Well, the results may surprise everybody. Since certain people haven't, ah, turned in their work yet
I am giving everybody who has current entries in the contest another 24 hours to revamp, if they so choose.
Right now, the clear winner, on overall points, is a very close race between... and yes, this was a surprise even to me...
Maelstrom and Keithus. Why? Because, out've all of the entries, they picked up points and didn't lose any.
Let's review the rules. Any art contest is, let's be real, unfair and ultimately subjective. I make no bones about making artistic judgements on a "do I like this, does it fit NanoBlobs's weird aesthetic" basis. However, technical modeling was a big part of judging:
1. Polycount must be lower than 2000. 2000 instead of 1000, because this will be a big, important structure in NB, and it should be impressively detailed.
2. It must be futuristic in design.
3. It should use the concepts of mirroring and other techniques to make it easy to skin.
4. I am the sole judge of the winning entry. This is the points system I will use:
A. Keeping the number of triangles in the mesh below 1900 is worth 1 point. Keeping it below 1750 is worth 2. Do not submit models with square faces, and I will not accept entries with polycounts over 2000.
B. Keeping the number of moving parts below 10, or designing the moving parts so they will be easily animated (i.e., making good use of rest positioning) is worth 1 point. I will be flexible, if it was well thought out.
C. Overall style is worth 5 points.
D. If it is uv-mapped, you get 2 points. I will paint the skin.
Let's look at the four top contenders:
2 for polycount.
1 for uvmap.
1 for mechanical simplicity and obvious design.
3.5 for overall style, flair, ingenuity, futuristic feel and keeping with the NanoBlobs aesthetics of 1930's Art Deco design.
Total Score: 7.5
3 points were awarded for the design, greebling, and attention to overall craft. 1 point was awarded for special technical distinction, then half a point was subtracted for a technical flaw that I feel was avoidable.
Overall rating: the model is, by far, the most clean entry I looked at, in terms of the overall mesh. No smoothing, welding, or other blemishes. It's damn near flawlessly clean. I did not have to weld/split/reorder the mesh to have it meet my standards, which are (usually, when I'm not being lazy) very high. That shot on the left was right after importing. I was like, "sweet, I don't have to fix this at all".
I know that may not impress everybody, but it says a lot about Keithus's desire to actually make a go of it- that and the revisions and calls for critique. I didn't step in with ideas, because frankly, after jinxing Rattle I felt like I probably wasn't helping by kibbitzing and throwing out visual puns
Keithus, to score a perfect 10, you'd have to find 1.5 more points of overall "cool". What makes that happen is very arguable, given your concept- do you add mechanicals that animate to suggest the opening sequence... some greebles that could suggest how it keeps stable/turns while in mid-air, or is it something else entirely? I'd meditate on it, go study some of these visual references I posted links to earlier, and do some drawings. I know you have it in you.
Lastly, this model lost a point because while it is uvmapped, and doesn't have much distortion, the map has lots of gaps, wastes a lot of space, and is generally laid out pretty poorly for skinning. It'd be a very tough model to work with, although I can certainly get it done.
Here's a shot of Keithus's uvmap:
2 for polycount.
1.5 for uvmap.
0.5 for mechanical simplicity and obvious design.
3.5 for overall style, flair, ingenuity, futuristic feel and keeping with the NanoBlobs aesthetics of 1930's Art Deco design.
Total Score: 7.5
Maelstrom's entry, at first glance, wasn't my first choice for a strong contender, but when I actually looked at the model under the microscope, it rapidly grew on me.
While its steampunk imaginings are somewhat at odds with the overall blend of 30's pulp sci-fi and 70's anime schlock that is the artistic heart of NanoBlobs, it's still a very well-made model. It required welding/splitting to clean it up, but the resulting model, as you can see, is very clean, and has hardly any welding flaws.
