Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• It would have been nice to see more evidence of research into castles and how they were designed/constructed, and to see how this influenced your work. Try not to add things for the sake of it (eg. the shrine) as it may confuse the overall point of the environment - I'm not sure the theme really hangs together here. Could be a good idea to look into methods to prevent obvious texture tiling, for example vertex painting to add variation.
• - The modelling of the castle walls is too straight. When you have lots of 90 degree angles it gives of a early CG look. Try adding more detail, in the references you can see trim sections and areas that extrude outwards. - Because the castle walls take up so much space, you need to work on ways to create variation to break up the repetition. This can be done through adding more form and detail to the silhouette (such as adding in trim pieces mentioned in the previous comment), adding different elements of another material (Maybe some wooden scaffolding or ivy) or creating a variation of the stone material and vertex painting over it. - To make the forest seem more dense you can create a couple levels of detail. Ranging from fully detailed trees at the front to flat planes of trees in the background. The reason for this is that fully detailed trees will take a lot of resources to render, so adding the lower detailed models will help the forest look dense while saving resources.
• NOTE: The submitted project is missing its map and files and includes only default or bought assets, so this is based on what is available (screen here and presentation) Research: Very little effort in understanding the nuances of the medieval architecture, what makes a castle work, what are its core elements, why towers / walls are made a certain way - the research shows things like the sword in the stone, but the piece really doesn't showcase it in a way that is meaningful, one would expect to find more substantial study on how such an element could better integrate in the environment Technical Workflow: There are a plethora of mistakes that show very little attention to the quality of assets - the wrapping of architectural elements shows lack of understanding of UV mapping and tiling, the terrain has no textures at all, the lighting is extremely poorly made (it's a step back from the default unreal lighting, which shows sings of tinkering without understanding of the tools) Creative Development: While the subject can easily be used to create a stunning composition, there is quite a lack of interesting twists and creative choices done on top of the extremely basic and formulaic understanding of what is a castle and how it's supposed to look like - the statement is quite weak and without the documentation would be almost impossible to tell what is what, the environment doesn't really tell a story. Final Presentation: Overall the lack of attention is also reflected by the spelling mistakes in the description and the lack of a decent set of screenshots for the preview, the only image being a direct capture of the editor screen with all the gizmos in sight. Project Documentation: Consistently with the rest of the project, there is a substantial lack of care and attention here too, with texts overflowing, spelling mistakes and a fairly lackluster presentation. Overall: It is unfortunate to see such a haphazardly thrown together scene, with such a lack of attention and care - beyond the technical understanding, it seems more like an attempt to check a dotted list as quickly as possible than something born out of creative passion