Environment Art (Archvis) Contest sponsored by Epic Games. $25k grand prize!
Hey All,
I'm Wyeth Johnson from Epic Games. Earlier this week, we partnered with Ronen Bekerman to sponsor the biggest cash prize pool in ArchVis history, 100% realtime, 100% in UnrealEngine 4. It's called "The Vineyard".
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/epic-games-and-ronen-bekerman-launch-the-vineyard-challenge
Our interest in the archvis community grew organically from people out in the world downloading Unreal and doing amazing things we never expected. Every day some new visualization comes out that blows us away, here are a few examples:
Unreal Paris:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6PQ19BEE24[/ame]
All of Koola's Amazing work:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpL6btTFD1yTtSUeapW3fNA
CGCloud's London Loft
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aofYM00GtFU[/ame]
and dozens more...
And of course we at Epic aren't sitting on our realistic rendering hands either, this time focusing on exterior rendering with our GDC realtime demo, A Boy and his Kite:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNgsbNvkNjE[/ame]
All the tools are out there to make insane things in Unreal, and we wanted to incentivize communities like yours to participate.
The challenge is to design a modern winery setting, entirely in Unreal. The challenge runs for 12 weeks so everyone has plenty of time, and we are accepting individual entrants as well as group entrants.
The prizes, by the way, are awesome. We'll have $25k for the grand group entry, $12.5k for the individual winner, $7500 for the group runner up, and $3500 for the individual Runner up, along with Nvidia TitanX graphics cards for all those categories. (Thanks Nvidia!) We're also awarding $2k for categories like Best Lighting, Best Materials, Best Interactivity, and so on, and Nvidia 980ti cards for each of those categories as well.
We also have some great judges for the contest including Ash Thorp, design guru and director of project 2501, and Kim Libreri; film CG visionary, multiple technical academy award winner and inventor of the bullet time tech in The Matrix.
This challenge is very simply a clean, modern, incredibly realistic realtime environment art competition, something you're all great at, and we'd love it if you all participated. Anyone, working professionals from games, archvis, or hobbyists, are eligible.
To make an official entry, sign up and get started here:
http://www.ronenbekerman.com/challenges/the-vineyard-challenge/
I will be checking this thread daily from now until the end of the contest in the middle of September to answer any questions you may have, cheer you on, or perhaps feature entrants from Polycount on our twitter feed, unrealengine.com blog, and our twitch stream.
Good luck!
Wyeth
Wyeth Johnson
Lead Technical Artist | Epic Games, Inc.
I'm Wyeth Johnson from Epic Games. Earlier this week, we partnered with Ronen Bekerman to sponsor the biggest cash prize pool in ArchVis history, 100% realtime, 100% in UnrealEngine 4. It's called "The Vineyard".
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/epic-games-and-ronen-bekerman-launch-the-vineyard-challenge
Our interest in the archvis community grew organically from people out in the world downloading Unreal and doing amazing things we never expected. Every day some new visualization comes out that blows us away, here are a few examples:
Unreal Paris:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6PQ19BEE24[/ame]All of Koola's Amazing work:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpL6btTFD1yTtSUeapW3fNA
CGCloud's London Loft
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aofYM00GtFU[/ame]and dozens more...
And of course we at Epic aren't sitting on our realistic rendering hands either, this time focusing on exterior rendering with our GDC realtime demo, A Boy and his Kite:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNgsbNvkNjE[/ame]All the tools are out there to make insane things in Unreal, and we wanted to incentivize communities like yours to participate.
The challenge is to design a modern winery setting, entirely in Unreal. The challenge runs for 12 weeks so everyone has plenty of time, and we are accepting individual entrants as well as group entrants.
The prizes, by the way, are awesome. We'll have $25k for the grand group entry, $12.5k for the individual winner, $7500 for the group runner up, and $3500 for the individual Runner up, along with Nvidia TitanX graphics cards for all those categories. (Thanks Nvidia!) We're also awarding $2k for categories like Best Lighting, Best Materials, Best Interactivity, and so on, and Nvidia 980ti cards for each of those categories as well.
We also have some great judges for the contest including Ash Thorp, design guru and director of project 2501, and Kim Libreri; film CG visionary, multiple technical academy award winner and inventor of the bullet time tech in The Matrix.
This challenge is very simply a clean, modern, incredibly realistic realtime environment art competition, something you're all great at, and we'd love it if you all participated. Anyone, working professionals from games, archvis, or hobbyists, are eligible.
To make an official entry, sign up and get started here:
http://www.ronenbekerman.com/challenges/the-vineyard-challenge/
I will be checking this thread daily from now until the end of the contest in the middle of September to answer any questions you may have, cheer you on, or perhaps feature entrants from Polycount on our twitter feed, unrealengine.com blog, and our twitch stream.
Good luck!
Wyeth
Wyeth Johnson
Lead Technical Artist | Epic Games, Inc.
Replies
All the more reason to work harder and challenge yourself. The challenge can be quite the motivator...
Agreed! Also keep in mind, the challenge won't just have grand prizes, but also awards for things like best lighting, best materials, or best design (irrespective of fidelity), so even if you don't feel like you can polish an entire environment, focusing on the quality of an individual category could still grant you a winning entry.
