SFAM - Questionaire

[kysterama]

The best thing about this competition was it finally forced me to delve into Unreal3 which I had not previously used before. It was great fun working in a team, dividing up tasks and encouraging each other to do well and like Dukesy said, help get "work 3d" out of our headspace and do something creative.

It was obvious that if you've never used a game engine before, this competition was going to be tough for entrants, but part of the allure of the whole thing was working frantic 3am night, virtually stuffing your mind full of Unreal3 tutes on a constant hellish stream on one monitor (interspersed with the occasional stargate episode :P ) while you pulled you hair out in front of the other monitor making it all work! This is where having Dukesy involved was a real help because we got to learn the engine together and help each other out in the process.

Having said that, its a tough call allowing individual entries alongside team entries because the amount of work that can comparably be done between the two is vastly different. Then again, the more people in a team, the grander the final result can be so its a tough call.

Kudos on the competition and prizes and great work by the GA staff for being quick to answer queries and help the entrants along. The theme was quite fun because it meant you could just choose a scene and get straight into it without a whole lot of pre-planning. Looking forward to what you come up with in the future!

[Hupie]

The main issue for me is that the rules of the competition for texture usage dont stimulate to make a scene with good performance/efficiency and maybe even do the opposite.

For example you wouldnt benefit from deriving a spec map from diffuse maps, which is very common to save memory. Or using a cheap grayscale image to blend in some dirt would drain from the diffuse texture limit.

On the other hand the limits for various slots were all 4096, which is quite a lot given that a lot of textures can derived from eachother or combined.

I suggest to not have 4096 texture limit per slot but a texture limit containing all slots. This way people will have to think cleverly on what textures to make and what can be mixed up. Alternative to this can also be a limit on memory usage, for example a max of 100mb of bmp's or tga's .

Also the aspect ratio for the entries was a bit off, given that movies are widescreen and the entrie ratio wasnt.

Edit: hmm, it seems i forgot to mention some positive things :P . Well first off the questions in the help topic were very quickly answered. Also the theme was great, having so much movies to pick from. And last but not least, there are some very amazing entries out there! You should have an extra bonus for the winners if they turn their scene into a real map!

[[hP]]

This was definitely a great compo, the theme was also great. I mean, who wouldnt have though about recreating that awesome scene from that awesome movie you once watched, but never really had the motivation to do it?!

Another pro, was definitely the team work, i had the pleasure of getting to know and work with Lee. I also never worked with buddy before, and it was a very good experience.
Working in a team is very important, and very motivational too, I haven't felt this "team work" feeling since the old MaxPayne modding days for me, so this was very remarkable to me, personally!

Another pro, was being able to choose any engine, and completely forbid any kind of pre-rendered scenes, I mean this is game art we are doing, not CG, so to everyone complaining about that... ktkxbye! Plus, all the people who didn't had any experience with any game engine, this was a great opportunity to learn, and get acquainted with new technologies and engines, as game artists we need to keep up to date with tools and so on.

Let me point out another thing, if you guys ever do another competition like this, which I seriously hope you do, stick with the Environment Art exclusive, OR character exclusive don't mix both. (As a Env. Artist myself, i would even prefer you guys do only env. art compos of course, lol)
More and more Environment Art is becoming more important in the industry, instead of the characters getting all the attention, so this kind of compos are great!

Believe it or not, I don't got any con to give you, so therefor i must congratulate the staff for their awesome work and dedication as well!

[BloodRobot]

The best thing about the competition was (1)the quality of work: I have been around the forums for a while, and I am really blown away by a few of these submissions. I've been showing friends of mine who aren't game artists, they like to play though, and they can't believe some of the work. I didn't have time to do a scene of my own, but I was checking out the forums daily to track progress on all the entries!(2) great theme and structure: I know everybody loved this comp. The guys that finished ought to be damn proud of their work. There was plenty of time, plenty of quality feedback, and I didn't really see anyone nit picking the rules. Good stuff everyone!

Can't think of any negatives, really. I will edit my post if something pops into mind.

[d_unique]

Overall the competition was very well organised and awesome. As mentioned there are some awesome and inspirational pieces that have been created and I think that everyone who participated, no matter if they finished or not, learnt a great deal. I definitely have and can identify weaknesses that I need to work on. The theme was great, although I had trouble choosing a movie scene because of the sheer amount of possibilities. A theme based on a movie is great because it meant the work could be focused towards an end goal. Its great that environment work is being exposed more. No cons really, I was in it for the ride more than anything else. The extra week helped a lot.

