The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge!
polycounter
We're kicking off another contest here... The Polycount BRAWL² Tournament!
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Theme:
Multiverse / Mad Max / Dystopian world, with the Inspiration of previously designed titles, stories and designs by gaming artists of the past, present and future. Reimagine and redesign your chosen entry with the options below.
Pick your genre:
- Boomers, hero, looter shooter
- Rogues, Souls-like
- RPGs, open world
- MOBAs
Room to add your own flavor, remix the design and set the mood and environment appropriately.
You can make a concept, vehicle/mount, environment, etc.
Do it yourself, or team up, based on your free time.
Choose any role in game development. Present it pleasingly with 2k screenshots. Pick your triangle & texture limitations to show us this asset/world you've created.
Present your work, and help the judges decide who achieved the top artistically-pleasing development or product.
From the lowest-poly designs to the highest-poly. Good luck have fun, impress & inspire us & yourselves!
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Dates
Contest starts May 12th 2025.Final submissions due September 12th 2025 at 11:59pm U.S. Eastern time.
Judging will be finalized sometime mid-October, exact date TBD.
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Work In Progress Threads
Each entry must include a work-in-progress (WIP) thread, posted in this section.
Post updates as often as you can. You can include work-in-progress videos as you go about this contest, but at a minimum, periodic screenshots must be posted.
Reference sheets are required. If you're using concept art, please include credits to the artists as much as possible. Reverse image search is great for finding the source of an image: Google, Bing, TinEye, Yandex.
Although it's not a requirement to reply to others' threads, it would be nice to keep the community alive, well and thriving. We're all in this together!
Threads must be titled like this:
BRAWL2 [Role] Your Design's Name, Your Artist or Team Name
For example:
BRAWL2 [Environment] Pizza Town Blastorama, mastapimp420
Roles:
- Animation
- Character
- Concept
- Environment
- FX
- Prop
- Vehicle
- Weapon
BRAWL2 [Environment] Pizza Town Blastorama, mastapimp420 [Tribute]
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Breakdowns
Please include breakdowns with the finished work, of all materials, presented as you deem necessary for clean readability.
Example:
Texture sheets, wire frames, etc., sculpts (gray/clay render, simple lighting), callout sheet presenting the major elements.
Wireframes should be backface-culled, for example:
credit: Joe Wilson
It's OK to present texture sheets as flats, or as multi-layer images, flat or on the model, for example:
credit: Joe Wilson
There are no specific texture or triangle limits, except that your content must be renderable in a real-time 3D renderer. If you choose to work within a specific limit, please indicate these limits in your thread.
No paint-overs on screenshots allowed, except to add subtitles and/or framing elements like logos and artist names.
References must be included. You must include an image of the inspirational piece/concept as it appears in the original design.
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Screenshots & Lighting
All contest art must be screenshot directly from a game engine (Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc.) or equivalent real-time rendering setup (Marmoset Toolbag, Sketchfab, etc.). If your display is less than 4k, it's ok to combine multiple shots together, for example with scripts.
Real-time lighting only, only what can actually be used in a real-time 3D game title.
All real-time solutions are allowed... SSAO, cascade shadow volumes, etc.
Beauty & breakdowns at 1920x1080 (Full HD), with one "hero" shot at 3840x2160 (Ultra HD).
Include thePolycount BRAWL² Tournament logo in your hero image (above image includes alpha, for your benefit), optionally in the rest of your images.
NO paint-overs of any kind, touch-ups, or post-process solutions, other than what is provided within the real-time renderer. Except... to add the BRAWL2 logo, artist/team names, subtitles, or framing elements.
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The Rules
- All artwork must be original and made specifically for this contest.
- No artwork previous created before this contest will be considered for final voting & judging.
- Absolutely no A.I. the reason for this contest is to challenge your skills & abilities.
- No NSFW, pornography, that means no nipples or genitals, folks.
- Minimal gore, some blood/damage is ok but try to keep it tasteful, no threats or inciting violence.
- No overly religious pieces, i.e. the Pope as a K-Pop star (as fun as that might be!).
- No overtly political / propaganda themes.
- No insulting / group-demoting / racism / sexism style elements.
There are no specific texture or triangle limits, except that your content must be renderable in a real-time 3D renderer. If you choose to work within a specific limit, please indicate these limits in your thread.
21 weeks is plenty to bust out a solid design. You're welcome to submit more than one design if you wish to do so and yes, if you have the time and energy you may enter more than one entry as well for any of the positions.
This is a video game art challenge, remember to challenge yourselves!
