Win one of three copies of The Foundry’s fast, do-it-all VFX tool, MODO 701 – worth £999 each

MODO 701 is a cutting-edge, artist-friendly 3D software package that combines modelling, sculpting, painting, animation and rendering in a single integrated application.

• Read our review of MODO 701 online to find out if it suits you

In the wake of the recent merger between Luxology and The Foundry, MODO 701 has now been released with a number of new developments that open it up to a whole new audience within a high-end VFX market.

Courtesy of The Foundry, we have three copies of MODO 701, each worth £999, to give away. To enter the prize draw, simply complete our online entry form at www.futurecomps.co.uk/TDW171modo.

MORE ABOUT MODO 701

Despite the fact that nearly every one of MODO’s features has had an overhaul and some completely new features have been added, it’s the speed of working that gets the biggest plaudits in this new iteration of the product.

Put simply, it’s speed, speed, speed in 701. The new release flies in OpenGL view. Once complex meshes have loaded, it is genuinely stunning how capable MODO 701 is at handling large data sets.

There are also amazing speed increases in preview mode and during rendering, making the upgrade worth the money for those enhancements alone.

The retopology tools also improve on speed and accuracy, and brand-new tools like the Contour tool add to MODO’s already extensive feature set.

• Read our review of MODO 701 online and find out if it suits you

Arguably the biggest new feature is the particle system, which makes MODO 701 an attractive option for VFX and motion graphics work.

A Linux version will soon join the existing Mac and Windows versions.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS IN MODO 701

• A stunning new particle engine system with an easy-to-use preset workflow
• Audio playback and a sound channel modifier enable artists to bring animations to life
• Amazing large-scene performance improvements – as much as 175 times faster
• Unlimited network rendering
• The software is easy to learn and MODO has extensive training resources online. It is a true end-to-end solution that offers a fresh, flexible and modular approach to the creative process

Visit The Foundry’s website to download a free 15-day trial licence.

Enter now!

Simply complete our online entry form at www.futurecomps.co.uk/TDW171modo.

Three lucky winners will be chosen at random after the closing date of Thursday 31 October 2013.

Terms and conditions apply: these are available at the website address above.

Artwork created in MODO by Andy Probst (www.meilenstein-digital.de)

Free Modo tutorial online

Model believable scale on a spaceship: Mike Griggs has some modo tips to prevent your massive battlecruiser from looking like an escape capsule

Enter now for your chance to win one of four copies of this groundbreaking real-time animation toolkit worth $4,795!

Reallusion’s iClone has built a strong reputation for accessible but powerful real-time tools to help you craft great animations.

Supported by a content library and integrated online marketplace with characters, scenes and props, iClone enables you to easily assemble animations for pre-viz, online broadcasting, education and many other needs.

WIN ONE OF FOUR COPIES OF iCLONE ANIMATION PIPELINE!

Courtesy of Reallusion, 3D World has four packages of iClone Animation Pipeline (as sold for $899.95), featuring iClone5 Pro, 3DXchange5 pipeline, Mocap Device; and the Facial Pipeline Character Pack with DAZ Genesis Extension (as sold for $299).

The iClone Animation Pipeline is a revolution for CG animation and game development. This toolkit contains a complete set of animation tools for quick character generation and smart motion editing, and is supported with an extensive online content marketplace.

By utilising intuitive real-time character motion tools alongside Autodesk’s Human IK technology, iClone makes it easy to convert characters and retarget both facial and body animations to your native working environment via standard FBX, BVH and OBJ formats.

iClone also supports basic motion capture with Microsoft’s Kinect sensor, which gives you the raw motion data that saves you time and helps to turn your PC into a powerful production studio with minimal cost and increased production speed.

For more information on the products in this extra-special prize bundle and other products in the Reallusion catalogue, visit www.reallusion.com.

How to enter

In this prize draw, 3D World is offering you the chance to win one of four product bundles of iClone Animation Pipeline, worth £799 each. To enter, simply complete our online entry form.

