ZBrushCentral

Monthly Challenge Proposal

Let’s face it. The majority of us who post in this forum are so busy that anything that is too large of a demand on our time seems to get put to the back burner as we work on our own projects. I propose a slow tinker with it over lunch hour challenge that would go for one solid month and then move on to the next topic. The weekly challenges had a great start, however I fear many artists wouldn’t even involve themselves because having only a week’s time to crank out a model when you are knee-deep in other work can feel distracting.

I propose a monthly topic for us to sculpt on in our free-time to show some of our sculpting techniques. I think we should keep the topic open ended enough that those of us who feel the need to move on to new sculpt rapidly could post a series of sculpts and those of us who are busy can work on one. I don’t want this to be a competition more of a group critic on one subject for a month.

I’ll be honest I’m selfishly trying to start this because when the weekly sketches were going I felt like I learned boat loads from other artists.

I’m just testing the waters here, if you think this is a good idea, terrible idea, mediocre idea that needs some tweaking let me know…

i think this would be a good idea since many of us do like taking part in these when we have the time but a week just seems like very little time for most of us in the community that are busy or just don’t have time and a month would give us a lot more time. i proposed a while a go that we should have an animal challenge once a month on specific species because it would really help us to understand form and structure better since each species is unique from another but nobody really ever responded to me i usually like to participate in these because i like to learn new techniques from other artist and like see how they translate the topic in there own interpretation. but it really seems like as fast as we get the challenges going they die out like a month later, i know i would participate if its a topic that grabbed my interest, but yeah i hope we could get an official thing going since it really gets the zbrush community together more. i was think i know one feature that i thought would be a really good help was zcast but they never mentioned anything after zbrush 3.5 r3 and it like it was removed entirely from the zplugs menu but yeah here is where they first mentioned it, http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=036912 and this was back in o6 sounded like it would really be a good addition. but yeah it will interesting to see what is added in zbrush 4.:wink:

You think we should be totally figurative subject based or should we maybe pick a style a month and see what we could come up with??

I envisioned maybe a month of classical style sculpture whatever you wanted to sculpt then maybe a month of abstract forms. Or we could go completely genre based too like a month for fantasy a month for horror. I worry that when we get overtly specific in our challenge requirements we make it less accessible. I don’t want to totally write off the idea of a animal a month it just seems limiting… Hmmmmm

One way or another we are going to do this because I need an outlet for some sculpture other than work and i would really enjoy getting a group together that would be able to critique peoples work.

Let me know what you think for sure next month at the very least I’m going to try and start something so let me know how narrow or wide you think we should go with the subject matter.

I think it is a good idea to have it monthly. I work full time at a frickin deli and get home tired, but want to make a living creating. I am completely new to zbrush and would love to be involved in these challenges. I know I have plenty to learn and I’m certain I can learn more from this community than I would learn from spending hours in a class room. I’m currently enrolled at a community college and as far as 3D is concerned I’ve learned a lot more outside of class from forums like this and magazines. Monthly would be great for not only you pros making a living doing this kind of stuff (want to be like you, lol) but it will be good for us trying to learn how to use Zbrush. A month would be a good amount of time, give people a chance to post progress and how they went about it maybe. Keeping the monthly topics simple like: horror, fantasy, classical, science fiction, animal, reptile, amphibian etc would be good too.

unfortunately this part of the forum is somewhat untidy, just look at some of the posts, a few don’t have anything to do with challenges and have not been removed even though they are months old.
also people like to post their work from other boards challenges here which just further mucks it up, back in the day it was zbrush central only challenges. so what seems to happen now is that someone will post one of the above type threads and knock a thread like this one out of the main slot and no one will even know there is a challenge.
what would be nice is if the mods would create a challenge or two(without prizes) and/or allow someone to make a challenge thread sticky, but i don’t see it happening.
anyway good luck to you all.

Well judging by the responses and views of this thread there is a desire for this to become more of a community. I think we should do this regardless of if we get buried under a torrent of other forums challenge posts. I think we should make sure and always be prize free that way it stays friendly and we don’t set the wrong idea. This is going to be about learning as a community of artists. I’ve noticed through a lot of the forums that there seems to be a lot of new posters which strikes me as an opportunity for everybody to learn.

So I propose we have a discussion in this thread on what we would like to dedicate next month to and I on the 31 i will open a challenge thread and I’ll try to keep it bumped to the top. Hopefully I won’t offend any moderators that way.

As far as subject matter i really think we would benefit from keeping it open to interpretation. Personally I have been digging classical sculpture lately and I really would like to see where some of us could go with a month of lunch hours to throw at a Greek style figure. Imagine some of the Hellenistic clothe work that is so dramatic. However I worry my interests aren’t that universal so give me some feedback here. Let me know what you would like to see this group start with.

I think your monthly comps would be a great idea, I’m just starting to learn Zbrush and this would be another awesome way of learning some new tricks, especially off you guys.

You could always have the winner of each monthly comp decide on the following topic/style, that way you should get a good mix of topics instead of just being stuck on the same ones all the time.

I think the Subject is good as well as the idea of monthly challenge.
Count me in !