The 17th CGEmpire Music Compo has kicked off this week. The theme this month, is childrens’ music, and the winner will receive a copy of ProjectSAM’s True Strike 2 worth $539.99.

ProjectSAM is the brain child of film composer Maarten Spruijt, media composer Vincent Beijer and composer-arranger Marco Deegenaars, who teamed up in 2002, to found sample library development company ProjectSAM®.
ProjectSAM is where custom samples and commercial libraries meet.

Nowadays, ProjectSAM has become one of the most respected orchestral sample development companies. ProjectSAM has developed 8 sample libraries specially aimed at film, tv and games composers: True Strike 2, True Strike 1, Flute & Piccolo Effects, SAM Organ Mystique, SAM Solo Sessions, SAM Trumpets, SAM Trombones and SAM Horns. All libraries are sold internationally through ProjectSAM’s online shop and by a number of world-wide distributors in the US, Europe and Japan.

The 17th CGEmpire Music Competition, sponsored by ProjectSAM

For full information as well as the rules, take a look at this thread.

TIGSource have announced the winners of their Bootleg Demake game-in-a-month competition. The idea was to take a well-known recent game, and present it as if it were a bootleg on older hardware.

Congratulations to Superflat with his NES demake of Silent Hill 2, Soundless Mountain II:

Top #10 Entries:

1. Soundless Mountain II (superflat)
2. Gang Garrison II (mrfredman, MedO)
3. Aquarium (Oracle)
4. Little Girl in Underland (The Ivy)
5. House Globe (Oxeye Games)
6. S.T.A.C.K.E.R. (Pishtaco)
7. Squish (Terry)
8. Fillauth (Oxeye Games) / Macarena of the Missing (Noyb)
9. Sexy Seaside Beachball (lemmy&binky)
10. Advanced Set the Rope on Fire Cartridge (Blueberry)

There were a whopping 68 entries in total. Other notable entries include Overscan, a side on 2D version of Rez and Large-Scale Vehicular Stealing, a NES-style version of GTA IV.

All 68 games can be found and downloaded here!

Source: TIGSource

Round #20 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

This round’s outline is…

It’s a tricky low-res outline this round, so get your creativity pencils ready and download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Last round was a tricky outline, so hats off to Nyu001 and his Ninja:

Check out previous winners here!

Round #19 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

This round’s outline is…

So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Last round was won by Nickenstien with his amazing Space Squid:

Check out previous winners here!

Round #17 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

This round’s outline is…

So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Last round was won by, er, me with this mousey/hamstery thing:

Check out previous winners here!

The 16th CGEmpire Music Competition is kindly sponsored by Peter and Giorgio, the creators and owners of SampleModeling.

The winner will receive a copy of The Trumpet (which retails for $240), a VSTi of unparalleled realism and usability!

The challenge this time is to compose The Darklord theme, and the deadline for entries is Sunday 22nd of June 23:59 London time.

For more information, please visit the Competition Thread.

Round #16 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

The challenge this time is…

…can you make this outline into anything other than a turtle? So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Congratulations to MashPotato for winning the last ColourThis round with her excellent “Large Lady doing Aerobics” entry:

Check out previous winners here!

Hearty congratulations go to mirrored for winning the 15th CGEmpire Music Competition with his entry ‘The Long Way Home‘.

For his troubles, mirrored takes home a copy of Stormdrum 2 which retails at $495, courtesy of Eastwest/Quantum Leap.

The challenge for this month’s competition was to compose a theme to accompany the following premise:

…The heroes kept on walking, the wind blowing restless. Soon the terrain changed. The sparse trees, which until then provided some kind of shelter, gave place to rocks. As they climbed the mountain the sun got hidden by deep clouds, and the wind changed to rain first and then to snow. The slowed down but never stopped. Every obstacle they overcame, they were not short of courage. Finally they reached the top of the mountains, stood there for only a brief moment, to catch their breathes and then took the path down, to the other side. At the bottom, the snow gave way to the everlasting greens and the familiar smell was reassuring enough. They were home!

Congratulations to all who took part for all-round excellent entries! You can listen to all the music competition entries here!

Round #15 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

Download this outline, colour it,
and submit your entry in this thread!

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

We had great entries last round with contributions from many ColourThis first-timers! Ultimately, congratulations go to round #14 winner Nyu001 and his “runny-nosed, tam-o-shantered Scotsman”:

Check out previous winners here!

GameRecruiter have announced the first of their 3D artwork contests, the “Battle of the SuperModelers”.

It might sound like something from America’s Next Top Model (Mondays, 9pm, LIVING TV - I definitely do not watch this, okay?), but it’s not. With prizes from the likes of Alienware, Autodesk, Wacom (a Cintiq 12 WX, no less!) and Gnomon Workshop, if you’re a game artist, fancy yourself as “quite good, really”, and are based in the US or Canada, then it’s probably worth a shot.

Game artists are invited to create an original real-time character model of a monster, creature, robot or alien that might be found in a fantasy, sci-fi or horror game and submit their 3D art entry online by Friday, August 15, 2008. The contest Grand Prize Winner and three finalists will receive a combined total $50,000-worth of digital art tools and technology.

Real-Time Art Asset Budget:

10,000 tri-polys for everything: the creature and any minions (sidekick, friends, pets, parasites, etc). Also weapons, and objects, special effects and equipment, etc.

Required Maps:

1 x 2048 Color Map
1 x 2048 Normal Map

Additional Optional Maps:

1 x 2048 Specular Map
1 x 2048 Specular Color Map
1 x 2048 Bump Map

1 x 2048 Reflection Map
1 x 2048 Opacity Map
1 x 2048 Glow map
1 x 2048 Glossiness map

Isn’t it a bit nuts that “real-time” nowadays can mean 10,000 polys with two (and the rest!) 2048 pixel textures applied?!?!? Whatever happened to polygon limits that you could count in your head and teeny tiny little hand-pixelled textures? Bah!

Full contest info and guidelines here!