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Brawl Winners: 5th Place goes to...

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Judging is over and we're FINALLY ready to begin announcing who the winners of Polycount's BRAWL Contest are!

As you may remember, the judges were sent the Top 5 FIGHTERS and Top 5 STAGES as voted on by the Polycount Community. From there, they rated the entries in 3 areas: Artistic Achievement, Technical Achievement, and Brief Criteria. The points were tallied and our winners were decided. In the event of a tie, we referenced the public vote and the Fighter or Stage with the most amount of votes was given the win.

Up first:

The 5th place winners!

 

5th place FIGHTER: Stepanchikov's Scorpion

 

The judges comments:

Chris George:

Technical Achievement

This is one of the cleanest character models I’ve seen in some time. Excellent meshflow and deformation throughout. Extremely efficient use of UV space as well. One of the only entries with proper finger joints that can deform into a tight fist, although the thumb still seems a little odd. Still, excellent work.


Artistic Achievement

Very nicely executed model. The proportions are perfect, and the materials are great throughout. The diffuse map looks a little plain, but the final result in the render looks great anyway.


Brief Criteria

This character is immediately recognizable. Maybe a little too recognizable. Definitely a great model, but if you took just the silhouette of this redesign, it looks exactly like the original Scorpion. It almost feels like a very high quality reskin. I would have liked to have seen the character design pushed a little further away from its origins.

 

Vitaliy Naymushin:

Technical Achievement
Technically I think this model is really well done. The only thing i would comment on is that there are a few areas that can be optimized alot without losing any silhouette or ability for the mesh to deform well.

Artistic Achievement
Artistically I think this whole post apocalyptic scorpion thing is pretty cool, but its definitely lacking a few things. I would have liked to see some sort of trim color, maybe something to break up the silhouette (like some gauntlets) and I'm also not the biggest fan of the metal chest piece.

Brief Criteria
This is a cool and different take, although if you just black out the silhouette and disregard all the surface detail is basically the same old scorpion.

 

Hanno Hagedorn:

Note: Woo, we received Hanno's comments!

Technical Achievement
+Poly destribution nicely captures allot of outer shape details.

Artistic Achievement
-Looks very similar to the original Character,interesting details.

Brief Criteria
-generic design; lacks of character
+good overall look and feel

 

5th place STAGE: Bbox85's Tam Tam

The judges comments:

Ryan Monday:

Technical Achievement
Another solid entry with a great use of texture space, also using other systems in the engine to give the artist(s) a well rounded environment.

Artistic Achievement
I love the depth of this stage and the environment has so much life. Between the birds, waterfalls, and foliage the stage has so much room for interesting ambient movement. The uneven terrain of the stage makes for a very interesting piece as well. The biggest down fall to me about this set is the lighting. I think it gets to dark in the shadows. This is a fighting stage and the darkness could cause lighting issue on characters.

Brief Criteria
I love how you took the totems from the original stage and made them into cliff edges. The only thing that is a bit different is you have seem to gotten rid of some of the tribal feel by making all the wood elements stone and not integrated some of the tribal paint back into the set. Otherwise you may be killing the characters tribal background the designers originally intended.

Josh Cook:

Technical Achievement
Good material quality, good use of alphas, nice Lighting and FX

Artistic Acheivement
Good detail, depth and atmosphere, nice sense of life to environment.

Brief Criteria
Great transformation of pixel art to something very realistic and modern.

 

Bram Eulers

Technical Achievement
Shaders, effects and lighting looks well done, but the texture layouts are very inefficient. A lot of wasted space and not much reuse going on at all. As a fighting stage, it looks really really small. Where is the separation between stage area and background, it's hard to read with all the detail.

Artistic Achievement
Very high contrast textures are hurting the readability of the scene a bit. Some of the materials are hard to read and get muted very fast. Rock, wood, stone and statues all look like they are made from the same muddy material. I do like the attention to detail though and the added touches of color with the flowers and butterflies. The lighting is ok, but could have used some bounce and color contrast to improve readability.

Brief Criteria
Definitely a reinterpretation of the original, though I think it's a bit sad that all the fun of the original is gone. Why not use the designs of the original statues in the scene, or take some of the color? Nextgen does not have to be boring :).

And there you have it! Our the Brawl Contests 5th Place Fighter and Stage! Congratulations to Stepanchikov and Bbox85!!

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