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.

For this year's MARDINI, the daily prompts are specific Houdini nodes. As shown below, each week has a category, and each day has a node which needs to be used in the artwork that you submit.

The focus of this contest is the aesthetics of your submitted artwork – while the nodes give you a chance to explore different parts of Houdini you may not have encountered before, the focus should still be on the final artwork. Your artwork should use the daily node but doesn't need to be about the node - it can be about anything!




Note: There are some people missing prizes from 2023 - please fill out this form so we can compare to our shipping lists and sort out any issues:

MISSING PRIZE CLAIM FORM [docs.google.com]

Hello Robert and all involved parties from sidefx! Nice to see you all returning participants, and greetings, new people!

Robert, the greyscalegorilla+ library is a welcome addition to the challenge this year. I wanted to ask what the rules were about other third party assets providers like megascans or, really, any online marketplaces ? Are they allowed like last year, or do we have to pick among the free assets from GSG+ ?

Cheers and best of luck and fun to all artists !

Other assets are allowed - the Greyscalegorilla assets are for the special prize 0 a one year subscription to Greyscalegorilla+.

Note that your submission should get most of its art from Houdini rather than outside assets.

Hello Robert,
For the animation, what's the allowed resolution? Must be 1920x1080 or a square screen, like 1080x1080, is possible?
Last question, to build the video (without any editing) can I use DaVinci resolve?

Thanks!

There are no specific sizes or aspect ratios for images/animations. Your choice.

You can export movies from Mplay - File > Export > FFmpeg.

Hi Robert.
I have 2 questions:

1. Is it ok if we submit an animation and a still image one day, but then another day, I may only have time to upload a still one day.
Do I still qualify to get my Houdini Swag?

I am an animator and I always push to get an animation, and I don't have time always to render lots of frames, so I'm just thinking that I still count as being done with the challenge every day.

2. I haven't seen Octane Render mentioned, so I'm guessing everyone is using Houdini in their own way, but I want to make sure rendering through Octane and not Solaris, one day, does that still count? My Octane setup is optimised on my machine and I'm obviously doing the Mardini Challange to practice more with Solaris, but I'm afraid one day I will fail and I want to ask if I have the option to go through the Octane ROP.

Thanks, Robert and sorry for the simplistic questions

yes you can do an animation one day and an image the next - only one entry per day though.

As long as you are rendering from Houdini it is fine - Solaris would be preferred to help build up skills there.

Hello Robert,

I sometimes come up with multiple ideas on the same subject and end up actually making them.
For example, on Day31_Fire in 2021, I made and submitted two pieces.

If I do this, is it okay if I write a note saying something like "Please grade this one"?

Please only submit one of them - this way we avoid confusion.

I had quite a painful experience with the "layout" node yesterday.
the help shows that the tool is no longer supported, I wonder why

That is a geometry (SOP) node - the challenge was for the Layout LOP: