Announcing the handplane baker prop art contest!

AlecMoody

Hello Polycounters. We are pleased to announce that we are working with polycount to run a contest for handplane baker. We just launched version 0.93 and it is now polished enough that we are looking for feedback on usability and suggestions for features to add. Handplane baker is free and you can download it from gumroad here: https://gumroad.com/l/znpF#

Task:

Create a game prop of a hand plane. There is no specific triangle or texture resolution limit- keep it reasonable for game art. The model must be displayed in a game engine. The contest will run from December 8th 2016 to January 8th 2017.

Hand planes are one of the oldest wood working tools and there is an enormous amount of variety in how they look and what materials they are made from. Some examples:

We are looking for detailed feedback for the baker. To that end, create a thread and document your workflow. Do your best to provide feedback about what is working well and what needs improvement. We are looking for all kinds of feedback, nothing is too big or too small to discuss. Artists can submit more than one entry but should keep all entries contained in one thread. An artist can only win once.

Requirements:
*Produce a game res handplane prop and display it in the realtime engine of your choice. Your model must be baked using handplane baker.
*Create a thread in this subforum and keep it updated with your work in progress.
*Provide feedback about handplane baker. Let us know what is working well for you and where we need to improve.
*Upon completion, supply 2 images of your model in-engine. The images should be at least 1600px wide or tall. Also include an additional breakdown image showing texture flats and wireframes.
*Final images should be added to the first post of your thread no later than January 8th 2017
*If you create more than one entry, keep it all in the same thread.


Judging:

Submissions will be judged based on quality of the final asset, presentation, and how well the artist made use of the baker feature set.  We will also consider the quality and depth of feedback in picking winners. All final images must be posted to the top of your thread by xx/xx/2016 (30 days).

Prizes:

1st place:  $500 steam gift card

2nd place: $300 steam gift card

3rd place: $100 steam gift card

If you haven't used our baker yet, watch this overview video from our initial release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACkX_t3QDnU

Handplane baker is all CPU based. There are a lot of advantages to keeping calculations on the cpu but there is one big drawback - AO calculation speed. AO is by far the slowest output and I generally don't bake AO until I'm sure my projection is perfect. It is very easy for users to over sample AO if they don't understand how the settings work. If you are new to our baker, please read this post about AO sampling:
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2443428/#Comment_2443428

We chose to keep everything on the CPU because it allows for fast baking of very large meshes. Handplane baker will chew through 20 or 50 million triangles very quickly.

In my experience, total time to bake all maps from handplane is about the same as with the GPU bakers I have tried. I think the advantage to being CPU based is that most of the render time is at the end of the process when you bake AO, and not waiting for gigs of mesh data to make there way to the GPU. This allows for fast test maps, checking projections, and iterating on your models.

For more info on how to set AO sampling read this post:
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2443428/#Comment_2443428

There is also a lot of good general knowledge in our handplane baker technical talk thread:
http://polycount.com/discussion/169679/introducing-handplane-baker/p1

I will try to stay on top of users posts in this subforum. If I don't respond to a problem, feel free to PM me.

Phoenix995

Count me in

Joopson

You can count me in on this one!
I have a love for handtools, and planes are no exception.

Here is some more inspiration for everyone:
(Not sure the link will work, but it should)
http://imgur.com/a/S16iZ

AlecMoody

Are people still having issues posting images in this subforum?

Kanni3d

Oooo this sounds awesome, always loved using HP to convert OS normals to tangent when baking... always wanted to try out its own baker. Count me in! Hope I'm not too late to the show. 

TooLzor

Not gonna lie...I wanted to start modeling and actual hand as a "plane"
Rad contest though

ValN84

Question regarding the rules, mainly this: *Upon completion, supply 2 images of your model in-engine.
Does "in-engine" include only per-se game engines or can we use Sketchfab or Marmoset Toolbag?

AlecMoody

You can use anything equivalent to a game engine. Viewport shaders, marmoset, and sketchfab are fine. Just don't render it in something like vray RT.

huffer

So I guess Substance Painter's iray is also not ok?

AlecMoody

Yeah, iray is not equivalent to a game engine.

Phoenix995

Quick Question:
I wanna render my piece in Marmoset Toolbag, which Tangent Space Normal Setting should i use? is maya 2014 ok for that?

ValN84

Use the same setting you used when baking the normal map in Handplane.

AlecMoody

Maya tangent spaces are more likely to create problems because of how maya handles calculating normals for triangles vs quads. I would start with unreal 4 output.

Joopson

Just a question, when is the contest ending? It says January 8th; is it the midnight after the day of the 8th, and is there a timezone you're basing the deadline off of? Just want to make sure I don't make a dumb mistake and miss it.

AlecMoody

I'm in GMT -5 but I don't want to be super strict about it and limit the amount of feedback we can get. If it's before midnight in your timezone or mine, that is fine.