SFAM - Questionaire

[doylle]

Hello game-artists!

Let me start with saying congratulations to everyone who participated in this competition. You've all put allot of work and effort in this competition, and we're very pleased to see that 31 teams were able to finish.

This competition was a heck of a lot bigger than any other competition we've done before and it's our intention to do more of these large events here on Game-Artist.Net.

That being said, we can't do this without the support of you, our awesome community. We want to make sure that our competitions are fulfilling your expectations - being challenging enough that you get something out of it, without being too big that you'd struggle to finish it. We are most interested in what you think of the competition just-finished and what feedback you can give us whilst it's still fresh in your minds. This will help us make better decisions for our next competition.

What we would like from you:

• The two best things about this competition
• The two worst things about this competition
• Any thoughts that you want to share. (about the competition duration, size of the project, being able to work in a team, etc )

Thank you.

The Game-Artist.net staff
Proudly supported by CG Society

note: We're only looking for feedback on the this competition, so please do not start a debate about what the next competition should look like.

[NajumAnwar]

Well I guess I will start things off :-D. First off I want to thank all the game-artist staff for allowing my team (Dirty Hanzo) to submit our entry (even though we missed the deadline due to our own confusion on time) anyway thank you for allowing it to be submitted for judging and critiques.

Pros: People giving feedback was an awesome aspect of the competition. It allowed us to make changes and adjustments on things we weren't noticing. :-D.

Second was the support people gave to eachother on their projects. If someone wasn't feeling too good about doing something the community would rally and encourage others which was awesome!

Requiring a viewport only was also a great idea! it allows you to see it as it is truly rather than a render which can be very misleading. (in my opinion anyway)

Plus allowing teams was great! it really allowed people to make the scenes that much better!

Cons: The uses of different engines and software in my opinion may have given others certain advantages compared to others (although allowing the use of different engines was a great idea so that anyone can get in on the competition and allowed for different results) However the downside to it was that some were able to get different effects because of the engine they were running.

Being a Maya user had some disadvantages as far as utilizing lights and various special effects (maya viewport only allows 8 lights to be used at a time).


Overall though this was an amazing experience for myself. During the course of the project I was able to learn several new techniques which improved my workflow as well as helped me become a better artist! Only changes I would add to the competition is more specific rule layouts as far as issues with AO baking and other map related questions. Also, I would like to see perhaps seperated sections for tutorial help for different programs ie: maya, max,unreal, cry engine. Just would be easier for people to find what they need to without having to go through pages of threads to find what they are looking for. Other than that, I can't wait to see what the next big competition brings!

[kYo]

BEST

1. Theme Idea
somehow a brilliant choice since it offered alot of versatility (there are just millions of movies out there) and at the same time allows relatively good comparison for the judges, thanks to the resemblance to original thing i guess?

2. Organisation
you´ve increased quantity and quality (sponsors/prices/participants).. i can imagine with this its organisational work gets heavier too, but from what i can tell everything went flawless like f.e. with quickly answering questions, coming up with solutions or help, etc.


WORST

1. Theme Idea
as brilliant as doomed maybe, since its just recreating others work after all and nothing which requires much own ideas, originality and imagination

2. That sampson and racer445 didnt finish theirs
Nah.. that there were so many WiP threads, but only around 1/6 of them finished. Thats probably just life, at least nothing to worry or to blame on the competition itself. but its interesting to think about the bigger reason (looking at given data as a study/experiment)... anyway i guess thats an important issue if someone´s young and plans to join in the game industry fun, train your vision and scheduling tasks skill !

[Tom]

Pros:

Teams = best thing. I don't really have many fellow 3d artists to talk with other than a few I mod with, not even around here.
Fortunatly I was invited to join a team, which made the experince so much better.
I even have plans with one of my team mates to start a new project together, another movie scene actually that must mean that the competition was a success, hehe.

You learn stuff. I learned a lot about normal mapping and high poly hard surface modeling. Was probably the worst approach to the problems at hand but just like every single comp, that I have entered, I have come out the other side much wiser on some subjects.
But unfortunatly also disappointed about what I ended up making (I tend to dig myself into a narrow hole and explore what new subject I'm praticing instead of focusing on the overall competition) that would probably be a con for me personally (not the competitions fault, hehe)

Long deadlines. Being a student and having mod obligations as well, my spare time for personal projects is limited, so the longer the deadlines, the better (for me at least).

In general I have liked every single theme so far (been around since the street prop/space ship comp). Keep em' comming!

Cons:

The only real con I can think of is the focus on game engines.
I know that being a game artist, you should be able to work with game engines (which is where your stuff ultimatly ends up).
For me it was hopeless to keep up with any of the teams that is going to take home the trophies. The fact that they are proficient in a "next gen" engine and know a lot about the technical stuff in them (crysis/UE3) was a huge discouragement for me. Seeing that they know the lighting-, shading- and other misc systems, where I could only do basic importing.
I had no chance of learning to be a semi god in UE3 in the time frame.
(its not like I don't know game engines, but the good ol' Battlefield 2 engine just dosn't cut it in this sort of comp )

Lastly I would like to say a big "thank you" to the staff, the fact that there is a huge amount of prices every comp keeps surprising me. Great job, keep it up!

