[jah]

VFX401 – Star Trek Soldier of Fortune
Submissions Start: February 5th 2010
Submissions End: March 5th 2010

The Star Trek Soldier of Fortune Challenge

It´s stardate 2258, James T. Kirk has been charged with mutiny and has been marooned on the planet Delta Vega by Spock, who is now the commander of the starship USS Enterprise. Fortunatly for Kirk, Starfleet has hired a soldier of fortune and sent him to find and rescue Kirk! Planet Delta Vega is a bleak and barren ice planet, filled with countless life threatening dangers!

To move quickly on the snow, the soldier will be riding a next generation snowboard with plasma thrusters and a anti-gravity engine. He is also wearing a force field based spacesuit which surrounds him with an invisible barrier that keeps out the extreme cold and allows him to move about freely.

Your challenge is to re-create this hostile environment and integrate the supplied video footage depicting the soldier travelling at speed on his board, tweaking it to match the Stardate! You will also need to show that the soldier is fleeing from a natural, mechanical or alien disaster of your choice so let your imaginations run riot!

You can introduce 2D or 3D elements, modify the video footage we supply and use your matte painting skills if you so wish. The only must is that you will need to generate realistic ice and snow to ensure that the scene is as real as it can be! Put your VFX skills to the test by creating the scene as you see fit!

Source Material

Download you source footage here:

http://media.sputnik7.com/vfxtalk/SNWB1A.E.23406.zip
http://media.sputnik7.com/vfxtalk/SN...23406matte.zip

Note this footage is copyright Ribbit Films and you only have permission to use it in the VFX 401 Challenge

Guidelines

You will be judged on the integration of all elements, from appropriate shadow casting, grain, reflections, and originality. The necessary skills you will need to learn to succeed the Series 4 challenges are: Matte Painting, Modelling, Lighting, Compositing, Onset Photography, Planning Ahead, Originality. Particle and volumetric FX generation, Animation, Projection and 3D Texturing and HDRI are all optional.

Everything must be created from scratch, save textures or photographs, of course. The complete shot should be 720 frames long at 24fps (minimum of 15 seconds long) at low HD, res 852x480. No prior work will be accepted. If we find that you are using existing libraries of cities or building models, you will be disqualified.

You get extra points from a active WIP! Begin your WIP thread by painting up this image to show us what you'd like to accomplish. From there, hit the visual effects supervisors mark by bringing that concept to life. It is not necessary to create other shots that lead up to this one, and you won't get higher marks for it. Focus your time on creating this 30 second shot the best that you can! You can find the WIP forums here: http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/vfxchal...orum-f109.html

Voting:

Moderators will judge all entries and will choose a shortlist of ten, these entries will be judged from the Work In Progress threads and the final result. The final ten submissions will then be voted on by the community in order to select the top 3 winners. We do not want to see a final shot turn up out of nowhere and have no clue as to how it was created. Since you are starting this from scratch, having a WIP thread showing your progress will be vital in swaying the judges to vote you into the top 10. Users will then vote on the top 3.

If you have any questions regarding this challenge please post them into this thread. Please start your WIP threads in the VFXChallenge WIP Forum, as always. Because of the complexity of this challenge, team entries will be permitted, provided that all members of the team are members of VFXTalk however teams can be no larger than 2-3 members!

As always, all the help you will ever need can be found in the relevant Software Forums for your software of choice or the WIP Forum. We are trying to encourage an environment for peer/team learning! The more we help each other, the further we can push each other, and the better our VFX skills will become!

The prize's for this month:

1st Place: The 1st Place winner of each monthly VFX challenge will be taking home a hot Intel based Mac Mini! This fantastic prize has been sponsored by the cool people at online independent film site Sputnik7. They will also receive a Taskwise Small Business account, use this innovative software to easily create and share projects and information between a team of up to 10 people.

