT will build a full size model of the winning vehicle, which will be exhibited at the Shanghai Motor Show in April 2009.

And now the most interesting part… The 29 finalists with their concept car designs are presented below.

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Title: SVP
Author: Mickael Soubabère
Location: France

The main advantages of this car are speed, comfort and space. The feeling of freedom, this is what you feel while driving this vehicle. But ecology is the main matter of concern. So, this car runs on solar energy.

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Title: Module
Author: Cristian Fabio Di Filippo
Location: Argentina

We can’t imagine our life without transport. But for glut on the roads, we should think about flexible forms of vehicles that can be adapted to modern conditions. And this stylish car presented by Cristian Fabio Di Filippo from Argentina combines all these aspects.

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Gamers and 3d graphics fans are screaming with delight as this weekend Blizzard has officially announced Diablo III - a long-awaited version of the cult game that we are all big fans of. According to GameSpot.com, this event took place at the 2008 Worldwide Invitational in Paris.

the image is taken from Kotaku.com

After 8 long years since its predecessor’s release, Diablo III finally emerges from the heap of rubble and rumor that has buried it after many letdowns from previous Blizzard conventions. And to no one’s surprise, it looks awesome.

the image is taken from Kotaku.com

Diablo III will have a much deeper and player interactive story than the previous installments. Your character will now have a voice and will be able to make specific actions to move the story along. Player driven events and class specific quests are just a few of the ways Blizzard is trying to bring in the full roleplaying feel in an ARPG.

Diablo III has a team of 50-55 developers dedicated to it, according to Jay Wilson, the game’s lead designer. The game will offer drop-in/drop-out co-op play over Battle.net throughout; though it will be doable as a solo player, gamers will be able to bring friends in at any stage.

the image is taken from Kotaku.com

Although the game is obviously not yet rated, Blizzard confirmed to GameSpot that it plans to stay true to the series’ M-rated roots. The company is aiming for an ESRB M rating, and a PEGI 16+ in Europe.

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Howdy 3d geeks and other sincere admirers of 3d sphere and CG in whole! For the past week there were several juicy events in the world of 3d graphics. One of them is the release of LuxRender 0.5 - an open source physically based render engine. A new version has a large number of new features and major rewrites - hierarchical 2D & 3D procedural material and texture system, biased and unbiased integrators, full spectral rendering and many others. You are welcome to check out the rest of innovations at the release page.

For those who don’t know what LuxRender is:

It is an unbiased (which now also supports traditional/biased techniques too) render engine that is released under GPL. LuxRender supports Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

the photo is taken from LuxRender gallery.

You have all probably seen the new animated film from DreamWorks Animation and Paramount Pictures - the ‘Kung Fu Panda’. And since it was made with the 3D visual effects we thought it’d be great to post something interesting for our audience as you are all both fans of 3D and of the funny cartoons, aren’t you?

So, today under our blog’s newly added “column” called 3D NEWS we post some of the most interesting stuff from the interview with two main directors of ‘Kung Fu Panda’ posted at Animated Views blog (which by the way we at Templates.com always enjoy reading).

Besides its colorful visuals and excellent vocal performances, including Dustin Hoffman as master Shifu, the cartoon is also a challenge in itself in matter of animation. As one of Kung Fu Panda’s directors, Mark Osborne, said, the biggest challenge for them was a way to actually perfect kung fu and get all this physicality actually correct. The creators wanted their kung fu to be as grounded as possible, and all the acting in this movie as grounded as possible, so that people couldn’t say that it’s animation. Quite a logical challenge for 3D artists that have been working on the cartoon, isn’t it?

the image is taken from Animated-Views.com

The studio appealed to Daniel D. Gregoire, a live-action artist, and brought him in to do some pre-viz on the film, which is a rather unusual way to proceed. As John Stevenson (another film director) said, the biggest challenge for the movie, artistically and technically, was how to make the action scenes look different. So, that first translation from 2D storyboards into 3D was very critical. Daniel Gregoire had an immense experience in pre-viz on a lot of huge movies like the ‘Star Wars’ films and Spielberg’s ‘War of the Worlds’.

the image is taken from Animated-Views.com

There is indeed a traditionally hand-drawn animated sequence, realized by James Baxter, that opens the film. So, there is 2D sequence in a 3D movie. “Starting the movie with something that would hopefully surprise people because they would expect to see a whole CG film was something fun”, said John Stevenson. “And this sequence appeals to us. It is more graphically stylized than the standard look of 2D animated feature. We have a more graphic sensibility and “anime” was of a huge influence”.

the image is taken from Animated-Views.com

So don’t miss ‘Kung Fu Panda’ cartoon, enjoy it and see the striking 3d graphics performance!