I'll be around for the next comp, and the one after that

[x_frame]

The Good side of things
First of all the competition theme was great! I really enjoyed it because most of the time I'm working on movies being a gamer and was great to turn things the other way around.
Secondly it was a pleasure and inspiration seeing other teams progress along the way.
Third is that there were no limitations on software/engines being used.
And a big Thank You for the extension of the deadline.
As for the bad there isn't except that our team didn't get much feedback for reasons unknown to me (thank you to those few who wrote, it really meant) which in our case didn't really matter since most of the time we knew what we are doing.
Best regards!

[trowstuff]

A great comp and some great looking entries. It was a good choice for the subject, well organised and the required specs were enough for the most ambitious of projects and prizes were worth sacrificing the time for. (although i'd have done it just for the experience anyway)


Suggestions.

Possibly ask for a few of the assets to be included individually to help with the assessing/judging?

Ask for a 360 degree render from a point to judge whole environment, rather than just pose 2 single stills?

If I'm going to nit pick, although the 'team' element has paved the way for some more ambitious and complex projects than you might otherwise get, It does leave the 'lone modellers' at a disadvantage. As 3 of me could produce 3 times the work of the same quality as 1 of me , creating a far more complete and impressive scene. A possible solution, have seperate ratings for singles and team entries? But it was my choice to go alone and I knew this before I started... so just ignore me !!!!

Thanks again, you did a great job!

[laughing_bun]

Ill keep mine brief and just say that i think the competition was definitely a success, the turnout was about as good as the unearthly competition which is pretty impressive.

the only real issue I had was with the use of game engines as well. It seemed like so much of the competition hinged on who could come up with the most effects and little tweaks within the engine, instead of just letting the artwork stand on its own.

If your going to do the engine thing I think the competition should be about making something playable.

In the future I would probably like to see more individual and smaller competitions. Though working with an engine and a team was a really great but often cumbersome experience.

[kaze369]

What we would like from you:
The two best things about this competition:
1. the rule were pretty open. the poly limits and texture sizes were nice. And being able to use almost any kind of map was good too.

2. Pro & Con. (real-time renders) I really think using only real-time renders was a good thing because it forces me to evaluate my textures on a deeper level and it also forced me to learn a game engine like UT3.

The two worst things about this competition:
1. (look above) One of the down sides to only having real-time renders was that I had to learn about shaders really quick which really isn't good when you have people that have been using an engine for years. I spent to much time trying to really understand shaders and how they work.

2. More Time. figures I would say this. But I'm going to agree with time here. between job, school, mod work personal stuff gets pushed to the back. I know this this because I was one of the teams that didn't finish.

Final Thoughts:
Even though I didn't finish, I still enjoyed working on a project that required me to learn skills that I don't have and improve on skills I already have. this was a competition I needed to do for myself and not necessarily for the prizes. I definitely picked a scene that was to large for one person.

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

[dukesy]

This was a great competition, fun, challenging and long! which is great to make sure you can get the most out of your scene. i know people work and things like that but I do to, and it was good to stay up untill 3am every night for 6 weeks trying my best to get everything done. p.s the quality of my art at work might have suffered! lol

Really liked the Scene from a movie idea, it helps get a quick start and sort of allowed people (like myself) who cant really do concept art or have an crazy fun ideas to make a cool looking scene that is also fun to make (and get my head away from work)

The only bad thing about it was the confusion with like reflections and engine specific effects etc. Different engines do different things and i guess are designed to produce different results, maybe limiting the engines or judging in engine categories, to make it more fair would be an idea in the future.

Thanks again GA staff and to all the sponsors, this was great fun and i hope i can paticipate in another comp again! Good Luck all!

[doylle]

Thanks you all for the feedback so far people. It is very much appreciated! I'll try to reply to a few of the things said...

The choice of having teams for competitions is a bit double sided. From our point of view, we wanted to break away from the smaller competitions we had before. But with the bigger sponsoring we just needed a bigger assignment. Yet having 1 person to make a whole scene was unrealistic, so the decision to allow teams for this competition was very quickly made. It would allow people to work on larger projects, get more stuff done, and ultimately more people would have a finished piece at the end of the competition. The downside of having teams is that people who didn't find a team, or just prefer to work alone are left in the cold. Maybe we should to split this up in two categories...

The game-engines and the realtime screengrabs is something we strongly believe in, and unlike "Cornered" we decided that you could use any game-engine feature that was available. We don't want to force anyone into using a specific game engine, so taking half of the features from the engine they picked would've been a bit strange (imo that was didn't go so well in cornered). We were taken a bit off guard when people started asking questions about dirt masks and using separate channels from the maps they didn't use. This is one of the things that will change in the next competition, so that there is less confusion.
Essentially, i think using the game engine you prefer, and being good at it, is just the next step in showing what you're capable of. A better modeler will make better models, a better texture artist will make better textures, and someone with more engine knowledge will produce better stuff ingame. But I think in the end this is what game-art is all about. It should not just stop at modeling and texturing.

But combining this with what i said earlier. Having two different categories where we give one of the two groups the chance to work on a smaller project and invest time in other things such as learning an engine, or finding new work flows is something we should look into...

Originally Posted by kYo

[b]
1. Theme Idea
as brilliant as doomed maybe, since its just recreating others work after all and nothing which requires much own ideas, originality and imagination

I completely agree with you here. There are a few reasons why we thought this was a good idea. For allot of people it is an easier task to recreate something existing, rather than come up with something original and coherent. But knowing that some people prefer to create their own stuff we made that possible as well (you didn't have to recreate an exact scene at all, a themed scene was fine as well). It is not uncommon that you have to work with a certain art style, so that was kind of the thing we were after.


Keep em coming alright

J