Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Artist – Xandra Van Antwerpen Category: Search for A Star Assessor: Anthony O Donnell – Lead Artist at Firesprite Work name: Opening Day Disaster Research and Development /Documentation The document is beautifully presented. The process from planning to blockout to completion was sensible and done using industry workflows. Organised and clean scene management in UE4 was good to see. Technical Art Polycounts are good , even if more were added it'll still be a fairly cheap scene. Channel packing was not used so could be to reduce the texture memory footprint. This would also reduce the number of texture samples used per shader. Materials and Textures It was interesting to see the awnings and wooden panels of the shop front utilise a unique unwrap texture layout. These could also have worked well with tileable textures as there were no specific details in there to justify baked maps such as sculpted edge damage. As an opacity mask is used for the awnings this means the entire shop front pays the pixel cost as it's a shared material. Material instances were used. Creative Art Overall it's a very creative piece which manages to find it's style and maintain it across each asset. There are some nice considered details in the textures such as dirt on the cardboard boxes and the dirt on the pavement which adds some life to the scene. The dressing of the scene to support the narrative and decal use works well. Roughness variation could have been used to greater effect across the scene such as on the pavement dirt / slabs. I really like the variation across the cake/ pastry selection. Interestingly none of the pastries mentioned on the menu are in the selection dropped on the floor. I'm assuming they're inside :P Final Presentation The final images work well its an interesting scene with a clear narrative. The reference chosen is evident in the final design. The colour choices work well together. The lighting would have benefited from being softer to match the style. To improve the composition "fake" buildings could have been used as light blockers on the opposite side of the street allowing for the shadows to be used as a framing element focusing the viewer on the shop front. Currently my eye drops off the bottom as soon as the clear road surface appears in view. Overall nice work :)
• Research & Development There's a nice image showcasing research. Development steps of the scene and assets seem good. The document doesn't tell me how closely you researched props and how good prop references showcasing shapes and materials you had for each of them, but that's just nitpicking. I'd like to see some sort of main style concept you referred to. BSPs might prove useful to me, too. Creative Art The scene is a lovely stylized scene with lots of heart and emotion. Saturated colors read very well and work nicely together. Pastries look attention catching with their slightly more simple style, as something you would like to go and pickup as a player. The Asphalt and rock materials look a bit to be in a separate style, which is slightly distracting. Diffuse values could use a bit lighter values to help lighting bounces slightly. Technical Art Polycounts look good in general. Round objects, such as table top and chair could use maybe some more roundness. Big assets could benefit maybe from trim sheets. Some objects also show maybe a bit too much of free UV space, which is not optimal for texture memory. Pivots are in slightly funny positions; importing the mesh with different settings can help with this (The experimental pivot baking option in the import setup could prove useful to you) Are chamfered edges with hard shading a style decision, or is the smoothing maybe broken? Organized Outliner is a very nice thing. Post process and lighting setups work well in the scene. Decal usage is great and adds a lot of depth into the scene and its feeling. Using same material for different pastries is a good call. Documentation Documentation is short and sweet with clear descriptive texts supported with illustrative images. Final Presentation The images are of high quality and showcase the scene well. Renders are of high quality and are a joy to look at.
• Good to see lots of reference gathered and a small block out to test the look of the scene. I’m not sure if you did do this but you could have used this rough mesh as the basis for your scene block out. Good to see you tracked the progress of assets and organisation of them in UE4. Models have clean geometry and look good in UE4 even with a default grey material applied. Good use of tiling textures and modular kit pieces (pavement). You could have made the bakery modular but as it won’t be repeated I can see why you didn’t. UVs are nice and efficient and the texturing is consistent from asset to asset. It would have been good to add more geometry into the assets to make them less facetted (this is particularly noticeable on the food items when close up).. The set dress really adds to the story. The lighting is good, subtle use of fog would have added some depth to the scene. Some subtle AO would have helped ground the scene too eg. where the pavement meets the road. The building in the background could have had a lighter texture applied to it so that it wouldn’t disappear into the shadows so much. Overall I think this is a great scene and I really enjoyed seeing your progress both in the document and as a progress gif. Well done!
• Submission Title: Opening Day Disaster Submission Tier: Search for a Star Assessor: Dominic Shaw Artist @ Firesprite Research & Development You have done some good research and development on this environment and I like that you have done a nice concept and played around with a few colour schemes. There is also some good asset management which is good to see because there is a lot of work involved in environment’s so it’s good to keep track of the project. Creative Art The environment has a nice style and is visually appealing and eye catching. I think there is still some work to be done on the roughness of some of the props as some of the cakes look a bit too shiny and it would have also been nice to see some more colour variation in some of the assets as some just look like flat colours. Overall, it’s a nice and interesting environment to look at with some good story telling elements. Personally, I would have removed the background pieces completely and just presented this as a diorama scene so that I’m only focusing on the bakery. Technical Art You have used master materials which is a good way to speed up the process but it would have been nice if you channel packed the roughness and metallic maps into one texture and then added some ambient occlusion maps to the props too and then pack that map into the same texture. The texture would look like this: • Red Channel- Ambient Occlusion • Green Channel- Roughness • Blue Channel- Metallic Then make sure that the texture compression is set to ‘Masks’ for this texture. There are few low resolution textures on the building due to it all been on one texture sheet. You could have made the building a bit more modular and reuse the textures so that you could get more texture resolution on this asset. Trim sheets could be a good workflow to look into too. There is a lot of wasted texture space on the assets which you have mentioned yourself that this is something that you need to work on, I tend to prioritize the parts that are seen the most or have the most detail on and then scale these UV shells up more so that they get more resolution. This is a good way of using the full 0-1 space. Documentation You have done some really good documentation with a good breakdown of everything that you done, it was clear to see how you went about making this environment. Final Presentation The final renders are interesting and eye catching, as mentioned before I would have personally presented this as a diorama so that I’m only focusing on the main storytelling elements. Overall, I really like this environment, it’s visually appealing and has a good focal point and interesting storytelling elements. I think moving forward there just needs to be some improvement to the textures by adding more colour variation and having another pass at the roughness on the props.