Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Research & Development Nice main reference. Interesting references. I like the mood boards. Creative Art Nice, stylized scene with vivid colors. Leaves look especially interesting as a style and create nice contrast. Silhouette look interesting. Crashed car gives a nice fun factor for the scene. Technical Art Cool post process. Materials could use master material and material instancing. Using tileables and trims might be beneficial for the future. Lighting looks nice. Extra shader effect work might add to the scene. Documentation A bit short but a breeze to browse through. Final Presentation Nice quality renders.
• A good attempt at recreating a very stylised original concept, which is always a challenge to translate into 3D. The final result is pretty close to the concept, with good attention being paid to scale and detail in the blockout stage, and strong modelling on display. The handpainted textures are also strong, with the temptation to add too much detail mostly resisted. My primary feedback is twofold - one is style approach. The artist has attempted to recreate the line art outline look of the concept, but via drawing outlines into textures, which is very tricky to get looking correct. You end up with an inconsistent look - compare the vegetation which looks almost entirely cartoon like, with other areas which are sort of halfway to that look. I think the use of an outline shader here would have been the best way to recreate the line art look of the concept, rather than attempting to paint it into the textures. The other area is lighting - the lights are either too saturated (the red spot is fighting with the diffuse colours) or too bright and localised, leading to areas of heavy contrast (very bright sign, other areas of almost pitch black). A base GI lighting pass from a skydome light would help to even things out - the original concept has a much more even tone across the piece, with all areas visible.
• I like your reference boards and that you can see a definite theme in them. I also like that you’ve experimented with ideas on paper too. Nice block out and good to see detail being added to it as you go. Great to see you adding base materials and lighting at this stage too. It would have been good to see a breakdown of your workflow and different lighting tests and scene compositions.