Design us a star - and win a workstation! (part 2)

HOW TO ENTER
The contest is about unleashing your creativity, and we want to recognise you, the stars of the digital art community, so your graphic should embody that concept.

The finished artwork should feature a 3D render of a five-pointed star prominently… but exactly how you treat that star is up to you.

To get you started, click the link below to download an EPS file showing a simple five-pointed star. Use this as the basis of your design.

Your image should use the Intel blue as a primary colour; and green as a secondary colour. The exact colour values are as follows:

Primary colour
CMYK – 100/40/0/0 or RGB – 8/96/198

Secondary colour
CMYK – 40/0/100/0 or RGB – 174/197/0

We have also included a number of guides within the download to show the various formats in which your design may be used, which include print ads and online banners. For the banners, it will be necessary to crop in on a smaller part of the graphic.

Bear in mind that, for print use, the image must be supplied at 300dpi resolution.

And finally, don’t include any text on the image.

Once you have completed your image, send it to us by clicking the entry link below. Include your full name and daytime phone number in the body of the email.

(Note: our email server only accepts attachments under 9MB in size).

The sender of the image that, in the opinion of the judges, best fulfils the brief and best demonstrates creativity and technical quality will win a Core i7 workstation with the specification shown at the foot of the page.

The closing date for entries is 12 February 2009.

In order to qualify to receive the prize, you will be required to send us the scene file and other assets for the graphic; and, if necessary, a larger print-resolution version of the image.

source by : www.3dworldmag.com

Design us a star - and win a workstation! (part 1)

Create a graphic for our upcoming digital art talent contest and you could win an Intel Core i7-powered workstation worth over $5,000

This April, 3D World, in association with Intel, will be launching an international contest to find the most talented digital artists of 2009 – and we’d like you to design the marketing concept used in the publicity material.

In addition to seeing their work used in high-profile adverts, both in print and online, the creator of the graphic chosen to promote the contest will win an Intel Core i7-based workstation worth over $5,000.

For years, Intel technology has been the driving force behind digital content creation, both on Windows machines and the new Intel Macs. But the company’s new Core i7 processors take demanding multimedia and graphics tasks to a new dimension.

Although the i7s are quad-core processors, Intel’s proprietary Hyper-Threading technology splits each physical core into two virtual ones, so the processor appears to the operating system to have eight cores, speeding up demanding 3D tasks.

In our review of the Armari Magnetar NS+, one of the first Core i7 workstations, James Morris commented: “This system beats the multi-threaded rendering performance of any quad-core workstation we’ve seen.”

source by : www.3dworldmag.com

CES Preview: Putting the New in Notebooks (part 1)

by Cisco Cheng

As you might expect, notebooks will be where the action is at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year.

Sales of notebooks continue to increase, while desktops decline. As a consequence, OEMs continue to drive this market toward new and emerging technologies, all the while competing aggressively on price.

Here's what we expect to see at CES this January. Want to read about the rest of the show? Check out our CES overview.

New form factors for notebook screens will dominate the show, moving from the older 16-by-10 ratio to a 16-by-9 one, as is common in HDTVs. We've already seen a handful of them in the past few months, including the 16-inch Gateway Mc7803u, the HP HDX16t, and the Acer Aspire 6930G-6723. Since they are also cheaper and more efficient to make, laptops with screen sizes such as 14-, 15.6-, and 18-inches will become the de facto standards at CES 2009.

Nvidia is making a huge play with its integrated ecosystem, which is likely to take a decent chunk of market share away from Intel. The Apple MacBook 13-inch and the MacBook Pro 15-inch dual-graphics machine are already utilizing this ecosystem, reaping the rewards of enhanced 3D graphics without the power draw. The Toshiba Portege A600 is another laptop that uses Nvidia's integrated chipset; expect companies like Acer, Asus, Dell, and HP to jump on board. Recently, Nvidia announced its Ion platform, transforming traditional Atom-based netbooks into somewhat gaming-worthy machines. Expect to see the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset in future netbook designs as well.

source by:www.pcmag.com