Judge feedback

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• Submission Title: Excalibur’s Island Submission Tier: Search for a star Assessor: Dominic Shaw Environment Artist @ Firesprite Research + Development There were some nice shots of real world reference which is good but it would have been nice to see some asset lists with time breakdowns and just a bit more planning to the project. Creative Art The environment has a very clear focal point and some nice atmosphere, there is some good sculpts in the project and good evidence of game art techniques such has baking. The use of the same symbol amongst the assets was great has this helped to get some storytelling into the environment. To help improve the project, I noticed that there was a few texture seems and UV issues on some of the meshes, so I would do another pass at the models and make sure there are no visible UV errors. I liked the sculpts that you did for the project but I think that you could have gone a bit more planar and hard edges on some of them. It could have helped to break up the base shape a bit more on them has you can tell that the base shape is just a box so you could break up the straight lines. When it comes to the main sword area, you could have a more unique sculpt that is cracked to make the sword feel more embedded into the environment has at the moment, it’s just placed there. With the colours of the rocks, I think you could have matched them a bit more to the brick material so things are a bit more coherent. The dirt material that you did was nice but it looks a little low resolution compared to the megascans bricks so I would up the resolution. Finally, you could rotate the directional light to cast more shadows across the environment and get more interesting areas of light/shadow, this will help to add another level interest and stop everything looking flat. Technical Art You have a good knowledge of game art and the master material you created was really good, you did well to say you came into the competition late. A few things to improve on would be making sure that you are not wasting texture space, I noticed that the sword and sword handle was two separate textures when there was no reason at all for these to be on different texture sheets. I understand that you were short on time and megascans are an easy way to speed up production, however I think has a student, this is the time to show off your skills so I would much rather see evidence of you using substance designer than importing megascans. You need to prove to potential employers that you could do the job without the use of megascans. Documentation Unfortunately, there wasn’t much breakdown due to entering the competition late and I think that the environment could have been way better with more time. Final Presentation The final images had good composition and mood and to help improve them more you could have pushed the background stuff in the distance more with the values to create more value separation to help you focus solely on the focal point area.