Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Submission Title:                                  Blood Knight

  Submission Tier:                                   Search for a Star

  Assessor: Anthony O’Donnell          Lead Artist           Firesprite

   Concept design & Development:

  The initial concept chosen is strong. There is evidence of some additional research carried out to achieve the HOTS style. The artist researched and understood the style in HOTS and was able to reproduce it themselves.

   Technical Art:

  As a marmoset viewer scene was provided I could not deep dive into the source art to review it.

   A good workflow was followed in Zbrush from roughing out the insert primitives, Zremeshing and refining along with the armour starting from the Zmodeler tools and details via nanomesh shows a deep understanding of the software.

  PSD files looked organised which is a production bonus.

  Geometry is clean and well distributed for the most part. Some clean up could be done in areas to reduce the polycount a bit such as the knee armour but it’s nothing major.

  There is clear usage of roughness variation across the various surface types. Additional attention to detail was shown with roughness variation around edges and damage along with blood / dirt patches.

  The use of mirrored elements / stacked UV’s for efficiency reasons and keep the texel density high is good. Two 2k texture sets is appropriate for a game as opposed to the trending 4k for everything choice.

  The UV layout is packed well.

   Creative Art:

  This is an excellent reproduction of the concept in 3d. The artist very closely matched the concept while defining and sticking to a specific style inspired by HOTS. Careful attention was clearly taken to match the proportions of the concept character but also the angles of armour elements and their design.

   Written Documentation:

  Written documentation is well presented and goes into some depth of processes used during the production of the character.

   Final Presentation:

  The final renders look good and have a simple but effective light setup. The completed model looks great and achieves the intended goal of matching the concept and adhering to the HOTS art style.

• amazing

• Really good, solid piece. Primary and secondary forms are tight, design is good - would fit right in many games out there.

• I really enjoyed reading through your documentation, you took me through your creative process and gave me an insight into the challenges you face and how you overcame them.  I loved that you included the ZBrush brushes you used and how you clearly explain Steph by step how you tackled the work.

  Blood knight is a very well presented piece of work. You have an eye for detail and excellent technical skills.

  You could now take this excellent model and push your pose further, don't be tied to the concept I would look at other sources of inspiration from film/Tv or other 3D work to produce a really dynamic pose. Seeing your character in a number of different types of pose from action, fighting to mindful or at rest would be a way to explore the character further with being limited to a single concept image. 

  Dave - art Director, Microsoft. 

• Very impressive body of work and documentation. Great to see thought process and problem solving. Character looks fantastic in Marmoset viewer!
  Our only criticism would be that it doesn't appear to match the brief to create an original character. Apart from that, well done!

• Overall character is fantastic. Its finished to a very high quality and you nailed the blizzard style. Only thing id say is to watch your polycount and texture resolution, i think its probably a little high poly and maybe some of those details could have been solved within the normal map instead.