Avatar Creation Contest: Design a New Default Avatar for Space, Win $500

Space, the upcoming Unity 3D-based virtual world from Second Life and OpenSim pioneers (a proud NWN sponsor!) just launched an avatar creation contest for a new default avatar skin (current one at right) -- winning submitter gets $500 USD or lots and lots of virtual goods.

All the details are here in the Space forum, but here's the basics:

• A male or female base avatar skin of natural human appearance.
• 3 to 5 Screenshots which demonstrate your design, preferably posted to a site such as Flickr, and included in the Space group pool.
• Winners will be free to sell or give away variations, or alternate designs based on these skins in the Space marketplace, you will retain most rights to your entry.  Any non-winning entry remains your property to be used as you see fit.
• Creators should be aiming for 4096px x 4096px resolution files, with a final publishing resolution around 2048px x 2048px.
• Create the avatar in Unity using Space's resource pack downloadable here.
• E-mail entries, questions, comments, here: [email protected]

Space is especially reaching out to Second Life's burgeoning avatar/fashionista community for help creating this skin. As lead developer Adam Frisby put it:

"SL has the best character skin/texture artists on the planet. Even AAA game devs often don't do as good a job." Agreed.

Above is the female UV template you'd be working with. "Plenty of UV detail area given to the face and other 'high profile' areas," says Adma, "with less UV area for less visible portions of the body. Things such as fingernails have their own sections on the UV map to make them easier to paint. Everything has been arranged onto a single large UV map .

As always, post questions/comments to Adam below!

Comments

[Susan]

This is an excellent idea! I wish I were a skin designer :)

[Just Say'n]

All Good Adam just know 80% of all skin designers are using the same baseline stock with almost all of them getting it from templates,copybotting,etc. well that leaves 20% with 10% of that stealing from the other 10%. so you have 10% chance for those designers making $500 a day in sales to take valuable time away looking into space. so it would have to be someone who wants a challenge or personally likes you.

In the meantime you should consider trying to get the Elf Clan in Inworldz to join. they had a disaster in that place with lies and promises but have been in limbo unwilling to go back to SL due to pride while no real alternatives have came along besides vanilla opensim .

research some past big spenders in the old forum who left Inworldz it was a large amount who you might be able to get to try space out.

[Just Say'n]

Nothing wrong with wanting creators but communities given community tools with robust features to build the place up that's progress.

Do you have partnerships in space? ,how about multiple? .. Family profiles? , Groups beyond abilities in SL? .. Profiles with full media features? .. alt accounts for business that share the same inventory as the main account?

How about Incentives to get communities to come and grow? every new resident they refer to space you discount them rent or other discounts?

[Adam]

Hey Just Say'n, definitely taking comments & suggestions onboard!

Re: groups/profiles/etc - we've got a big update planned quite soon with a lot of those features. The reason they aren't in yet is our focus up until about 'nowish' has been getting complete creator tools out there (since without anything to see, there's not much point adding profile/group features). We're now happy with the capabilities of those, so community building and user features is a big focus now.

In each of those categories you mentioned above we do have something coming soon - groups is going to appear first (it's near the top of our priority list at the moment), followed by new profiles (little further down, but still in the 'soon' bucket), and a few other features. We overhauled our snapshot window last week - the new 'Photo' feature I suspect a few people are going to enjoy playing with (it's actually a *lot* of fun for such a minor feature)

As always though, we're open to feedback & suggestions - we're pretty open with our production schedule and what we're actively working on. :) We keep a trello board up to date which reflects most of what we're immediately working on: https://trello.com/b/jUeF6CYM/space

[Patchouli Woollahra]

You say US$500, but anyone who's serious about Space will know what the real 'value for money' prize in this contest is: the chance to have a Standard 4 subscription for life: that's a lot of space, users and room to build cool stuff in, and only having to pay the commissions on sales of items if you don't need more space or users seems like a pretty good deal if you expect .Space to last more than four years.

[Adam]

Patchouli: yep! It's the winners choice - all three prizes are on offer for all selected winners. I think that one's got the most value-for-money too.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

I'm an idiot, Adam: I just remembered that you're currently doing launch discounts of 50% off, which means that if you declared the end of launch discounts the day after the prizes are handed out, it's still worth two years, rather than four, of Standard 4.