Best Of 2003 Calendar Contest!

General Phoenix · December 5th, 2003, 03:17 PM

Alright, everybody - a new year is almost upon us, and that means it's time to look back on 2003 and remember the best of our work.

In keeping with that idea, a few of our veteran members are going to be going through the Finished Artwork forum to find the best work posted here in the last year. Once we've managed to settle on about 30 images, I will setup a public voting thread where you can choose MULTIPLE images that you think should be part of our 3DG Best of 2003 Calendar, to be available in our Online Store as soon as it is assembled. The thirteen images with the most votes will be featured in the calendar, and the TOP image will win the cover spot.

Now for the prize information...

The monthly winners will each receive a free copy of the calendar.

The winner of the Cover spot will also win an additional surprise, to be revealed after the voting is complete.

Any questions or comments are welcome!

Chris B · December 6th, 2003, 09:04 AM

May I politely point your attention at the fact that a (supposingly) big deal of the images has been removed from the servers they were hosted on. Even artists sometimes clean out their webspace. I therefor suggest, if you want to publish a calendar, pick the actual Images of the Months that were choosen by the members. If all those that cannot be find on the servers anymore fall out of the game, it would 1) not represent the fading year and 2) be unfair.

May I also mention that the number of active members has considerably lessened? What is going on here, are we dieing?

Sorry for the downer...

December 6th, 2003, 10:28 AM

See Chris, one problem with it being that actual images of the month is that you get a load of images from one artist, so I think that'd be about 5-8 artists representing 3DG as opposed to one artist for each month. Which just ain't fair. We wouldn't be showing nearly our full range. Plus, there's only so much Star Trek I can handle XD One of the great things about this being a forum as opposed to an online gallery is that we're not seperated, we're all on one page and we're all discussing the art together- the artists help one another develop and either through constructive criticism or observation of one another's work, the style and capability of the artists expands. I think it'd be great if this calendar showed how many different kinds of artists we have considering the fact that we're a community.

moovok · December 6th, 2003, 11:08 AM

I've noticed the lack of voices around the place. It seems the same people are saying the same things. Feels like the Q Continuum.

Anyway, I think it should be the Artist of the Month people. Okay, some people will be the same, but they were voted for as the best for that month. But there is a choice: 3D Image or 2D Image. Doesn't mean they'll be thousands of Trek pics.

Chris B · December 6th, 2003, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Shui-Hua
See Chris, one problem with it being that actual images of the month is that you get a load of images from one artist, so I think that'd be about 5-8 artists representing 3DG as opposed to one artist for each month. Which just ain't fair. We wouldn't be showing nearly our full range. Plus, there's only so much Star Trek I can handle XD One of the great things about this being a forum as opposed to an online gallery is that we're not seperated, we're all on one page and we're all discussing the art together- the artists help one another develop and either through constructive criticism or observation of one another's work, the style and capability of the artists expands. I think it'd be great if this calendar showed how many different kinds of artists we have considering the fact that we're a community.

Alex, lately there _are_ only 5-8 artists representing 3dg, because there are only so little left.

December 6th, 2003, 11:35 AM

True :/ Oh well, that's not to say we're fickle... isn't this supposed to be images from the past year?

moovok · December 6th, 2003, 03:44 PM

The "BEST OF 2003" represents to me the people who won those monthly great 3D/2D images. That's why I thought it would be nice if the images would be displayed on the month they won.

Why are we loosing members? There must be a reason why. (I miss the Buffy / Farscape forum)

December 6th, 2003, 10:06 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by moovok
Why are we loosing members? There must be a reason why.

Low traffic and bad connectivity are two reasons that come to mind. There's not really enough going on here to hold the attention of the non-diehards and the fact that the site is not accessible to fairly hefty chunks of the net doesn't help matters.

Losing members isn't too much of a problem, however. All boards lose members over time. The big problem for 3DG is that we're not attracting new members at all, let alone at a rate high enough to match our losses. More aggressive promotion could help here, as could dusting the cobwebs off the homepage.

