Enter our new contest!, Create an awesome, full-featured, ready for production fantasy character and win awesome prices.

The focus of the contest will be ORIGINAL Fantasy Humanoid Characters, rigged and posed. Contest will run from March 1st to April 1st.

Rules:

• Design, model, texture, rig and pose an original fantasy humanoid character.
• You can use concepts under creative commons licenses (BY, BY-SA) or public domain works and/or works used with explicit, written permission).
• Copyrighted material and/or fan art is not allowed.
• Characters may be high poly, but multiresolution is not allowed in the final version (ie, you can sculpt and bake normal maps to a moderately high poly character [recommended]).
• Characters should be rigged and posed before uploading, the render should be obtainable by just hitting F12 in Blender (ie. Internal or Cycles only, no external renderers).
• You can use whatever software tools you know and need, but the final result must be a .blend file.
• You must upload the finished blend, with the complete, full featured, ready for production model to Blend Swap, like you'd do with any other swap, from here
• Entries must be tagged with FantasyContest to enter the contest. If you forget to add the tag upon upload you can add it later by editing your entry.

Some examples of entries that would be acceptable:

Fairies, robots, original superheroes, princesses, orcs, elves... the palette is quite wide, you define what makes your character a fantasy character.

Remember: Blend Swap is a place to share 3D models, not just renders and so Blend Swap Contests are also about sharing 3D models. Entries that feature only renders, without the model, or in a format different from .blend, will be disqualified. All other upload rules clarified in the first screen of the upload page still apply.

Judges

Once again we've been graced with some of the biggest talent in the Blender community to judge our contest.

• Jonathan Williamson of CGCookie.com.
• Lee Salvemini of CGMasters.net.
• Greg Zaal of Blendernerd.com.

Judging Criteria

Judging will be: 50% model, 30% texture, 10% Pose, 10% Environment

• Modeling (50 points)
  • Topology (30 points)
  • Original design (20 points)
• Texture (30 points)
  • Is it UV unwrapped effectively or is the UV map a mess? (10 points)
  • Does the model look good, as far as textures go? This may or may not require bump/spec/diffuse/transparency maps (20 points)
• Rigging and Pose (15 points)
• Is the character rigged correctly, proper deformation, weight painting, IK, etc (10 points)
• Is the character expressing emotion/action in their pose. (5 points)
• Environment (5 points)
  • Is the character in an appropriate setting. (5 points)

Prizes:

1st Place:

• CG Cookie Workshop, Basic account. - Value $180 Blender Cookie will soon announce their first workshop, Master Modeling in Blender. This workshop is a 4-5 week, online course that will teach you everything you need to know to master mesh modeling. This course covers all the fundamentals, theory and practices of modeling, including extensive coverage of topology, poly modeling, sculpting and low poly modeling. Throughout this course you will gain a solid understanding of techniques you can apply towards not only organic or hard surface modeling but any kind of modeling and subject matter.
• 12 months of Unlimited Bandwidth on Blend Swap - Value $120

2nd Place:

• 6 months of Unlimited Bandwidth on Blend Swap - Value $60
• Track, Match, Blend! DVD - Value $40
• Mango DVD - Value $45

3rd Place:

• 3 months of Unlimited Bandwidth on Blend Swap - Value $30
• Mango DVD - Value $45

We are super excited buy this contest, the Judges and the Prizes, we hope you guys love it. Best of luck to everyone and better start Blending. The Blend Swap Crew