Competition #16 - BOSS MONSTER - Rules and Specifications

[heavyness]

once again, this competition will be running on both CGSociety and Game-Artist.net [until we get them merged]. you can only submit 1 [even if you have an account on each site].

Game-Artist.net's Low Poly Forum [link (http://www.game-artist.net/forums/low-poly-competition/)]

[blacker]

Oh man I hope I have time for this. My computer sucks (can't do normal maps!) so this is right up my alley. Hmmm.... an alley...... interesting... : )

[fx81]

i know you mentioned that this is a challenge but that 3000 tri and 512x512 seems ridiculous and unrealistic for a combined boss and its environment.

what type of console or game generation are you basing this of off, 360, ps3, pc, wii, ds or hand held games ?

[heavyness]

i know you mentioned that this is a challenge but that 3000 tri and 512x512 seems ridiculous and unrealistic for a combined boss and its environment.

what type of console or game generation are you basing this of off, 360, ps3, pc, wii, ds or hand held games ?

yes, this is for a handheld device [ds, psp... maybe even iphone].

[bcairns]

This sounds fun! weee, hopefully i have time for it! :D

[Sandr0]

Wohooo new competition :buttrock: Texture budget is pretty tight, but it's going to be fun


@ blacker
I you can't have normalmaps :) Only 512x512 diffuse/alpha. I think pretty much every kind of computer that is able to launch a casual game or two can handle this.

[mttjss]

awesome, I'm in!
And for a DS limitations, this is right on par for that.

Matt -

[ixumanu]

Can we use vertex color?

[Firerbert]

This will quickly turn into an artistic challenge which is just frickin' awesome! I pooped in the refrigerator when I read that poly count, but that is why it will become an art challenge. You can only be technical to a point with that kind of budget and map limitation.

[LouisBrowne]

I certainly think these limitations are a good thing, it allows people to be more creative and less hinderd by technical workflows.

NextGen games is certainly not the only industry. Big thumbs up.

[fx81]

funny, i always heard creativity is at its best when technical limitation is the least.

@heavyness - what made you choose a hand held specification and not a more popular popular tagret console like xbox360 or ps3 ? or did you just want to keep the scope of this challenge small due to the fact that there are no huge prizes like Dominance War ?

the reason i ask is because if you look at games like Little Big Planet on ps3 or resistance 2 then you can see what creativity can do.

[glynnsmith]

funny, i always heard creativity is at its best when technical limitation is the least.

@heavyness - what made you choose a hand held specification and not a more popular popular tagret console like xbox360 or ps3 ? or did you just want to keep the scope of this challenge small due to the fact that there are no huge prizes like Dominance War ?

the reason i ask is because if you look at games like Little Big Planet on ps3 or resistance 2 then you can see what creativity can do.
Technical limitations are always present in game art, whether you're developing for a 3D PS3 title, or a casual 2D Flash game; You'll always hit a bottleneck and learning to deal with those barriers for the better is where the best games come from :)

We chose to switch it up this time, as most of the newer artists are starting with the next/current generation specifications to work with, which can be a negative thing - By forcing a lower specification in the rules, we're making people to look at aspects like tiling, reusing texturespace and all of that stuff that some people might not necessarily have to deal with, or might not have the necessity to try out in their work or home projects.

Like LouisBrowne said, current/next generation specs aren't the only kind of games being made :) It's supposed to be a fun challenge, so join up and have some fun with it ;)

[Dennispls]

I couldn't have said it better glynn.

I have developped for the psp for a while and the limitations are really strict.
This is CHALLENGING and thats why we wanted to present that in our next CHALLENGE
Creativity should not be linked to limitless resources.
To be real creative is to come up with something nice within the limitations

[fx81]

FYI i never meant to say that it should be limitless

if u look at my personal game art work i always kept them fairly low poly compared to what you see in Gears of War type games where a single character or weapon can go up to 14000 triangles.

i was just curious about the spec and why hand held was a better choice.

anyways, since you guys are saying this is for a hand held spec i definitely think that spec is more than enough but the screen grab resolution is too high for a hand held. you dont want to take a screen grab of something small and blow it up big (1024x768 is around twice the size of a PSP screen 480 x 272)

i would recommend a max of 640 x 480 since the exact PSP res may be too small for cgportfolio.

[blacker]

@ blacker
I you can't have normalmaps :) Only 512x512 diffuse/alpha. I think pretty much every kind of computer that is able to launch a casual game or two can handle this.

