Welcome to Fractal Forums

General Rules:

- No more than 3 images per user per category.  Some users have indicated that they may wish to post anonymously - or at least as another user. I'm OK with this but please don't abuse the system! (You can be 'found out'!)

- Your entries MUST be of fractals.  Photoshopping / editing is OK, but this is a Fractal related discussion board so only images that resemble, or imitiate, fractals will score highly.  Your entry will be more credible if you post the fractal type / application used.

- No nudity or offensive entries please.  You may be nude whilst creating the entries, nude whilst posting the entries and even the judges may be nude whilst judging the entries but please no nudity in the entries themselves.   :)

- The judges' decision will be final.  We have yet to announce who the judges are.  Anyone posting an entry cannot judge the category they posted to.

These rules may be amended at any time.  The competition and prizes are the result of a lot of goodwill so please don't abuse them!

are l-systems fair game?

i feel like coding some fun stuff ;)

Of course!

the l-system animation thing is going to take a ton of programming work, not just on the graphics side but also on the audio side; most of the code will be from the ground up, and together with my paid-work coding it's unlikely i'll make it in time. the gpu powering the rendering will only be in my hands around the 23rd, leaving very little time to write the rendering stuff i have in mind :/

so anyway, that aside, i'll probably end up picking one of my test-animations as entries if the bigger project doesn't make it in time.

You haven't mentioned anything about use of these images.  Is this purely a competition for prizes, or are these images going to be used in any way by anyone?  Just wondering :)

The images are not going to be used for anything - this is a competition for prizes.  I may showcase the winners in some promotional e-mails / posts, but I am not going to sell the images.

There may be some scope for doing a higher value competition in the future, whereby images would be sold (eg on a Fractal Forums calendar) and winners awarded cash or profit share but this is a bit further down the line.

If we hadn't had BradorPoints offering some Biocursion DVDs the competition would have just been for fun.  Which is still great!

I will be looking for more prize suppliers in the future.

hmm i'm having difficulty making a quality of render / aesthetic tradeoff :(

i've made two versions (actually several more) of "a deepness in the sky", the first has a nice grainy look about it, and the other is just really outrageously antialiased and smooth.

grainy version: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/43245472/
smooth version: http://www.fractographer.com/wip/adits_final.png

is it kosher to ask which version people prefer? i'm thinking of switching to the smooth version as my entry because the antialiasing quality is definite, whereas the "niceness" of the grain is subjective.

edit: in reading over the rules again, the bit about "credibility" is kind of worrying since i'm using (entirely) my own code and algorithms to render my entries. if there's any doubt about this i can send an exe that'll render it with colours of your choosing :) it'll be really slow though, since the whole thing was built from the ground up to be 64bit (and it seems i'm about the only person on earth using xp64), specifically with regard to double precision computation and increased execution width to take advantage of the extra registers offered by the amd64 architecture...

You can of course ask for opinions!  Bear in mind you may be asking your fellow competitors though..

Hi Lycium,

Both are very nice, but the grainy one is my favorite, it has more character.

Just wondering, when does the competition close? Can entries still be submitted as long as its November somewhere in the world?  ;)

Very good question!!


I would say that is the best option, and gives everyone the same reference point.
 

*Sigh* It is very December here, and I am in the last stages of weighing points. I have five static images and two banners fighting it out in the final playoffs. The winners will not be my personal favorites, I think. I am grading loosely on composition, originality, and general esthetic appeal (ooo, it's pretty!), with extra points added or subtracted for various reasons (everything from image quality to "fractalness"). I should have the system tuned up a little better next time.

Maybe next time I will be able to judge animations too, since I will probably have a newer computer. :)