How about famous movie monsters?
Godzilla, King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein,
Or, How about Creatures/beings from the D&D Monster Manual?
–Like Loth! Queen of the Demon web pits… or a Pit Fiend
Frazetta’s Death Dealer… or Conan the barbarian…
Or A:M versions of well known CG characters like Mike and Sully from Monsters, Inc. or Shrek!
Or 3D versions of old cartoon characters
The Smurfs!
or newer ones like Pinky and the Brain! Narf!
:buttrock:
How about this (for an animation contest): Create a 10-20sec “music video” based on a short section from a given song. You get to choose the section, but not the song. We could vote on the song.
How about self portraits (caricatured or 3d cartoon), it would be a funny way to know us and to make a great family photo.
Here are a few ideas with no originality 
I like the Super Hero idea, but characters that we make up.
Orcs. There’s lots of room for variations of orcs, and lot’s of extra things can be added, ex. armor, weapons.
Animal characters. Cartoony type animals with the big eyes and human like features.
Vehicle characters. Ala “Cars” Pixar’s next film after Incredibles. I think it’s about cars that talk and have eyes and stuff. ( i don’t really like this idea)
Old West/Sci Fi combo. Alien Cowboys to Robot Indians. Make sense?
Dogs/ 50’s Mob combo Dog mobsters. Ala boids of a feather, but using dogs.
warriors/ swords. A cool character. Skilled in the art of swordsmenship
:shrug:
George
Hey, Grgeon
I have posted a cartoony type animal character with big eyes and human like features here:
I like all that kind of stuff. There is a lot of room for expression and variety.
Like the text of the poll says, I’d love to participate in an animation contest. Whether or not I actually do remains to be seen. 
I’ll support it as much as I am able.
That should be something that we should settle on too eh? A different set of skills. For instance I’ve yet to do any animating in A:M at all. But, perhaps a challenge may force me to do so. Or keep me out. hehe Just a thought.
Oh and I would vote to stay away from any challenge that’s already been done elsewhere in the forums. Ya know, like the LOTR stuff and so on.
How about we make up an 8th dwarf for Snow White to pal around with. We choose our own characters quirky personality, like Gassy, Burpy or Dorky.
I’m trying to think of simple characters that we can start the contest with so we’re not overwhelmed on the first go round.
Jim
Yea I like that one too.
The 8th Dwarf.
I also like old monsters. King Kong etc. Althought I’m not so sure there are enough to chose from.
I kinda figured we would need at least thirty people interested in participating to make it worth our while. . .
We got 26. . .
:hmm:
yeah the 8th dwarf sounds really cool! so would that mean the contest would have 30 different versions of the “8th dwarf”? i hope we find 4 more people!
-kungfud0rk
8th dwarf sounds great! Definitely agree on keeping it simple for the first one. Are we looking at a 30 day timeframe?
Originally posted by Wegg
[B]YI kinda figured we would need at least thirty people interested in participating to make it worth our while. . .We got 26. . .
:hmm: [/B]
Wegg,
Just curious, why 30? To account for those who dropout?
Jim
Yea.
Even at 30 we’d be pretty lucky to get more than 5 people to actually finish and submit something.
Be nice if we could find a marter to post to the AM list. 
Another question, what time frame are we thinking, a month? A week? Two weeks?
It might be cool to have the modeling contest first and then the winner’s model gets animated in the animation contest by all the animators. That way their animation stands on it’s own if they all use the same model. (I say “they” because I’m not an animator.)
Jim
How about
B-list superheroes and villans that never made it. (think cast rejects from ‘the tick’)
or,
a bit more general ‘80s cartoon character’ that gives access to tranformers, robotech, thundercats,gi-joe, he-man etc… (hmmm thundercats)
Are we talking about characters fully rigged and textured or just modeled, we should probably decided before starting.
Also any kind of timeframe is a big factor if I’ll be able to participate and finish…
sounds like fun tho. :buttrock:
-Drakk
How much time do you think you will need?
A whole month is a long time. In production you are usually only taking one or two days to model something and another for the textures.
If your taking over a month than. . . bloody hell.
How about a week then. Not all of us are used to the insane schedules you are used to. If you make it less then a week then you need to provide us with Mountain Dew to keep us going 
i’d like to join, so sign me in please (even if I just watch)
a week may be too short if you have other stuff going on to pay the bills. (like I have)
a month may be too long to keep the attention span going.
However, I’d vote for a month as it’s a common format and on lots of forums, people can post progress images and get feedback AND you give time for the best work. If you work fast, then do your work in 3 days post and sit back basking in the glory!
Another point is - imagine your copy suddenly throws up a bug. You might appreciate having a month.
Hello folks, nice to see how far this forum has moved on!
I agree w/ the month-long idea. Working on a production schedule is one thing. Working at home in so-called “spare time” outside of a day job is another thing. Some folks may be in a position to work full-time on a model, but it wouldn’t be fair to assume that everyone has a similarly open schedule. Same goes when it comes to the animation side.
For those who work quickly or have tons of time, a month is more than enough, allowing them to crank out the model and move on to other things if they wish. For those with limited time, it should be a decent length of time to put something together in whatever time is available.