ith 20 CG Challenges behind us, we can proudly boast about their spectacular success. The CGChallenges are the world's largest and most successful series of digital art competitions. Over the past 5 challenges we have given much more narrative and technical guidance.

Each time we give more, the entrants have improved their work yet again. However, we are always looking to enhance the challenges and wanted to make the 20th challenge something special. So we introduced animation and film categories. We also invited in two of the world's leading Science Fiction writers and based the challenge on one of their blockbuster novels - EON, by Greg Bear. This made it the hardest and the highest profile challenge ever.

So why did we choose this special occasion to break a winning formula in such a spectacular way? Because we knew our members would be up to the challenge and the time was right to move into animation and film. In the past we have only had illustration categories. We have seen some truly amazing talent and illustrations worthy of "master art" status. But with this challenge, it was time to see if there were any nascent Scorsese, Lucas and Spielbergs lurking out there. To our great delight there are. But before I announce the winners we should talk a little about the challenge, the topic and the judges.

Through a combination of online activities and publishing (Ballistic Publishing division), the CGSociety has become de-facto face of the global digital arts industry. Now it's possible for us to approach absolutely anyone in our field knowing they will want to participate. However, we want to do more. We want to reach outside our own community, into related creative communities, such as writers. With this in mind, we invited two of the world's leading Science Fiction writers in this challenge - and they were delighted to participate.

Greg Bear and David Brin are two of the world's leading Science Fiction writers with a great many Hugo and Nebula awards between them. If you're a science fiction fan then you'll already be familiar with their names. They have both been hugely successful. but this also created a problem as most of their books are optioned for films. It was too difficult to use optioned works on short notice. However, Greg's blockbuster novel EON was available as a theme.

Originally published in 1985, EON stands as one of the great science fiction novels of our time and remains one of Greg Bear's best selling titles. It is truly vast in scope. Entrants were allowed to create their work based on any part of EON. Greg kindly gave us permission to publish a significant number of excerpts from the book to aid people not familiar with EON.

"EON may be the best constructed hard SF epic yet."
- The Washington Post

"The only word for it really is blockbuster. It is big and breathtaking; the story and the concepts are ambitious to the point of mind boggling." - Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine

Each challenge we reach out to a few high profile external judges. We also call upon past challenge winners. This challenge we were privileged to have two of the worlds leading science fiction writers join us. However, this doesn’t diminish the contributions from all our other judges and I would like to extend a personal note of thanks to them all:

	Brian Pohl (vizfizz) Brian J. Pohl is co-owner and pre-visualisation supervisor of Persistence of Vision Digital Entertainment (P.O.V.). He has served as the previsualization lead/supervisor on I,Robot and Stealth at Digital Domain.

	Dehong He (G. Brush) Dehong He comes from China, and started creating comic books eight years ago.

	Kris Costa (antropus) Resident artist at CafeFX, working as 3D character artist/generalist, Kris has been a passionate CG artist for over 14 years.

	Damian Bajowski (mime_evermotion) Damian is from Poland, and has been creating CG for six years. His recent focus is on 2D work, though he is also familiar with 3D graphics.

	Greg Bear The author of more than thirty books of science fiction and fantasy, including: ‘Blood Music’, ‘The Forge of God’, ’Darwin’s Radio’ and ‘Quantico’. Awarded two 'Hugos' and five 'Nebulas' for his fiction writing, one of only two authors to win a 'Nebula' in every category, Bear has been called the "Best working writer of hard science fiction" by The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

	David Brin Scientist, public speaker and author; several of David’s novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. His fifteen novels have been translated into more than twenty languages.