First, there are two major announcements to share from NVISION:
NVIDIA is demonstrating Viewsonic’s new 120Hz 3D ready monitor. MTBS isn’t at NVISION this year in person, so we are hoping to be able to get our hands on a unit to try it out in the near future. We will update this story as more information comes in.
The second NVIDIA story is we have the latest 177.83 Vista Stereo driver from NVIDIA! You can access it in our downloads section HERE! Read through the MTBS NVIDIA forums for special instructions. There may be another update still – we will have to wait and see.
Incidentally, this new driver fixes bugs with Unreal Tournament 3, which means it may qualify for a Platinum grade MTBS Certification! See? That didn’t take long, did it?
On a separate front, prior to SIGGRAPH we had the privilege of working with CGArena and iZ3D LLC to launch a special stereoscopic 3D CG art contest focused on wacky video game characters.
Joined by members of the iZ3D LLC team and Hans Westman, the Editor for SIGGRAPH’s quarterly newsletter, we carefully judged the work based on its stereoscopic 3D effectiveness, and most importantly, its wacky video game character nature.
Fish Chase by Luca Tunesi
While most of the images were by virtual stereoscopic cameras, we recognize that most of the entrants did not have the benefit of proper 3D equipment. In most cases, the separation between the cameras was too high, or there wasn’t adequate use of convergence or pop-out effects. Fortunately, we were able to adjust the images on the artists’ behalf and make them even more impressive in the 3D world. We think you will like what you see today for both the artistic quality and the S-3D effectiveness.
First prize, the iZ3D 22″ monitor, goes to:
Grant Moore for his Spear Throwing Ogre!
Second prize, the AMD 4800 series GPU, goes to:
Pawel Kryszak for his Gun Toting Frog Alien!
Third prize, the 50% discount on the iZ3D monitor combined with the Flatout 2 game goes to:
Chaitanya Krishnan for the Robots on Wheels!
The four runner ups who won Unreal Tournament 3 by Epic Games include:
The Minotaur With the Axe by Karoline Haugseth
The Ballet Wrestler by Mateusz Grybczynski
The Red Alien by Jasdeep Singh
Motorcycle Man by Ravi Yadav
One piece of work had to be disqualified because it didn’t strike us as a wacky video game character. However, we were so impressed by the CG and stereoscopic 3D skill shown with the image, we created a new division called “The Best Technical Implementation Prize”. The winner is:
Sexy Snake Mermaid Surrounded by Sharks by Bendik Slyngstad
There are several other finalist images that you can download and sample HERE. We think you will agree that this contest was extremely difficult to judge as the quality of work submitted was so closely matched. For fun, make a point to vote on the images in the gallery to see which ones our members like best. Please note that image titles were not submitted by the artists, so we made them up.
Thank you all for your hard work in making this contest possible and we hope to do this again. Special thanks go to iZ3D, AMD, and Epic Games for these valued prizes, and CGArena and its community for helping make this contest a reality!