Be kind, have fun.
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Judging
Judging for thePolycount BRAWL² Tournament will first be done by public vote at the end, also by a panel of professionals. So we'll have crowd favorites, and judges favorites.
We'll add more about this later...
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Prizes
Prizes for the PolycountBRAWL² Tournament are fairly simple: There aren't any, ha!
Will we have prizes in the future? Perhaps, but for now the contest is purely for the sake of personal achievement in game art.
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Disclaimer
All artwork, screenshots and IPs depicted here belong to their respective owners and are shown as examples only.
Any and all 3D characters, 3D environments, etc. and images created by Polycount Members for this contest are owned solely by the artist and are submitted to this contest as fan art, or uniquely representational artworks made specifically for the contest.
Polycount or Polycount.com do not, and will not take ownership of any submitted materials on or within its domain.
This contest is FREE to enter and is not for profit nor for AI collections. We have NOT given consent for anything posted here to be used in any tech/script/robotic generation recreation monstrosity.
We're simply video game artists who love creating game-art, art and/or fan art.
May the best poly win!
Replies
I"ll tell all my students and Alumni.
Heck yeah! Was totally expecting for this to cook for a couple more weeks…so thanks @iam717 for all your efforts!
I do wonder, however, if it would be better to pare back the scope a bit (as alluded in the discussion thread) to keep it more focused, and if nothing else, easier to organize and judge???
It’s an honest question and ultimately I just want to see what a group of artists can create/inspire when working on a shared goal…so whatever the case is totally fine!
Lets go!!!
2 triangles -1k - 20k
Mean?
2 triangles -2k - 50k
Lived-in, usable, wow factor, this can also be a mount!"
No beauty images at 4k?!
Wow that was egotistical. Congrats on a super initiative. This will be nothing less than a blast! Ah, I feel the winds of youth
If it was up to me I would suggest simple numbers for the targets, e.g. Characters = 5000 triangles. With a note that if artists want to do theirs with less, go for it, just let us know you are doing so.
Otherwise, it's going to be difficult for the judges, trying to judge 100-tri models side-by-side with 5k-tri models. I think a stricter spec is better for artists, especially real-time 3d artists.
However, it's ultimately not up to me to decide, I think this is still your contest to manage. My editing was to try to help make it easier for people.
My inclination is to have it a bit more focused for our first time back and to stick more to the original Brawl, perhaps with some further room for riffs and improvisation? After all, majority votes were for that in the initial polling (I voted “other” as in Brawl without prizes). Also, I couldn’t find the brief for the original competition and wasn’t around during then, but it seemed rather successful.
I agree that it’s too ambiguous and it’s open ended nature seems not all that different from a root-level Polycount ”pimping and previews” section. I get that it’s still low stakes with no prizes, but it’d still be nice to treat it as a contest (in the spirit of competition and camaraderie) with judging as such; and as mentioned above, that can be difficult and hard to manage with lots of categories and themes.
I don’t know if there are any right or wrong answers here, and probably more about what you will able to manage @iam717. Hopefully, other members will express their own opinions on what direction they prefer and give you a better idea on where to steer this ship…it’s a ton of work and large time commitment, so thank you!
Side note, skimimg through the 2011 Brawl Tournament
And since there's feedback here related to lack of theme as yet, might start the ball rolling plus nod to the original contest fighting brief - so howabout a Mad Max theme (rad vehicles alongside buff staunch chars do go well together
4x textures at 4096 ... does that mean 4 material trim sheets (for environment), each with any number of "passes", each material at 4096? Like one metal, one rock, one paints, one fabrics?
Or does it mean that each texture pass is a texture and you get four? Like one albedo, one roughness, one normal, one metallic each at 4096 each, and that's everything? Make one single trim material?
Note that when you edit a post in normal non-html mode, every time you add a line return (Enter key) it will add another <br>.
The idea is that each artist (or team of two) will create their own WIP thread. In fact, it's kind of required. Or were you thinking some shared WAYWO-style show-your-latest-work thread?
I also tried to find the original Brawl contest thread, still looking.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120113055502/http://www.polycount.com/the-brawl-tournament
I think you don't need to list the source for every reference. Just for the main image you are using as your primary reference, it's nice to credit the artist if it's not made by you personally.
Think about how it would feel if someone else used your art as inspiration for their piece, and wouldn't it be great if they gave you credit.
I notice 'If you're using concept art, please include credits to the artists as much as possible.' Does it mean that we can pick the subjects based on the field of any video game ? and modify it ?
i tend to pick character from lol . wonder if i were allowed ?