DAILY ART CHALLENGE
Get Ready for the MARDINI Daily Art Challenge - your chance to compete for cool prizes by creating images or animations! With a different challenge every day during the month of March, you'll have 31 chances to enter and win.
This year, each week features a different Houdini focus area – with a daily prompt to inspire your artwork. As usual, the judges will be looking at the aesthetics of your artwork.
While the areas of focus give you a chance to explore different parts of Houdini you may not have encountered before, the main goal should still be polished artwork.
Here are the Daily Prompts. Your entry should use the context of Houdini featured for that week and then get inspiration from the daily prompt. Mardini has been designed so that models in week 1, can be textured in week 2, animated in week3, simulated in week 4 and rendered in week 5. While you don't have to carry over your work in this way it is certainly one strategy for managing the workload.
HOW TO ENTER
The MARDINI Daily Challenge Forum will be made available and on each day of the contest - a thread for the daily topic will appear for you to post your work. Create your images or animations using Houdini products, including Indie, Education and Apprentice, and render using Karma or third party renderers working from within the Houdini environment. Any compositing work should be done using Copernicus.
Submit your work to these forums in order for your artwork to be considered. To win the daily prizes, you must post:
- your image or animation
- a screengrab that shows your artwork in the viewport and the network associated with the weekly theme.
These must be posted before Midnight EST/EDT on each day. You may submit art to any of the topics throughout the month but your work will only be eligible for the daily prizes or daily entry point if you submit before the daily deadline. You will still be eligible for the Iron Heart prize if you submit after the topic date.
Speedi in Mardini
Moeen Sayed of Nine Between has just released a Speedy in Mardini video. Here his provides 12 tips for working your way through Mardini. He won several categories in the HOULY contest from 2020 and has some great advice for surviving a full month of Mardini challenges.
Moeen also has a long history of delivering excellent Houdini learning material including Houdini is HIP, The Ultimate Copernicus Guide, Solaris is Sweet and VEX isn't Scary. Check out some of these excellent lessons to get ready for Mardini 2025!
Light & Camera Tips
Recipe Tips
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FREE 2 Month Houdini Indie License
If you are entering Mardini and were planning to use Houdini Apprentice, you can work Watermark free with a 2-month copy of Houdini Indie. Click below to sign up for this FREE license:
HOW TO WIN
DAILY POINTS
1st Place Image
5 PTS
1st Place Animation
5 PTS
2nd Place Image
4 PTS
2nd Place Animation
4 PTS
3rd Place Image
3 PTS
3rd Place Animation
3 PTS
Image Entry
1 PTS
Animation Entry
1 PTS
PRIZES
RULES
- Only one submission per day per artist is allowed. You can create an image OR an animation but not both.
- This contest is void where prohibited.
- Employees of SideFX or any of their agents may participate in the contest but are not eligible to win.
- The judges' decision is final.
- SideFX is not responsible for submissions that arrive late, or are lost or damaged during submission.
- If the prize cannot be awarded due to unforeseen circumstances, no cash alternatives are available.
- Artwork created for these challenges must be created using Houdini products.
- Include a screengrab that shows your artwork in the viewport and the weekly network type.
- Winners may be asked to submit .hip files to verify that Houdini was used for all aspects of the designs. If you do not submit the files then you will be disqualified.
- The only External geometry and texture maps that can be used as part of your submission are the Greyscalegorilla assets. Other than that please use the Content Library for some geometry and rigs and Copernicus for creating texture maps. You can also use the material gallery found on the Material Linker node. Houdini must be your main tool.
- All content must be the property of the submitter. If you are running Houdini on an employer or school computer make sure that this does not compromise your ownership rights.
- Entries that clearly infringe on the copyrights of another company will be disqualified.
- Your entry in the contest constitutes an agreement to allow SideFX unrestricted use and distribution of the artwork submitted.