Greetings!

I was recently contacted by a 3D artist who would like to sell the community the models in the attached picture for a total of $220 ($130 for the executioner and $90 for the lizardman).  I have the .blend files in my possession for previewing purposes, and I can verify that both of these models are rigged and ready to go.  Also, given what I know about 3D art, I would normally expect to pay a good deal more for models of this quality.

Unfortunately my budget is really tight this month due to some family circumstances, so I can't just purchase it myself, and all of donated commission money has already been allocated to other commissions.  So, what I'd like to do is see if people will be willing to donate money to pay to liberate some existing art.  I'm going to change the donation goal for the month to $220, at which point we will purchase both models.  If we don't reach this by the end of December, I'll just continue the donation drive into January, and so on.

I'd be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on this process.  If it turns out to be a good way to raise commission money, we may do it again in the future.

Note: If we can manage to raise the funds in the next two weeks, he'll also include the nude version of the executioner model (as seen in the last image).

Peace,

Bart

Click for full size (now with wireframes):

Just a quick heads up, guys.  Lamoot has risen to the top of the submissions list for the last 30 days, with 65 submissions at the time of this blog post, and is leaving the rest of us in the dust.  Can anyone overtake him, or are we all going to be completely pwned for the next 4 weeks?  Better get started if we're gonna catch him. :)

Bart

P.S.  Keep it up, Lamoot!  Not trying to stop you, just trying to take advantage of peoples' competitive urges and whip them all into an art submitting frenzy.  Whoops, did I say that out loud?  :)

This time it's Cardinal Quest, an addictive little open source dungeon crawler.  The source is downloadable from here.  I managed to make it down to the 5th level of the dungeon before getting pwned in the face by a succubus.  Good times. :)

Yesterday was kind of a big day for OGA development, essentially the last major feature push before 2.0.  You won't see any earth-shattering differences, but you might notice that things are a little bit nicer.  Here's what we did:

• Souped up the "active forum topics" block so that the title links to the forums, and the forum name is listed along with the forum post.
• Replaced the image captcha with a much less annoying custom text captcha.  It's not likely that bots will be able to break it, as it would require custom code for specifically beating OGA's captcha, and I don't think we're big enough to warrant the effort.  I'm sure the occasional human spammer will still manage to get in, but this should at least stop the bots that can defeat ReCaptcha.
• Fixed preview images on the front page and search pages so that they're really 120x90 instead of 640x480 and scaled down.  This should make the front page load a lot faster and cut our bandwidth consumption down somewhat.

I'd also like to call your attention (particularly visiting artists) to the Open Commissions Forum, where we post art bounties.  As of this posting, we're offering $30 for a fairly simple 3D animation (the model you'll be animating is already created, and it can probably be done with a Blender particle system).  If you're a game project lead and you'd like to commission art directly, you can feel free to post an offer on the forum.  If you're an artist who is open for commissions, post there and let us know.

I mentioned this yesterday as well, but here's a reminder:  If you're an expert on any of the areas that we've created new forums for, comment here and let us know.  We'd love to get some new forum maintainers.  It's a great way to participate in OGA if you're looking to do that. :)