Really high quality work on both sites and a shame that everyone can't win but that's how it is. Congratulations otacon, I really like your renders and everyone here was in complete agreement that your entry was the best.
lightmod, I've already replied to all this on SimplyMaya but I will say a few things here as well. First off this was not a modeling challenge it was an art challenge where best overall image wins not the thing that took the longest to produce or the most complex model in that case we would have asked for an untextured model to begin with. It was not a photorealism challenge either, it was about producing the best render. And since there were so many good models it really came down to nitpicking and some great models were let down by their shading and lighting work. For this reason images we considered perfectly executed were favoured over more complicated ones which had room for improvement. You can of course argue that this is wrong, for me it makes more sense to pick the highest quality image.
I don't know why you think SimplyMaya missed out, personally I think there was a lot of work on this site that could easily have placed in the top three as well and in a sense it isn't fair that so much good work went unnoticed. Nor do I get what you mean by
"Is it because the winner is popular with using lightwave?". I'm a Maya user and SimplyMaya is a larger site if there would be any bias it would favour Maya not Lightwave, nor do I or anyone else here know otacon personally we simply liked his work in this challenge.
When it comes to the choice of toy I see no problem with picking a vintage toy, we didn't say it had to be from your childhood as we also mentioned you could make something more adult like a gadget leaving plenty of room for interpretation. Either way many of us had older toys from our grandparents me included and toys are collectibles so you never know what people have lying around.
Anyway I hope that clears some stuff up, I also don't think it's very nice the way a few people have attacked the winning pieces especially on SimplyMaya it's fine to disagree but no reason to be nasty about it. I would have been much happier if the focus would have been on the work that people thought should have won but didn't rather than taking straight slap at somebody else's work, it's a waste of time and it achieves nothing but bad blood. To avoid this happening again I wrote very clear guidelines and what the judging criteria is for the
dream office space challenge, if something is unclear please feel free to ask me about it now rather than after the challenge is judged.
Nilla