Lightwave Animation Competition

#1 Wow, I don't agree with the judging on that contest at all... the grand prize winner's submission was by far my least favorite out of the whole showreel. Ben's submission was fantastic, and to see that big of a talent gap between first and second place almost makes you think the contest was rigged. :) I've been a 3dsmax user for years and can say that animating a robot (a very simple one like in the winner's vid) to music is a snap compared to real character animation, and it's not even that creative to boot. So was that all Ben's work, or did a team work on those shots? In any event, congratulations!

#2 Ben did it all himself, on his own time outside of work. Needless to say, he's very talented. Yeah the robot wasn't my favorite either. It did have sound and a big SIGGRAPH sign in the back (which might have added to it since they were to be shown there). Unfortunately, at the bottom there it shows how they were judged and quality only accounted for 15% of the judging, lol.

#3 Huh? I just cannot see why that robot would have stood any chance at winning. In any event, Ben did an amazing job!

#4 The robot was one of the least impressive period. It's a contest where mediocrity stood a better chance he just played the game better. He had a nice upfront Lightwave logo and it was character animation, highly stylized but character animation. People are used to seeing nice looking shots out of Lightwave but Lightwave is known to suck as a character animator. It's by far the worst of all the major packages at character animation. They were trying to promote it as a character animator inspite of no major innovations in that area in eight or nine years. It still doesn't work half as well as Messiah af that came out nine years ago. Notice it was mechanical animation? Yes it's not impossible to do character stuff but once you play around with things like Maya and XSI and see how it's supposed to work Lightwave drives you nuts. The bone system sucks. They pretty much gave up on it and focused on bells and whistles. The choice was a strategic one more than picking the best. Even by that standard I would have thought the factory one would win but I guess they got off on him using the camera/display function. Over all the scene looked more like what I saw people doing 10 years ago so it wasn't very impressive by today's standards

#5 Ben is likely the most experienced of the contestants and submitted a 4-clip sectional.
Each of those sections showed promise if the entry was one of the 4.
Each of the 4 sections showed much smaller clips of animation, maybe 2 seconds.
When it came time for the scoring criteria to judge Bens submission entry, he would have been
a "no-contest" hands-down winner if it was just 1 section not 4, and if that section was more then
2 seconds.
Clearly Ben is the better artist over all the entries.. but sometimes having that much talent can make you over qualified for the job.
It seems the robot won in the end because it was clean cut, direct and to the point. And perhaps thats one criteria the rules didn't mention.

My hats off to Ben for his entry, he is a true Master.

#6 Seems like the robot won since that sort of stuff is popular these days (Wall-E for example)