Four lucky winners will be chosen at random after the closing date of Monday 30 September 2013.

Terms and conditions apply: these are available at the website address above.

ENTER NOW!

We’ve partnered with Microsoft to launch an amazing competition to celebrate the launch of the Windows Store. Read on and find out how you can share in some incredible prizes…

It’s the perfect time to start developing for Windows 8 – and we’ve partnered with Microsoft to offer an added incentive: £40,000 worth of incredible prizes to be won in our Windows 8 app competition!

If you’ve never built a Windows app, now the time to start thinking about it seriously. The launch of Windows 8 and the Windows Store means you now have hundreds of millions of potential consumers at your fingertips.

It’s easier than you probably think to build apps for Windows 8 – and you don’t even need to learn a new language. For example, you can build Windows 8 apps with HTML & CSS if you’re a web developer; or Objective-C, Cocoa Touch and XCode, if you’re familiar with building apps for Apple’s devices.

The prizes

Prizes will go to the ten best apps in competition, and there’ll also be some fantastic prizes given out EVERY DAY for four weeks in a series of prize draws. Those prizes will be chosen at random, so everybody has a chance to win. And the earlier you get your entry accepted, the more chances you’ll have to win – so what are you waiting for?

Here’s the full prize breakdown:

Daily prize: 28 x 32GB Windows tablets – one each day, for four whole weeks.

Extra prize draw: A Dell Workstation, a Wacom 24 HD Tablet and a 16GB Lytro Camera will all go to one lucky winner.

Each author of the top ten apps will get a Windows 8 Ultrabook, a Windows tablet and a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows 8 Phone.

The Grand Prize winner will also win a Dell Workstation, a Wacom 24 HD Tablet and a 16GB Lytro Camera on top of that.
How to enter

Anyone in the UK who’s 16 or over can enter – whether you already have a live app in the Windows Store, whether you’re currently building one, or right now is this first time you’ve ever considered it.

All the information, tools and help you’ll need to start building Windows 8 apps are on a special Windows 8 app generator microsite.

Enter the competition today!

Find out who won the three copies of the powerful 3D digital paint software…

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UPDATED 11.10.2012

And the winners are…

Rosie Dennett from Nottingham, John Dean from Bournemouth and Cathy James from Windsor, win the copies of Mari.

Congratulations!
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This is your chance to get your hands on the latest release of The Foundry’s revolutionary 3D digital paint tool – Mari 1.4v4.

We have three copies of Mari 1.4v4 (each worth £1,200) to give away; each licence includes one year of maintenance worth £200.

• Read a review of Mari

Designed in production to meet the needs of the most challenging VFX texture and matte painting projects, Mari takes care of the technical issues to enable artists to spend more time being creative.

Mari is a 3D digital paint tool built to make life easier for artists. Capable of handling super-high-resolution textures and millions of polygons, Mari lets artists concentrate on painting.

It gives you the ability to view whole data sets at once, paint detailed multi-layered textures straight onto 3D models and optimise processing capability with its ‘paint and bake’ approach.

Mari is a 3D texture-painting application developed in-house at Weta Digital. It has been used on movies such as The Adventures of TinTin. Tintin © 2011 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Weta Digital. See more movie stills at the bottom of this post

Mari is open, scriptable and customisable, as well as being built for power and speed. With Mari, artists can customise the UI to suit their needs and preferences, and co-operate with Photoshop or other VFX tools.

Mari makes life simple, fitting around the artist to provide a fast and flexible workflow, where day-to-day technical issues are a thing of the past and artists can work in ways never thought possible before.

As part of The Foundry product family, Mari also interacts seamlessly with Nuke. It’s not difficult to see why Mari, running on either Windows or Linux, is the 3D paint tool of choice for artists working on the most demanding projects.

How to enter

Courtesy of The Foundry, we have three copies of Mari 1.4v4 to give away. To enter the prize draw, simply fill in our online entry form.

