Anyway, to respond to some of the comments about the actual thread topic before I got it off track...

We've tried to do animation, texturing, and particle FX challenges in the past and we either had lots of entries and just 1 or 2 finish or hardly any entries and no one finish. It seems that the modeling/texturing challenges are the ones that most people feel comfortable doing.

Doing a poll might be the best way to go about it. I admit I do generally try to create challenges of topics that I personally find interesting, but maybe that's my problem.