What is State of Flux?
The word 'flux' means change. A 'state of flux' is achieved when something keeps changing and reinventing itself. The term was chosen because State of Flux is a place designed to change, designed to be altered by participation.

Most of all, however, State of Flux is designed to help people learn 3D, by not only challenging them, but also by designing those challenges around real-world 3D industry work and freely available learning resources. The website itself houses a new breed of challenges to artists using the Blender 3D package. Other sites house grand competitions with cool prizes and lots of prestige. State of Flux will not try to compete with that. A lot of the inspiration comes from the Durian modelling sprints, but the challenges here are different from the usual Big Competition in several ways, the most essential ones presented here...
1: Micro-challenges
Challenges at State of Flux are small. Most are meant to take a few hours of work, at the most, based around a theme like "astonishment" or "loss of sanity". None are meant to cause months of pondering. A challenge might be open one or more weeks, but only to ensure people the time to notice it. The actual work is simple, allowing anyone to take up more challenges, or simply relax with one or two now and then. There will be multiple challenges open at any given time, in multiple themes and at multiple levels of expertise.
2: Your Prize, Their Challenge!
Rather than attract mass attention with grand prizes, the prize of winning a challenge is to create the next challenge in the same or a similar category. So if you make the best "loss of sanity" picture, you may challenge everyone to do that "painful victory" challenge you would like! It is not permitted to win at one's own challenge, though. And challenges are scanned before posting, to avoid "make a penis", illegal or just completely impossible (or incoherent) challenges. Challenges are won by popular vote.
3: Asset Reuse
All challenge submissions must be submitted with full .blend file, and all these files are made public. As State of Flux grows, this will become part of challenges: To use existing assetts for something new! As in real industry jobs, participants may be asked to use someone else's models to produce an animation, to improve on the work of others, to reassemble creations to produce something entirely new, and so on. It might be old challenge winners, or not. What you create in a State of Flux lives on long after its challenge is done...
4: Community Integration
State of Flux is a learning community, growing from the participation of others. But not just within the challenges themselves; online tutorials, clever community tools, existing networks and the like will be drawn into the mix, both to open up new challenges and to showcase what the wider community has to offer! From its inception, State of Flux has tied itself closely to sites like Blender Artists, Blendswap and Blender Cookie. State of Flux will build on these Great Projects, and hopefully show many newcomers the benefits they all offer.
5: Common Narrative
The Shift is the very brief introduction to a world that has gone mad, a world in which concepts of reality collide, shatter and throw off new realities. A world in which anything might exist, anything that those who participate in challenges can come up with. A world that has only just begun. Challenges will be the driving force behind the grander story. Not the challenges themselves, though, but what they produce; the story will be part of the challenge, and participants (not just winners!) will be creating the true story. Where it goes next is never known, but always changing...