The lucky winners will be chosen at random after the closing date of Saturday 29 September 2012.

Terms and conditions apply: these are available via the website.

Visit The Foundry’s website for more about Mari and to download a free 15‑day trial licence

Mari is the 3D paint tool of choice for high-end CGI productions in film, commercials and episodic TV.

Stills from films/projects using Mari

Method Studios' Scott Metzger demonstrates how Mari can be used in this personal project called Robot. Robot - Image courtesy of Scott Metzger

Interview with Scott Metzger about Mari

FX Guide has recently posted an interview with lead texture artist and VFX supervisor Scott Metzger about what aspects of Mari he used in his work. Check out the FX Guide’s ‘For Example’ post with Scott Metzger.

Mari was used in the production of the Snickers ‘Focus Group’ advert. © Snickers ‘Focus Group’. Image courtesy of Framestore NY

Mari was used in the production of The Three Musketeer. © Summit Entertainment & Constantin Films. Image courtesy of Mr. X

For more information visit The Foundry

Learn where to find textures for 3D projects at our sister site, Creative Bloq.

There is still time to enter the ‘Museum’ Lumion challenge, sponsored by 3D World and Act-3D, and win from a heap of prizes including cash, software and free subscriptions to 3D World!

Judges are asking for 3D artists to submit entries which showcase the New National Gallery in Berlin – designed by legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Roheand – and its surroundings during an event of their choice. A 3D model of the gallery has been provided as a base from which entrants can develop using the real-time architectural visualization tool Lumion. For all the details and to download the model itself, go to Ronen Bekerman’s website.

Remember the closing date for the final render is 15th October, so it’s time to get going on the project right now!

Enter our prize draw for your chance to win one of four packages featuring Reallusion’s real-time animation suite, worth $1,352 in total

Reallusion’s iClone has built a strong reputation for accessible but powerful real-time tools to help you craft great animations. Supported by a content library and integrated online marketplace with characters, scenes and props, iClone enables you to easily assemble animations for pre-viz, online broadcasting, education and many other needs.

Courtesy of Reallusion, 3D World has four packages featuring iClone5 Pro (worth $199) and its accompanying Mocap Device Plug-in Suite (worth $139) to be won!

iClone5 Pro is the flagship edition of the range. It offers real-time animation and compositing tools, in-screen puppeteering, and advanced timeline editing. iClone’s content library includes digital actors and smart props that respond to physical laws, which together enable you to drag-and-drop components into a scene and edit their actions.

iClone5 Pro also enables you to enhance your production with particle effects and post-production filters including colour correction and lens blur. Output options include the ability to create stereoscopic footage.

Reallusion’s Mocap Device Plug-in is the perfect partner for iClone5 Pro, enabling you to motion-capture a physical performance to assign to your digital actor. iClone’s Blend MixMoves library helps you achieve seamless transitions between different movements. The Mocap Device Plug-in works with any off-the-shelf depth perception camera, the best-known of which is Microsoft’s popular Kinect.

For more details on iClone5 Pro and the Mocap Device Plug-in, visit www.reallusion.com

How to enter

To enter, simply complete our online entry form via futurecomps.co.uk/TDW153iclone. Four lucky winners will be chosen at random after the closing date of Monday 30 April 2012.

Terms and conditions apply: these are available at the website address above.

Luxology is running a modo material preset contest for the next three months (November, December and January). To enter, create a unique collection of five-theme based material presets and share them on the Luxology Asset sharing site.

This month’s theme is Holiday. So don your thinking hats and get involved now. At the end of each month, three winners will be announced.

What you can win

• First place: SLIK, Arroways Texture Collection, Antangeo Balancer Software, 3D World Magazine 1 Year Subscription & a Dosch Design Model Pack
• Second place: PAD, SES 2, Epictor People Collections
• Third place: SES 1, Epictor Silhouette Collections

For more information, view the competition page at Luxology

To celebrate the release of the latest edition of SpeedTree, 3D World has teamed up with developer IDV to give away five copies of the new Studio edition of its software – worth $895 each! Now available as a 64-bit app for Windows, Mac and Linux, SpeedTree Studio features the same technology employed by ILM for Avatar, and is in use at VFX, TV and arch viz studios around the world.