I know, that's why I was saying this competition is perfect for me (since the other competitions are normal map heavy and my computer won't do High Quality rendering). :D I'm really looking forward to this, so I hope I get a chance to compete. As for alphas, I haven't tried them on my new laptop, but on my other computer they don't display in the Maya viewports. Instead I see only the shape of the geometry. I usually have to render the scene to be able to see my alphas as they should appear.

[conbom]

It could be very interesting indeed to see how one single small texture can be used and re-used to fill a scene. May i just ask someone experienced if this clever reusage is used in PS3 Xbox level work to save memory?

[FabioMSilva]

so, it must be a monster(no aristocratic human villains allowed?) and it has to be an original design ,or can it be an existing design?

sigh, i got no clue on how to make good real time renderers:shrug: straight from max viewport must look horrible

[glynnsmith]

There are no limits in regards to style or genre - it can be organic or metallic and it can be made for any kind of low-spec game that might have boss monsters. It can be anything you want, but it has to be obvious as a boss monster :)

The judges will be judging from concept to final peice, so if you take something that's already been made, you'll only stand to suffer when they judge your initial concepts.

[blenderhead]

FYI i never meant to say that it should be limitless

if u look at my personal game art work i always kept them fairly low poly compared to what you see in Gears of War type games where a single character or weapon can go up to 14000 triangles.

i was just curious about the spec and why hand held was a better choice.

anyways, since you guys are saying this is for a hand held spec i definitely think that spec is more than enough but the screen grab resolution is too high for a hand held. you dont want to take a screen grab of something small and blow it up big (1024x768 is around twice the size of a PSP screen 480 x 272)

i would recommend a max of 640 x 480 since the exact PSP res may be too small for cgportfolio.

How often do you see handheld specs comps? Never. How often do you see large poly count, normal map heavy 'get your copy of zbrush ready' comps? Several times a year (with or without prizes). There's a comp that might suit you better going on at gameartisans if you aren't up to the challenge of this one, there's even a prize going this time.

And where does it say we are limited to the size of the screengrab?

[Sandr0]

So - as this comp. is more or less oriented towards handheld devices, is realtime bloom/color correction to be avoided? I think some PSP games do have bloom effects.

@blacker
Ahh, sorry :) I misread your post.

[anoon]

3000 polys? Wow.

What is the final screen resolution of the hypothetical mobile device? Because that will have massive ramifications as to the boss design.

[TwiiK]

What do you mean screen resolution of hypthetical device?

It's written in clear text that your final submission should be:
Screengrab of final piece 1024x768px (No further image editing allowed)

[TwiiK]

I don't think I have entered any low poly competitions before and I'm wondering what the rules are on deleting unseen polygons?

Lets say I delete every poly not facing the camera in my final submission shot. That would save me a ton of polygons.

[anoon]

Wow. Are there mobile devices that have that screen res?

(When I hear "mobile device," I automatically think "cellphone." Living in the US, where all cellphones totally suck, I assumed that the final screen res would have been 240x320 or some such.)

[salmonmoose]

Wow. Are there mobile devices that have that screen res?

(When I hear "mobile device," I automatically think "cellphone." Living in the US, where all cellphones totally suck, I assumed that the final screen res would have been 240x320 or some such.)

Depends a little what you'd consider "mobile" :) My EeePC fits in my coat pocket and has a 1024x600 resolution :)

[khendar]

Mind you Anton has BIG coat pockets :P

This one should be interesting and extremely challenging. Good luck people :)

[glynnsmith]

With regards to the final submission image needing to be 1024x768px, we're not looking for you to set it out like that's the actual resolution of the game.

It's a good resolution for something low poly like this, because it allows you can have a couple of angles, or seperate shots of your boss monster at different angles :)

[DragonSFX]

could someone please tell me exactly what is a "boss monster".

i did a google, but it wasn;t really helpful. is it simply any "head" monster, or is it a specific type of genre?

thanks,
Levi

[glynnsmith]

End of level boss!

Big monsters that have more health and one or two exploitable hitpoints.

Think of any of the colossi from Shadow of the Colossus, or any of the metal gears from the Metal Gear Solid games.

