MARDINI DAILY ART CHALLENGE
Ready Set Go!
Welcome to the MARDINI Daily Art Challenge which gives the Houdini community the chance to compete for cool prizes by creating a new image or animation every day during the month of March 2021.
Each week has a theme which you can see in the graphic below and each day has a prompt which is meant to inspire the artwork that you submit.
HOW TO ENTER
The MARDINI Daily Challenge Forum has now been made available and on each day a thread for the daily topic will appear for you to post your work. Create your images or animations using Houdini products, including Indie and Apprentice, and render using Karma, Mantra or third party renderers working from within the Houdini environment. Any compositing work should be done using COPS.
Submit your work to these forums in order for your artwork to be considered. To win the daily prizes, you must have your image or animation posted before Midnight EST/EDT on each day. You may submit art to any of the topics throughout the month but your work will only be eligible for the daily prizes or daily entry point if you submit before the daily deadline. You will still be eligible for the Iron Heart prize if you submit after the topic date. The whole forum will be closed on March 31, 2021 at Midnight EST/EDT so the judges can review all the completed work.
To inspire you as you set out on this daily challenge, Moeen Sayed [Em-], the HOULY winner from 2020, has put together a set of tips for creating great daily artworks. He covers things such as planning your month, learning how to start simple, how to ignore the unnecessary and more. He is also doing DAILY REVIEWS of the Mardini entries.
Moeen is best known for his "Houdini Isn't Scary" and "VEX Isn't Scary" tutorials. For HOULY he not only submitted great entries every day but put together tutorials to show how he accomplished each piece. Be sure to check them out on his YouTube channel.
HOW TO WIN
There are a number of different ways to win with the MARDINI Daily Challenge:
DAILY WINNERS
All entries will be reviewed by a panel of Judges and on a daily basis the top 3 images and top 3 animations will be rewarded points.
DAILY POINTS
1st Place Image
5 pts
1st Place Animation
5 pts
2nd Place Image
4 pts
2nd Place Animation
4 pts
3rd Place Image
3 pts
3rd Place Animation
3 pts
Image Entry
1 pts
Animation Entry
1 pts
BEST COLLECTION
The artist with the most points after 31 days.
BEST ARTWORK
From the winning entries for each day, our panel of judges will pick the top three Images and the top three Animations.
IRONHEART
Everyone who submits entries for all 31 challenges and submits them as a contact sheet by April 2, 2021 wins the Iron Heart.
Ironheart Contact Sheet TemplatePRIZES
BEST ARTWORK
First Place: Houdini FX [SideFX]
Second Place: Houdini CORE [SideFX]
Third Place: Houdini CORE [SideFX]
BEST COLLECTION [MOST POINTS]
Houdini FX [SideFX]
DAILY FIRST PLACE WINNERS
Houdini T-Shirt [SideFX]
IRON HEART
Houdini Swag Pack
RULES
This contest is open to any 3D artist anywhere in the world. All entries must be received on or before the closing date.
- This contest is void where prohibited.
- Employees of SideFX or any of their agents may participate in the contest but are not eligible to win.
- The judges' decision is final.
- SideFX is not responsible for submissions that arrive late, or are lost or damaged during submission.
- If the prize cannot be awarded due to unforeseen circumstances, no cash alternatives are available.
- Artwork created for these challenges must be created using Houdini products. Winners will be asked to submit .hip files to verify that Houdini was used for all aspects of the designs. If you do not submit the files then you will be disqualified.
- External texture maps may be used as part of your submission but geometry and motion must be created in Houdini.
- All content must be the property of the submitter. If you are running Houdini on an employer or school computer make sure that this does not compromise your ownership rights.
- Entries that clearly infringe on the copyrights of another company will be disqualified.
- Your entry in the contest constitutes an agreement to allow SideFX unrestricted use and distribution of the artwork submitted.
FAQ
Q. What has changed from the HOULY Contest?
A. There are now daily prizes for Images and Animations instead of these competing against each other. To get the daily point for entering you must hit the midnight deadline. To complete the Iron Heart you can finish entries and submit as a contact sheet at any point before April 2, 2021.
Q. Is the Deadline midnight EST or EDT?
A. Since March will see daylight savings time arrive, the deadline will be either midnight EST or EDT depending on the change.
Q. Can third party render engines such as Redshift be used?
A. Yes as long as they are set up to render inside Houdini.
Q. Are Indie and Apprentice users eligible?
A. Yes.
Q. Are we allowed to use SideFX Labs, MOPs and or QLibs?
A. Yes plug-ins and third party tools are also allowed.
Q. Are multiple submissions allowed?
A. Only one submission per day per artist is allowed.
Q. Do I have to choose between images and animations for the duration of the challenge?
A. No. You can create an image one day and an animation another. They will just be judges in different categories each day but the points will be combined to find the best overall.
Q. Can I output animations using flipbooks?
A. Yes. You can use the Viewport OpenGL to output your entry.
Q. Can Megascans/Substance be used?
A. Megascan and other 3rd party models are not allowed in the contest. Megascan and Substance textures are allowed.
Q. Can I use an existing Houdini project as one of my entries?
A. In the spirit of MARDINI, you should create a new entry every day and not use artwork you have created for some other purpose.
Q. Do I need to enter every day to win?
A. Not necessarily. There are four ways to win - see the rules above for more details.
Q. Are groups allowed?
A. No, this contest is designed for individual artists.
Q. If I win multiple daily challenges do I get multiple T-shirts?
A. Artists will only get one T-shirt no matter how many daily challenges they win.