Creating trees and plants has never been easier or more fun. Existing tree objects can be edited to suit your needs; trees can be built from base templates; or you can draw a specific tree shape and then edit the underlying splines for precise control over shape and form. Alternatively, you can simply buy entire new tree species from the huge collection on the SpeedTree store.

You can choose a tiled UV texture from any of those in your SpeedTree library, or make your own. It’s a case of importing the texture maps, then dragging and dropping onto the mesh. For a final touch of realism, you can simulate the wind blowing through your tree (displayed in real time in the OpenGL window), and then export the data for use in any 3D app that supports the FBX geocache format.

SpeedTree Studio is one of the fastest and easiest tree generators you can get – and you can get it for free by entering our prize draw! To do so, just follow the instructions below.

For more information about the other great features in SpeedTree Studio 6 or the other software in the SpeedTree product family, visit speedtree.com.

How to enter

This issue, we’re giving away five copies of SpeedTree Studio 6: prizes with a total value of $4,475. To enter, simply fill in the online entry form at Future Competitions, the official competitions website for 3D World and other Future Publishing titles. The five lucky winners will be chosen at random after the closing date of 12 January 2012. Good luck! Non-UK residents are allowed to enter.

Enter the SpeedTree Studio prize draw at Future Competitions

The energy drink maker Red Bull has launched Canimation, an animation competition which states that the famous blue and silver Red Bull can must take centre stage. The contest is split across three categories: stop-motion, CGI and drawn.

The prizes on offer will definitely whet the appetite of any budding new animator. They include internships at Aardman Animations, The Mill and 12foot6. Prize winners may also be lucky enough to get their hands on various software and equipment from Autodesk, Stop Motion Pro and Digicell Flipbook Pro. Participants will also be in with a chance to have their work featured on Channel 4 and in cinemas nationwide.

The deadline for submissions is 15 November.

Animations can not be more than two minutes long and should be created in HD. The winners from each category will be awarded with prizes at the Red Bull Canimation Awards Ceremony on 15 December.

Get more details at the Red Bull Canimation website

SIGGRAPH 2011 takes place in Vancouver between 7-11 August

SIGGRAPH 2011, 7-11 August in Vancouver, Canada, is the best place to experience the explosive evolution of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

See, meet, and interact with the creators of the next wave of international excellence in research, animation, art, software, visualisation, hardware, games, visual effects, and education. Gain amazing insights, enrich your skill set, and expand your worldwide contacts.

SIGGRAPH is a must-see event, and 3D World has four free passes to give away. All you have to do for your chance to win one is enter 3D World’s SIGGRAPH 2011 prize draw.

With just two and a half weeks to go until the conference starts in Vancouver on 7 August, you’ll have to be quick. We’ll be drawing the winners on 27 July. That’s just a week to enter!

The prize draw is to win one of four free basic access passes for SIGGRAPH 2011. Travel arrangements and accommodation need to be organised by the winners.

Enter the 3D World SIGGRAPH 2011 prize draw at Future Competitions

Read more about SIGGRAPH 2011 on 3D World

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SIGGRAPH is widely recognised as the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research.

In addition to SIGGRAPH’s leading-edge technical program, the conference’s installations provide close-up views of the latest in digital art, emerging technologies, and hands-on opportunities for creative collaboration.

The conference also hosts the international SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival, showcasing works from the world’s most innovative and accomplished digital film and video creators.

Juried and curated content includes outstanding achievements in time-based art, scientific visualisation, visual effects, real-time graphics, and narrative shorts. Since 1999, the festival has been an official qualifying event for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Animated Short Film award.

www.siggraph.org/s2011