Announcing Community "Challenges"

Rebooting Contests

Contests have been a part of the CG Cookie community since the early days. There’s a wonderfully fun and productive dynamic that surrounds friendly competition among a group of like-minded learners and peers. They provide motivation, direction, and a deadline that always results in more work getting done than without contests.

Our last Halloween contest was incredibly fun (hello, scary pumpkins!) and made us realize the best part of running contests: the community. The interaction between Cookie members, mutual encouragement and friendly flexing is what makes the contests special. In short: Cookie community rules! 

So from now on, we're taking this a step further and giving the community (read: you) full responsibility over contests in the future.

Enter "Challenges"

The heart of CGC Contests is going to live on as Community “Challenges”. We believe the key to this iteration being successful is that they be reborn from their communal roots. In other words, we want Challenges to be run for the community, by the community. For the most part they will look similar to contests:

1. Unique theme
2. 4-week duration
3. Regularly scheduled every 3 months
4. 1st (100XP), 2nd (80XP), 3rd (60XP), and “People’s Choice” winners (40XP)
5. 1st-3rd decided by a panel of judges (People’s Choice by most liked by the community)

The three main differences will be:

• No monetary or physical prizes. That means no wacom tablets, or Render Street credit, or amazon gift cards for winners - At least not initially. I know this will be a bummer to some of you. Honestly, I’ve only ever competed in CG contests for a chance to win big prizes like that. I just tried to win the prize and get out. I never visited those contest host communities again...
  
  Which is exactly why we don’t want that to be a motivation with Challenges. The goal is to learn, complete a project, and score bragging rights among your CGC peers.
  
  
• Challenges will run live in the Forum. While we have an official contests system built, the Halloween contest from October taught us that it's not ideal for community-oriented competition. The forum is better for this.
  
  
• Facilitated by a community leader. That’s right, one of you will be in charge of CGC Challenges. A mighty volunteer has risen from this very community. She holds the schedule in the palm of her hand, knows all the cool themes, and has all the answers to your questions!

Welcome your Challenge host, Miranda van Elst!

If you’ve spent any time in our community in 2018, you know Miranda. She’s been a stand-out member ever since she joined a year ago: Learning from courses, posting work-in-progress, giving and receiving advice in the forum, a regular in our weekly stream, scoring top 3 in both classes she’s taken, and improving tremendously as a Blender artist in less than a year.

Combining her very active community involvement and professional background in project planning, I know Miranda is going to do an incredible job leading CGC Challenges.

🚨 First CGC Challenge happens in April 🚨

We’re wasting no time in kicking off the first official Challenge. The theme is "Eevee VS Cycles" and it's taking place throughout the month of April. Read all about it in the official Challenge thread! May the best Cookie win 😎