Unfortunately, however, there might not be room on the net for 3DG. Between CGTalk, Renderosity, Highend3D, LW3DG, Sci-fi Meshes, the various photography and digital painting forums and vendor-run product forums there are so many places on the net to talk about graphic arts that 3DG would need major investments in time and funds to differentiate and promote itself to the extent of winning back more than a token userbase.

Chris B · December 7th, 2003, 04:20 AM

Forums live and feed on a buzzing and hubbing main site that attracts visitors and "lures" them into the forums. Most of a site's forum-members initially came to read a tutorial or news from the buisness, use it as a rescource for models, textures, etc.

3DG unfortunately has no such buzzing website, in fact it has no such thing, i daresay. After the "big split" (what a nice term

) it was forgotten or disregarded to establish an attractive website. A half-hearted attempt was launched much later and stuck in the first steps.

December 7th, 2003, 07:31 AM

Me working on that. Me programmer. Me hit computer, make things happen. Ug.

moovok · December 7th, 2003, 04:11 PM

If all else fails, we could do a calendar of the 3DG Members nude (those in certain poses not to reveal) and make a film about it, and also gain money in the process

Just an idea I'm throwing into the mix

General Phoenix · December 7th, 2003, 05:41 PM

One problem with just putting the Artists of the Month on the calendar is that the best image of the month might not necessarily be the best of the year, especially if there were more popular images the month after or before that. Although, we could do a seperate Artist of the Month calendar - there's no reason NOT to...

Chris, I would love to increase our exposure. As we speak, Proximo is working on a new webpage system for the main site. One way or the other, I'm going to have a working mainpage with a frequently-updated Gallery and forum news page by the first week of January. I can't throw as much money into this as some site owners, but I can definitely invest some time and effort in it...

And if ANYONE has suggestions on promoting the site, I'd love to hear them. Just post a thread here in General Discussions or e-mail or PM me with your ideas. I'll be working up a list of my own to post here soon.

moovok · December 8th, 2003, 04:18 PM

The nude calendar as well as the movie deal are two VERY good ideas

I think

skyhawk223 · December 10th, 2003, 06:51 AM

Nude calendar? We are talking about Attracting new people, not making vast swaths of humanilty cancel their internet service and gouge out their eyes...

moovok · December 10th, 2003, 11:35 AM

Be funny though

hehe

December 10th, 2003, 03:01 PM

It would have a certain novelty value. Sort of like those joke chocolate penis things I keep seeing advertised in private eye.

moovok · December 13th, 2003, 06:14 PM

Those penis' are works of art!

I like the jelly tits!

January 1st, 2004, 12:15 PM

I thought I'd toss out a few observations (not trying to flame or anything

)

I think the big problem with 3DG getting new members is that it doesn't really offer much of anything. I mean, this is basically a forum.... and thats it. thats not enough to attract people to come to the site these days. Another compounding problem is that it's heavily tilted toward trek/scifi. (*EDIT ok maybe not as much as it used to, as i look over the finshed artowrk section. still though..*) I think that alienates alot of 3D artists out there, and only appeals to a rather narrow sector of the 3D art community. Its like what Enlightenment already said. Many of the other big sites offer alot more, either in the form of tutorials, software support, industry news, contests (with BIG prizes from sponsers) etc etc. I would also point out that those sites hardly ever have trek stuff pop up on them. At most, 3DG seems to get the leftovers of scifi-meshes these days. And thats really too bad.

General Phoenix · January 6th, 2004, 02:46 AM

No offense taken, Jason. You're right - we haven't offered much over the previous year or so, and with the neglect of the homepage and lack of big-prize contests, we've lost a lot of our more recent members. However, the new homepage is online, and being updated frequently, the download center has just been pulled out of mothballs after a long hiatus, and I intend to contact all the major CGI-software companies about sponsoring various contests here. I also want to appoint someone to troll those companies' websites to provide us with up-to-the-minute industry news - we may even be able to arrange some special pricing for 3DG members. In addition, the Artist of the Month contests will be streamlined, with only one prize offered each month, and 3D and 2D entries being combined in the one vote - I think our experiment with seperate 3D and 2D contests has proven to be a failure (especially as I look back on my bank account).

It won't happen overnight, but by this time next year, I intend to look back on 2004 as the year that 3DG really stepped up its game.