3rd International CGI Awards

Michael Weinzettl presents the winners and the Top Ten images from the 3rd International CGI Awards.

Yesterday, for the third time Lürzer's Archive in cooperation with the ICGIW handed out the third International CGI Awards. This was part of the 10th International CGI Congress, held for the first time in the Westphalian city of Münster. Since this year will also see the publication of our next biennial issue of 200 Best Digital Artists we decided to make submissions to this book automatically eligible for the awards (with the permission of the submitters of course). From these I culled 80 works that the jurors selected the Top Ten from.

The members of the jury (which partly voted on these 80 CGI images online) were:

Ale Burset, the number one ad photographer in the Lürzer's Archive Ranking for the past 10 years,

Professor Michael Jostmeier, head of the Design faculty at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University in Nuremberg and a professor for media design and CGI since 1996,

Surachai Puthikulangkura, founder of Illustion, Bangkok, one of the highest-ranking studios for illustration and CGI worldwide,

Olaf Hauschulz, advertising photographer. In 2008 Olaf worked on his first CGI project. Since then, he had the pleasure to collaborate with the most talented 2D and 3D artists worldwide,

Mirjam Böhm, Owner of the PAM photographers agency in Hamburg and a judge for our 200 Best Photographers special,

and myself.

The jury was asked to nominate their Top Ten and give recommendations for a possible winner for this year. Based on these we then decided the winners in the Professional as well as the Students' contest. Once again, there was a clear winner, which was able to get all of the six votes this year.

The CGI Awards 2018 thus, once again, went to Brazil, this time to LightFarm in Rio de Janeiro for an image for New York health care agency Area 23 and their client Bayer. It is titled "Battle in the Bone." LightFarm explained the winning entry as follows: "Battle in the Bone" is our newest 100% 3D work for Area23. The concept can be described as "The revolution will not be calcified!" Inspired by this concept, made by our illustration team, all 12 warriors were made 100% in Zbrush. Zbrush is a 3D software widely used to sculpt digital models in the same way it sculpts in real life. The final image was rendered on Octane." We congratulate the LightFarm for this brilliant digital image. The prize is a free double page spread in the 200 Best Digital Artists special to be published towards the end of this year.

The jury (from left to right): Ale Burset, Olaf Hauschulz, Surachai Puthikulangkura

From left to right: Mirjam Böhm, Prof. Michael Jostmeier, Michael Weinzettl

This year's students award was split between two entries, one by Christina Ruff of the Georg-Simon-Ohm University in Nuremberg, Germany and, respectively, the "Naturally Adaptive" motif by Abdelrahman Galal from Miami Ad School, Hamburg. Abdelrahman's work is all the more remarkable for having been originally (and erroneously) entered in the Professionals category, where it got judged by the jury as such and still gained three out of six jurors' votes, thus ranking in the Top Ten works by internationally renowned digital artists. (The ad is going to feature in the Students' Contest section in Lürzer's Archive Vol. 4-2018, and will thus be eligible for the 2018 (19?) Lürzer's Archive Student of the Year Award.)

We congratulate the winners and thank them for submitting such brilliant work to us.

The Top Ten digital works from the Professionals category at this year's CGI awards can be seen in the Gallery on the right. Check out the two award winners in the Students' category below.