2nd Place: The runner up will receive a subscription to the eyeon SWAT program and a free copy of SWAT Edition of Fusion! eyeon's new SWAT Membership program offers SWAT members the opportunity to learn Fusion in several different ways from introductory to advanced online training resources and webinars, extensive facility training, 3-day to 6-week courses, SWAT authorized curriculums, including universities and colleges and One-on-one seminars. Members also have access to great SWAT Edition pricing and upgrade models!

Third place: Third place winner is sponsored by CMIvfx, the leading provider of technological training for visual effects artists! You will take home your choice of one CMIvfx training video, take advantage of greate online visual effects training to hone your skills! You can also buy training videos from their site this month at a added discount using the VFX401 promo code!

Judges Prize: The challenges now featre a judges prize that will be awarded to the entry that has the most advanced and seamless usage of visual effects. The judges prize is sponsored by Ribbit Films and consists of a Ribbit Films video compilation worth thousands of dollars!

The Grand Prize:

Series Grand Prize: The coveted grand prize, awarded to the winner of the series, is sponsored by Sputnik7, Eyeon and The Foundry! It consists of an Apple Mac Pro workstation loaded with the latest complete versions of both Eyeon Fusion 6 plus Generation and a copy of Nuke from The Foundry!

The Sponsors

The VFXChallenges are supported by our very generous sponsors; without their help we would not be able to offer such fantastic prizes. These companies have been incredibly supportive of VFXTalk.com and we are extremely grateful to them for their continued involvement in the VFXChallenge Series.

Sputnik7 - www.sputnik7.com

eyeon - http://www.eyeonline.com

The Foundry - http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/

Ribbit Films - http://www.ribbitfilms.com

Silversoft - http://www.taskwise.com

cmiVFX - http://www.cmivfx.com


Feedback
We welcome all your input for the VFXChallenges...please let us know of any cool ideas, footage, elements that you would like to have featured in a future VFXChallenge by letting us know HERE

[RiKToR]

I, for some reason, cant download the footage from the link?

[jah]

ok sorry about that we know why this is happening and why we didnt spot it - firewall issues - will be fixed in a few minutes!

fixed - should be good to go now!

[Loud]

Downloaded fine now, thanks

Edit: Do we happen to know the camera's focal length and/or distance to subject in the footage or are we winging it?

[jah]

winging it sorry! its a challenge after all - figured we gave you the footage so that was a good head start right there!!!

[Engin_Arslan]

Note this footage is copyright Ribbit Films and you only have permission to use it in the VFX 401 Challenge

So does this mean that we wont be allowed to use the piece that we create in our demo reels, if it contains the footage that we are given?

[Popeye Media]

Is it supposed to be be one continuous 30 second shot or can we create multiple shots at different angles, etc...?

[spineblaZe]

Originally Posted by Popeye Media

Is it supposed to be be one continuous 30 second shot or can we create multiple shots at different angles, etc...?

I'd like to know this as well. Also, I assume only one person doing all the work, no teams right?

[AlexSudnikov]

Join to SpineBlaze's question about team's entrances.

[Loud]

Says up there:

Because of the complexity of this challenge, team entries will be permitted, provided that all members of the team are members of VFXTalk however teams can be no larger than 2-3 members!

And judging by past challenges, they don't have to be one continuous shot.

[Trisfae]

30 seconds of one shot would be sort of boring -_-

I'm thinking they don't have to be one shot as well.

[jah]

we could also drop it down to 'between 15 and 30 sec' if 30 sec is really too long? we just dont want 3-5 sec entries...

[Trisfae]

Originally Posted by jah

we could also drop it down to 'between 15 and 30 sec' if 30 sec is really too long? we just dont want 3-5 sec entries...

I agree with this.

[maheshdakshayani]

hi all,

I agree this challenge i am good in Compositing any body is there to do a team work here i am ready

regds
mahesh

[planetmirth]

This looks like a fantastic challenge. I might not have time to work on this one, but I'll certainly keep my eye out for future ones.