New User Challenge Discussion
DAZ_ann0314
Posts: 2,849
As with every year, as the new year passes, we like to open up the topic of the contest to you all to give you an opportunity to share your thoughts.
What did you enjoy about the Challenges?
What do you wish we would do?
What would you like to see added?
Please feel free to share your thoughts on the Challenges to this thread as we are always looking for ways to make the challenges more fun, inclusive, informative, and helpful.
We look forward to hearing from you 
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Comments
There are so many ways to design and express in a picture. I imagine more focus on what the creator thinks and says about his or her work, and what he or she tries to trigger or provoke in the viewer. We all can learn a lot about other ways of looking at things, approaches, strategies. Discussing and understanding how we try to achieve something expands our horizon. Which symbols do we use and how do we combine them. Yes, we need to discuss classical and vintage rule sets and established tools. But in most cases it is something else that transports what makes up a large part of a piece of art: sentiment, background idea, actuator. Art is full of symbols. Imagination can be trained and triggered. A very basic example: "A hot day". How can we transport this over to the viewer? How can we entertain viewers, make them sense and make them like watching our work. How to create somethings interesting. As a bonus, such a task would also make us use techniques we did not use in the past - because we did not have to.
@DAZ_ann0314
Just wanted to say thanks so much for providing this kind of thing as a resource and taking the time to help new users. It's fun seeing the work of others who are new and watching their development as you feel your own knowledge and skills expand as well. I went through the material/links provided too which taught me a lot. Would be great to get more daz veterans over here to offer advice and feedback on the work of the newer users. Maybe there's a way to suggest it in the other areas as I'm sure plenty of other experienced users would be happy to come over here and offer critiques if they were asked or notified about the newbies that really want to work on improving their skills. A lot of these experienced artists don't think of themselves as teachers but could really offer suggestions that would help.
@Fisherman_B I may have already said this but your stuff really is inspiring and the way you approach and discuss it is helpful. For most of us newbies we can't even wrap our head around how you captured the realism in something like "Mummy's Boy" and what direction to go in to understand how that is developed. Other than the composition and pose and other elements which I can grasp and make sense of...the photorealistic qualities of the character and car we wouldn't know where to start. I assume the lighting/shadows is what plays the strongest role but totally oblivious as to what techniques you use in that sense to capture it the way you did. Of course understanding and skillset will develop with more experience-trial and error and study, and each situation will have it's own unique requirements which changes it every time.... but I wish I had a vague grasp on what kind of setup you use to get things to pop like that. Then again i'm not trying to pry for specifics that you use as an artist to capture your own unique stye as may not want others trying to simply mimic what you've developed and copycat you-Not something I would ever do (or could do) of course. Just wanted to say please keep up the awesome work and keep posting great stuff for us.
I am happy that you find my render inspiring. We are all learning and my stuff is far from perfect, so I am glad that it can serve such a purpose.
I am not sure which level of technical detail is ok for others, and perhaps some people don't like other people to talk a lot about their work, so I suggest that I send you a rough description of what I did (if I manage to recall, haha) in a PM and we can discuss things there as detailed as you like.
I miss a greater focus on special things. There are so many settings and lever to pull, in all this menus. Sometimes I ask me, WTF is this setting for and how do I use it properly?
Yeah, there are some good tutorials out there, but most time I look at them and forget the most of all this things after a few days.
I would like some challenges where you show us a special technique and than give us the order to use this technique in a render.
I know, that would cause much more work for the mods and tutors and I think many prefer a totally free challange.
Thank you for the feedback
Do you feel this is something we should add into the "Composition" contest in some way in the future?
Thank you for the feedback
In general, we try to be sure the CV Team is always available to help. We do at various times have other members of the forum/site that do come and lend a hand or insight and we are always encouraging people to do so. I will see how we can possibly better accomplish that 
Thanks so much for the feedback
Do you have any examples of the type of thing you mean?
My idea was to have competitions that give a less abstract but still very general topic, like "A hot day" or "a cold night" or "Our new home" or "The look" or "The walk" ... Imagination is the limit. The participant would develop a general idea of the work to be created, but would not be constrained in his/her imagination at all. The opposite would be the case. Now you can - or better, have to - sketch a picture in your imagination before you start to work with the software. You think about colors, environments, light, details - even things that can not be expressed in a picture directly, like temperature or smells. You also think of applying rules and using techniques to make their idea come alive. The gain I see here is that discussions and exchange of ideas will be even more helpful and widening, and I expect great renders to arise :)
Generally the contests are more to help teach the toolsets and their uses. In the past we did try to run the challenges around themes but it tended to confine people more while trying to learn the toolset and it becomes difficult at times to match integrating the tools properly within more specific themes (and given that many new members dont have much content to work from as well). So in future Challenges we began to use the tools we were introducing as the theme itself.
That said, there are many wonderful contests throughout the forums that do deal in themes that I would encourage new members to check out such as the Freebie Challenge as well as the RRRR Contest.
We have focused more on the toolsets and software information for the New User Challenges since it was the one area other contests/challenges generally don't go into and we wanted to give new members/users of the site a good foundation to work from.
Not forgetting the Plat club contests for PC members and the program specific challenges for Carrara and Bryce.
Upps, I totally overseen that!
What I mean is, to show us what are the menus for.
As example...Dformer, weight maps ect.
I know a few things about them, but there is so much what I dont know...what ecactly does some point in all this things and where should I use it.
Rigging,Geometry... this are all so important things.
Yes there are tutorials for, but I would like to learn and try this things in a sort of group. Maybe not ecactly as a contest, more like a school class.
DAZ is so a mighty tool, but I have the feeling, I scratch since years only on the surface.
What I have in mind is, that we get a sort of start situation.
Maybe with only the basic things in DAZ and then whe must use one of the tools to create some effect, or implement this effect in a scene.