Just work on personal work/portfolio instead
Great contest though. I'm looking forward to all of the entries.
Looking forward to see what people decide to work on!
Not a stupid question in the slightest. If you own the design, for instance you work for a firm which designed such a building and want to visualize that project in Unreal for the competition, that's entirely valid and we'd love to see that. If you don't own the design, you shouldn't submit it to the contest since the work can't then be redistributed without the permission of the original designers, we can't offer it for download, for instance.
If in doubt, do something new! Of course many visualization artists take themes and shape language from designs they love and adapt them for their own uses, and in that way you can still create a project that feels fresh and isn't beholden to copyright without having to design something original entirely from scratch.
Absolutely, go forth and Marketplace!
Yep i realized I wasn't as explicit as I should have been, which created some confusion. I'll definitely clarify! From an overall design perspective, the entry needs to either be your own original design, or a design that you own the rights to, explicity allowing for it's use in this type of purpose. (the approval of a firm to use a building design, for instance). When it comes to individual assets, those are absolutely allowed. Anything that can be bought on our marketplace is fair game (keep your eyes out for some photoreal assets coming this week, by the way, that will be quite useful!), as is any asset you've purchased the rights to, and converted yourself. Of course, use of copyrighted material that you don't own a license for isn't allowed. It is NOT a prerequisite that we be able to redistribute your content on our marketplace, it's simply a plus and might factor in to scoring for categories such as "best interactivity" or in the case of the design category, creating something entirely new is the broad basis for that category's whole existence. Hopefully that helps.
I realize this might be simple to make happen myself from the first person template, but an Archvis project preset on the marketplace or in the engine would be most welcome.
You could even have additional types of navigation or interactivity not usually available in other game types, but relevant to the Archvis/Interior design industry. "Press Tab for floor plan view" for example or "Press ` to view square footage of current room", etc.
I'm a game artist, and a character artist at that, but I've always been very interested in architecture and interior design. While I likely don't have time (or the appropriate skillset) to compete in this challenge, I'm really looking forward to seeing the entries for this. My first thoughts on using UDK back on its release was "I should start a VR/Realtime Archvis company with this..."
That's a good suggestion, I'll talk to the sample content team and see what we can do.
In the meantime, we are working on a few things which will specifically help people working in the archvis space. First are a series of blog posts talking about real world lighting values, or how to convert high poly assets to realtime. We also have a good simple tutorial coming on simulating area lights in UE4 using bounce cards, which is a technique a lot of the great archvis artists are using to get a hyperreal look to their renderings in UE4. As those make it up onto our site I'll make sure to post them here.
I am mainly concerned with the scale of the project and what some people seem to be undergoing on the projects I am following - I, for one, will probably not have time to even flesh out the whole project let alone an interior of a hotel as well due to me working full time.
I am sure I read somewhere that it was up to us to decide what we include, but I can't seem to find the text again (with it being quite widespread information) so my apologies if this has been covered already, I just need some clarification.
I'm not sure I understand what the judges are asking for. This is labeled as an "environment art contest" but the judging criteria on the website is detailed: "That said, your entry will be judged based on a number of categories such as lighting, materials, modelling, concept, story, animation, interactivity, technical skill, emotive qualities and participation in on the forums showcasing your progress as well as offering feedback to other challengers."
Given "story, animation, interactivity", are you asking for small game/simulator - complete with a narrative, animation, and interactivity? Or do you mean more simply environmental narrative, simple interaction animations, and interactivity as in a button or two for showing floor plans, square feet, etc?
Just would like a bit of clarification as to what you want participants to deliver.
[ame]
Thanks for the question, it's a good one. Architectural visualization is a specific problem, basically rendering an environment realistically to achieve a vision which embodies a place, real or planned. Good renderings show incredible fidelity and also elicit whatever emotion the designer is trying to achieve.
The deliverables for this challenge include still images as well as a short animatic, no more than 60 seconds long, showing off the space you design.
The reason Ronen included those other aspects in his challenge is because Unreal is a realtime engine, and we would love it if people surprise us in the realtime aspect of this project via interactivity, or a sense of movement or setting... story isn't just about a character arc, it can be more subtle. Alex Roman's pieces are a perfect example of that mood and "story" about his places being told through simple camera movements, lighting, and subject matter.
We view this project first and foremost as an architectural visualization effort which is about eliciting a mood from the viewer and creating an incredibly high visual bar, but we want to leave room for entrants to surprise us with something above and beyond that we didn't expect. Hence the words like mood, narrative, interactivity, and so on.
I hope that helps. We are trying to ride the line between a really rigid criteria and some room to be amazed.
You might be surprised to know that almost every setting in Alex Roman's The Third and the Seventh is a rendering of a real world location. I personally grew up down the street from the Philips Exeter library, and it's one of my favorite buildings.
We'd love to see entries like his in this competition! Most of his stylization comes from post process and lighting, and we have all those same capabilities in Unreal.
It can be as small or large as you'd like. Some people are focusing on only exteriors, some only on interiors, and some are creating a fully realized space with interiors and exteriors. Don't let the scope scare you away, you can win with any entry if the fidelity, the taste level, and the skill in preparation are there.