[s0id3]

The two best things about this competition
The subject/theme and the fact that it is real time only. I felt that making it real time only pushed artists to use game engines, and in the the long run is much more realistic(job wise) than doing mental ray or vray renders.

The two worst things about this competition
The rule that if one team picked a movie scene nobody else could do that scene. I think it greatly limited choices and it would have been nice to see different takes and approaches to things.
Then the extension of the competition regardless for how many people were still not finished I think extending it just gives slackers a chance, and makes the hard workers feel like they pulled all nighters for nothing. I found it incredibly unprofessional to extend the deadline.

Any thoughts that you want to share. (about the competition duration, size of the project, being able to work in a team, etc )

It was a good fun learning experience.

[Pankake]

The two worst things about this competition
The rule that if one team picked a movie scene nobody else could do that scene. I think it greatly limited choices and it would have been nice to see different takes and approaches to things.

There was no such rule! We had a couple of teams doing the same scene, and these teams were assured they weren't breaking any rules by doing so .

Then the extension of the competition regardless for how many people were still not finished I think extending it just gives slackers a chance, and makes the hard workers feel like they pulled all nighters for nothing. I found it incredibly unprofessional to extend the deadline.

I have to disagree with this, sorry. The "slackers" have jobs and lives and need to spend time on other things. In my case, my teammate was really busy and didn't have much time to dedicate to the project, so I took the brunt of the work, that week extention was a godsend for me. It also gave more on-schedule teams time to polish up their work. Their submissions represent this community, and them looking better only make this community's image better and attracts more artists that want to be a part of it. Only good things, if you ask me .

[glynnsmith]

Originally Posted by s0id3

The rule that if one team picked a movie scene nobody else could do that scene. I think it greatly limited choices and it would have been nice to see different takes and approaches to things.

There was no such rule. Not sure where you read it, but we explicitly said in the QnA thread that more than one team could use the same movie. Two teams - one of them being a GA.Net staff team - used Bladerunner as reference. So yeah, not sure where you read that.

Thanks everyone for your solid feedback.

Hopefully you guys realise that working with game engines and realtime technology is the best thing you can be doing to push your game art skills and it's something we're all really pushing for, here. Rest assured that we'll be using the game engine-only rule in future competitions and, now that you've all gotten that working experience under your belts, you'll be much better equipped for the next competition - let alone that first job or your next game art school project. It's only a good thing that you're all learning to use real industry technology, rather than the typical CG renderers.

Don't think of this as a missed opportunity either, if you've never used a game engine before - Think of it as the start of the next opportunity, seeing as the next comp we have (and the comp after that) will all be rigourously realtime.

Once our collective knowledge is suitably skilled for game engines, we'll probably begin to explore other areas of game art that're severely overlooked.

Cheers guys. Keep the feedback rolling!

[00Zero]

pro: i'm so glad this was engine screenshots only.
pro: great theme
pro: no characters = FTW
pro: quick responses from the moderators (thanks guys)

cons: hmm, oh, the dimensions of the final entries were only 1280x1024. almost all of the entries were widescreen shots so they had to be letterboxed. I think you should step up to a widescreen ratio for the next comp for sure.

[Major Clod]

Pros:
Environment only - Good to see more environment based comps, especially helpful is the Team option, letting you create much larger and complicated scenes that you may be able to on your own.
Game Engine only - Fantastic way to learn. The unlimited engine rule was also fantastic, it let you choose the engine that suited your workflow, scene and knowledge.

Cons:
Texture Usage - I was a bit dissapointed with restrictions on texture usage. I'd much prefer an overall texture amount/size/channel limit rather than specific uses. Working in realtime i'm used to squeezing as much out of my textures as possible. Saying you have 6 x 4096x4096 RGBA would have been preferred.
Image Sizes - It was a tad odd that in a competition where the majority of the source material is widescreen, and where the majority of TV's and Monitors are all widescreen, that submissions were fullscreen only.

Other
This comp is what I needed to push myself into UT3 and getting inspired to do some 3D art in my spare time again. For too long now I've been stuck in the monotony of the 3D I do at work, and I've really needed something to push and inspire me to do some proper art, so I'm happy with that more than anything else I've gotten out of this comp. I know that a few of the other entrants can say the same thing too! Thanks for the comp!