Well Everyone had to send in today for sure. I am going to be at siggraph and I would to meet some of you guys that were on the forum. I loved using Houdini. I am so glad that I met someone from sidefx last siggraph on the bus and got a Houdini Apperentice CD from her. I love your product. Quite honestly there are things that I can do in Houdini that I can not even dream about doing in other Highend 3D apps without writing custom plugins to do the relationships. I am thinking of Maya in Particular because I have not used 3D Max in a long time. After doing this challenge, me and a couple of other guys are very impressed with your packages so we are thinking of incorperating Houdini Select into our production pipeline. Yeah I am a student but I do contract work too. Right now I have maya because I got it cheep. An older version of maya. I have to ask a few things. I was wondering if you could on your next Apperentice release allow for importing files, larger rendering resolution at least 720 x 486 because the students can use this res for their demo reels. Those are the two things I am most concerned about. To tell you the truth I was wanting to make desktop wallpaper for my computer with my renders. I do this with my work on maya. One last request but this is the one I care about least of all. Maybe make the watermark 25% smaller and use some kind of stencil or what not on the render. I want it to be very visible but I also want my artwork to show through more. I would have never have gotten anywhere close to what I have already with your product if it was not for your learning videos and very responsive product support. That is another reason we want to go with you in the near future. We are hoping sometime this summer. We have to see how cash flow is and what not. Oh one last thing if we happen to win the contest by some grace from God do we get to choose the platform that houdini will run on??? I would like to choose linux and not windows because I hate working on Windows for more reasons than I would like to count. Been on linux for 7 years and I just can not hardly stomach windows but I use it for certain apps because they have not released them on Linux yet. I also noticed most of the plugin support and what not by other companies is on linux more than any other platform so it just seems to make sense. I think I might start playing around with the HDK kit and just see what all I can do with it.
8) 
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
P.S. I love Houdini!!! Mantra is just sooo beautiful for the renderings. Oh I could go on and on. lol