Judge feedback

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• Artist – Wil Johnson Category: Search for A Star Assessor: Anthony O Donnell – Lead Artist at Firesprite Work name: Temple of Ares Interior Research and Development /Documentation The document was well written with a clean and visually appealing presentation. It goes into some detail regarding the development of creative decisions and the production process. Elements of the reference can be clearly seen in the final artwork. Technical Art Polycounts are high in areas where edges exist that do not contribute to the silhouette or any technical considerations in any meaningful ways. UV layouts are good. For some assets a tiling texture setup or trim sheets would have been more suitable as an approach such as the columns. The current method resulted in the columns having a texel density lower than is ideal. Channel packing was used and setup correctly. The vulture is the focal point but the polycount is on the high side given the form being represented. Creative Art The lighting and layout of the scene all support the focal point of the vulture statue. Modelling is decent with shapes / forms recreated well. Final Presentation The final shots are nicely composed images. The lighting setup is very bold for this type of subject matter utilising strong blues with accents of pink / orange which gives the work it's own flavour. Overall the scene and final images are good. Use of atmospherics give the scene a foggy, mysterious vibe.
• Hi there! First of all, good stuff getting everything done in the time frame. Now onto how we can learn and grow from this. When I was looking into your scene the first thing I noticed was the lighting, some of it was very atmospheric, but the blue of the moon was a bit too much, so I dropped that way down to around 1.5 lux. And focused more on increasing the ambient feeling to the lighting. It's very hard to deal with moonlit scenes as in reality our eyes do a lot of adjustment. The best reference is yourself on a moonlit night and seeing how others have done it successfully. A lot revolves around the dealing with ambient light. In your case finding a careful balance between the indirect light intensity and skylight ambience. Second, you have some z-fighting going on, especially on ceiling areas and where you have overlapping meshes, this isn't good. Solve this by either moving the meshes to be slightly offset, or better yet, don't have them overlapping. I can also see some strong wastage of polygons on the pillars. They could be cut down and normal mapped in such a way that no-one would notice. Shield and props don't need to be so high poly either, I reckon this scene could look the same at around a total of 200k tris. Not the 700k. All stuff to think about for going into a studio - as it will become more important. Personal work, it's less important for, just important to know it's important and how to do it. If you know what I mean? There's a troublesome cubemap reflection which keeps getting clipped out of existence as well causing some oddities in the scene rendering. It's nasty. Worth looking into fixing :) Thanks, Chris Harper Snr Technical Artist @ Splash Damage
• It would have been good to see more reference and it annotated too. Good to see a block out though the environment is very symmetrical. A few broken columns and break up in the floor would have been good to experiment with at this stage. It would have been good to see more of your process in creating your assets. From what I could see you might have found it easier to use tiling textures instead of baking assets down individually in Painter. I do like the colour contrast in the lighting but it looks a bit too strong. Not having all the torches lit would have also created a good amount of breakup throughout the scene.