Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Hi Ziyi, fantastic work on your “Paradise Now!” artwork! I love your motivations and creative inspiration behind the piece, and your execution was overall excellent. The techniques that you used to make your models look as good as possible worked out great and make for a solid visual look and cohesive style that is very rarely seen in student work. I especially like the variety of your modular kits, that allow you to make exactly what you planned for without wasting any resources and performance. The scale of this project is very ambitious but you managed to give enough attention to every corner of your scene which makes this world believable and leaves me wanting to see more. As for any tips for your next challenge or to refine this piece, I would have actually liked to see your own reflection on what you would have done to improve the environment if given more time, maybe as a closing word for your project document. I feel like to push this even further, it would be cool to revisit the scene during a night time setting, giving you the chance to showcase your fantastic texture and modeling work under a different light.
• Hi Ziyi Great work with this scene - very ambitious and a very unique concept. I think this would make a good portfolio piece, but I do have some feedback I'd like you to keep in mind if you choose to revisit this and make improvements: 1. I'd like to see more use of tiling materials in your props / large architectural pieces. Right now I'm noticing that the railing and train line is using a very large texture and unique unwrap. This hurts the main building railing the most and it's noticable very low res compared to the assets around it. Considering making it more modular and breaking into chunks like the other assets you've made. 2. The scene overall has a lot of visual noise - especially the ground. While the setting does mean there will be a lot of build up and dust, there are ways you can make things a little less uniform when it comes to overall read - I'd focus on the ground being a bit too bumpy all around. You have a terrain material setup, how about painting in some variations of smooth dirt? 3. I'd love to see some more attention to the ground, especially where the cargo containers and architecural pieces meets it - it could use for some variation in height (dust buildup, rocks, small greeble etc) to help make this scene look a little less CG and more natural. 4. Your scale seems a little inconsistent in places - I'm noticing some doors to be as high as the cargo container itself, and in your interior bonus room the barrel seems very small compared to the motorcycle. I'd spend some time revisiting the scaling on some of your assets. 5. I like that you're making a lot of use out of your assets, but I'm not sure the doors / windows tacked onto the cargo containers read as convincing - they might work for the assets out in the distance that the player never reaches, but it would be nice to see a few variants of the cargo containers up close - where the windows / doorways are more built in and have more interesting silohuettes. 6. I can see why you're running into mempool issues in Unreal - you have a lot of 4K textures for assets that probably don't need it. You've done a little bit of work here, I'd recommend revisiting and making sure you're not using textures at a resolution we'd never see. 7. You have some overlapping fog cards that create some serious overdraw issues in certain angles. This is minor, but I'd take a look at your debug view to make sure you're using them sparingly. Great work, and with a few extra tweaks I'm sure this piece will really sing!