I took off half a point, because the mechanical issues are a bit more difficult than they first appear. Firstly, the gears need to turn PERFECTLY, which I strongly suspect will be quite a trick. Secondly, if the gun is at a 45-degree angle, it will clip into the base a bit. Minor, but hey, this is a contest
On the aesthetic side... the square barrel... I can't really explain it without going into mushy language... but it just doesn't do it for me. A sloped, irregular pentagon or a triangle is much more interesting than a simple elongated cube.
On the other hand, the uvmap for this thing is pretty good. While it could've used far more mirroring, and has a couple of places where it is projecting through things that I would choose to emphasize as detail areas, it is laid out in a very straightforward fashion, and it's "duh" obvious what object cross-section I'm staring at. And there is no noticeable distortion on any parts that actually matter.
A solid entry, with a lot of potential. Just doesn't have perfect 10 quality and finish yet. The gears were inspired- the gun feels less so.
Here's Maelstrom's uvmap:
2.0 for polycount.
0 for uvmap.
0.5 for mechanical simplicity and obvious design.
3.5 for overall style, flair, ingenuity, futuristic feel and keeping with the NanoBlobs aesthetics of 1930's Art Deco design.
Total Score: 6.0
aGorm's entry scores very high on style, then loses a major chunk for not having a uvmap. Since even a fairly simplistic uvmap would gain this model the prize, I'm going to be interested in seeing how this works out.
This is really a brilliant entry, from a mechanical and design standpoint. Getting it to actually work in Spring would be a little painful, but not too bad. Getting it to work really convincingly... meh, a little harder, but still doable. Watching people's first reactions to a stealthed turret that looks like an evil spider-god when emerging to smite my foes... priceless
This model required to be cleaned/split, but after splitting, it's nearly flawless, and would look just fine in Spring.
Overall, I like this entry, and I feel like it really captured the essence of my vague directives about coming up with something innovative but not "bleah, too weird", which is where I'm trying to steer NanoBlob's art style. With a uvmap that was easy to work with, it would probably be the strongest contender, in terms of bringing everything together.
To reach perfect 10 status, it'd have to make even more use of mirroring (hint: the "base" could be divided into 4 pieces, just like everything else), have a uvmap, and come with a series of poses, so that Argh doesn't have to burn his brain out doing the initial animation run (cleanup and believability are, of course, just one of those things).
2.0 for polycount.
0 for uvmap.
1.0 for mechanical simplicity and obvious design.
3.0 for overall style, flair, ingenuity, futuristic feel and keeping with the NanoBlobs aesthetics of 1930's Art Deco design.
Total Score: 6.0
Dash's entry is pretty darn sexy. I mean, how can you
not like something with 4 guns?
However, even after 3 revisions, it still just doesn't feel right. The guns are referencing Star Wars. They're really cool, but they just don't quite mesh as well as I'd like. And while I look forward to the challenge of making that tower believable with an animation, I still feel like there's something more substantial out there that might work better.
In addition, this was the only model I looked at which still has some (minor) welding issues even after being split.
And it has, by a long shot, the highest polycount of all the entries. It just barely made the cut.
To get a perfect 10, I'd say drop the base and the tower and replace them with something solid and straightforward- something that says, "armored and gosh-darn heavy", with a little greebling to maybe suggest ablative armor (like the stand-off plates on the Springer or that silly mockup I threw out much earlier). I want something that should have
rivets and thick plates of uber-armor. And I'd go ahead and lose the holes on the barrels of the guns (to save on polycount- no point when they'd be 2 pixels wide on-screen 99% of the time), shorten the barrels and emphasize them a bit to suggest water-cooling jackets or something suitably old-skool, and generally make this look a bit less like a sleek appliance of Dooooom and more like a rusty-four gun machinegun ala WWII.
And a uvmap, even a fairly crappy one, is a must.
. However what I said in that post still stands, I still want some suggestions with what to do to it.
(And wish I kept the file so I coulda remade it, higher polygonal and more like the actual one...)
