Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Scene dressing is nice. You could improve by a lot the rendering with a better lighting : more bounces, better exposure for the camera. Be careful about polygons being visibles on some assets, especially when you've an organic shape, it's not really cost to add a bit more of definition when the asset is used 2/3 times in the scene.
• Clever use of an enclosed environment to set the scene and block off the surroundings so you don't have to worry about the. Atmospherics and lighting used to good effect, the project has an overall successful abandoned vibe, and the incidental animations of the leaves blowing in the wind is really nice. It would have been nice to see slightly more specific texturing on the telescope, instead of just placing the grunge generically. It's a good idea to make sure that you straighten your UV shells as much as possible as this will make texturing easier and prevent "jaggies". Look also into texture packing as you can combine AO/roughness/metallic into one map and this is better for memory. I like the extra incidental props lying around that show you've thought about how the room used to be used - although maybe wiggle everything up a bit more, eg. the computers, keyboards and mice are very straight and perfectly aligned which is incongrous.
• The research and development for this project was very thorough, I enjoyed reading your narrative exploration. It was also great to see the variety of moodboards where you not only referenced the props but also the colour palette you decided to use. You selected a cohesive set of props to make, and I liked your composition drawing; it would have been good to see more composition exploration sketches showing how you chose this layout. It was great to read that you began your modelling workflow with a reference to the scene scale by using the mannequin from Unreal Engine. I did notice that some of your texture scales were inconsistent, such as on the floor of the room. Have a look into using a trim texture method for models like this. The quality of textures is generally good, some texture scales are a lot bigger than they should be in comparison to the scale of other props using the same texture sizes. There are also cases where it looks like you've used alphas in Substance Painter to paint additional height details on your models (such as with the grid pattern on the stairs normal map), but you've not rebaked the other maps to make use of this extra detail. I saw that you had made use of channel packing for some of your props, it's a very efficient method and would be good to use this universally for consistency. You can adjust the texture export settings in Substance Painter to pack these automatically for you. I liked to see that you tried using Substance Designer by following a tutorial, it would have been nice to see a differentiation where you changed the shape and design of the texture to make it your own. If you plan to use baked lighting to present your scene, check your lightmap settings to make sure the density is evenly scaled across the scene. You can see this in the viewport (select lightmap density in the view modes panel) to compare the scales. The composition is balanced and well informed, and you make good use of space. The extra detail added to the scene through foliage and decals is good, make sure to place the foliage carefully so stems don't appear to be floating. It was great to see you included a video of the scene that clearly showed that you had used light rays and particle effects for extra flair. Thank you for providing additional download instructions on the project page too. I can clearly see the link between your research and the final piece, the scene is cohesive and presented well. You've used a good workflow and attempted new challenges with software. This is a really great piece, well done!