Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Artist – Matt Cane Category: Sumo Digital Rising Star Assessor: Anthony O Donnell – Lead Artist at Firesprite Work name: Mystic Temple Research and Development /Documentation The document is well presented and gives some insight into the creative and production process. The scene followed a standard approach from ideation to blockout to production. Some research was carried out to inform the final result. Technical Art Geometry The modelled bevels / weighted normals is a good approach. Polycount on the stones are excessive especially when compared to other elements in the scene. Materials and Textures Channel packing was not used. There was roughness variation between surface types but areas such as sand between the paving slabs lacked a higher roughness value which flattened the scene out a bit. The texturing is decent with some nice detailing. The scene has a stylized look I'm not sure this was intentional. The use of world aligned textures is good especially with the context of blending floating meshes to environment surfaces. The panning textures on the beams / portal add some dynamism to the scene. Creative Art The scene is an interesting concept that was made well with a clear focal point. With the portal being the key element it would be good to go back and make more of it by layering up effects to create a more visually interesting portal. Is it safe ? Dangerous ? Mysterious ? A quick google brings up many interesting references. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/831195674960495865/?lp=true Final Presentation The final image work well for the original intention. The focus is firmly on the portal this composition is supported by the lighting. More visual interest in the portal itself and work on the material variation in appropriate places would add a lot.
• Submission Title: Mystic Temple Submission Tier: Rising Star Assessor: Dominic Shaw Artist @ Firesprite Research & Development There was a good breakdown of everything that you have done, and I liked that you made a poly count thread for the environment. This is a good way to get feedback at each stage and be involved with the community. It would have been nice to see some more time management stuff such as asset lists and time plans as these really help with the development of a project. Creative Art There is a good focal point in this level and it’s a nice, interesting environment to view. I like the particles that you have the scene too which are quite cool. I think that the lighting is a bit dark in some areas so it would be cool to do another lighting pass to try lightening these areas up a bit. The main improvement that you could make on this scene is the way that you have set up the floor and sand material. You could have made a substance designer graph for the tiles with the sand in it and then exported a few variations of this texture and used vertex paint to blend between them. Rather than placing small meshes in the cracks where you want sand as this is very unoptimized. I would have three variations of the texture which would look like this: • Basic Floor • Cracked Floor • Sand When vertex painting the red channel could be the cracked version, green channel could be sand and then you have a spare channel which could potentially have wetness on the blue channel. Here is a good tutorial on this workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVCpHPM-1cc Technical Art The use of trim sheets in the project was a good workflow to use to help keep the level optimized and you have kept modularity in mind whilst making the environment. You could have brought in just one of meshes into the engine and then instanced this around rather than exporting all of them from your modelling package. If you set the pivot point to the centre of the circle, you would have no issue duplicating this stuff in the engine. The portal material that you made was cool and interesting but make sure that you are channel packing the textures for the roughness, ambient occlusion and metallic textures to further optimize the level. This would look at little like this:  Red channel- AO  Green Channel- Roughness  Blue Channel- Metallic Then when you import the texture, change the compression settings in the texture to ‘Masks’ making sure that the sRGB value is turned off. There was also a lot of unused material slots on meshes, make sure to delete the unused ones as these are adding unnecessary draw calls that will make the environment unoptimized. Documentation There was a good breakdown of all the things that you made and with the polycount thread, I got a good insight into your workflow. Final Presentation The final presentation was nice, and I liked the video that you made too, there was good focus on focal point in each render and overall not a bad job at all. Moving forward, I would just focus on improving the floor texture and the lighting as I mentioned above.