[Jadetiger]

sigh, i got no clue on how to make good real time renderers:shrug: straight from max viewport must look horrible

Yeh I'm not too clear on this real time render. If these are screenshots straight from the viewport, we can't use any kind of decent lighting? The anti aliasing is goign to be awful if I do this from Maya. I know u can up the preview quality, but when I do that on my computer I get all sorts of crazy visual errors like messed up textures, verticies and faces that shoot off the screen, etc. Can anyone clarify this point please? No mental ray or even a maya software render? IPR?

[glynnsmith]

As this is an extremely low poly game art competition, we're disallowing all software renders; Realtime-only screengrabs, be it from your application viewport or from an existing game engine.

As an afterthought for the lighting, there's a chance we're going to be using vertex-only lighting, but I've yet to square that away with the other mods/admin.

I'll try and get official word out by the end of the day :)

[blacker]

As this is an extremely low poly game art competition, we're disallowing all software renders; Realtime-only screengrabs, be it from your application viewport or from an existing game engine.

So I'm still SOL with my non-alphaing alpha maps? :shrug: Would it be acceptable to submit viewport captures and one render, so people would know what it was supposed to look like (if not for my crappy computer)? :D

[trungtran]

Hi all,
I am very interested in this competition. I do have a question on texture though. One 512X512 diffuse. Is that for all in the scene? Boss, props, background and etc in one 512x512 texture? Or is that one 512x512 for just the monster boss texture? Thanks.

[TwiiK]

Lol, what's up with all these questions?

Almost all of these you can answer by reading the initial post.

You can split up the texture space into smaller textures as required so long as the total size of all of your textures does not exceed one 512x512px.

[glynnsmith]

Haha, aye :p

512x512px is all the texture you get. That will cover you for the Boss AND the scene :)

Blacker - You're going to have to import it into a game engine that supports alpha's, then. No software renders. If a render is submitted, it will be discounted and the judges won't be able to judge it. Best of luck! :)

[SummoniX]

Sorry for my noobiness guys, but I really wanna try joinining this competition too.
I had an hour demo of ZBrush yesterday, so Im not sure where to find all these polygon options n stuff but ill figure it out.
I was just wondering is ZBrush one of the programs we are allowed to use for this competition?

[TwiiK]

I guess you can use any program you want as long as you're able to provide a real time render and stay below 3000 triangles and 512x512 texture space.

I'm new to this low poly game business and I have a question:

- Seeing as we're only allowed 1 diffuse and 1 optional alpha texture does that mean our creations will be completely diffuse? No specular, glossiness or reflections whatsoever?

As an example let's say I use the standard material in 3ds max, am I allowed to increase the specular level?

[glynnsmith]

I was just wondering is ZBrush one of the programs we are allowed to use for this competition?
Theoretically, ZBrush could be used, because it pushes vertices around. I wouldn't suggest you used ZBrush for this competition, though :P

Seeing as we're only allowed 1 diffuse and 1 optional alpha texture does that mean our creations will be completely diffuse? No specular, glossiness or reflections whatsoever?

As an example let's say I use the standard material in 3ds max, am I allowed to increase the specular level?
You're right :) No shader-side specular. You'll have to paint it onto the diffuse :D

[blacker]

Nuts.. I've got my model about half done but I just got some disturbing news. My employer was just bought and my job is in the balance. Needless to say, I won't have time to finish this. If anyone would like to pray for me, I'd appreciate it!:bowdown:

[Pookytheloon]

Hope your jobs safe mate, its difficult times for everyone across the board.

One thing thats struck me is how quiete this competition is, not that much
activity or c+c going on. Both cgtalk and gameartist, peopl not really commenting
that much on each others work, which is a shame. I've just finished working
on a piece for another forum and the thread got 40+ pages in a week or two.
Great vibe there, lots of helping each other out and some astonishingly good
entries.

It's partially why I've kind of lost interest in completing this one tbh.
That and I have to agree with fx81 that some of the spec for this comp
doesnt quiet add up. The screenshot size in particular is a big stumbling block
for me. If we had to complete at the resolution of a handheld I think it would
be better. Just rambling.

[doylle]

We can't ignore that it has been a bit quiet around this competition. We are looking into what has gone wrong, because with no entries at CGS, something must've been off.

Feedback is appreciated, so if you have comments or suggestions, don't hold them back... :)

cheers

J

[Pookytheloon]

One quick thought is that might it be something to do with the competition not having its
own dedicated sub forum (low poly competition?)
The wip posts just getting lost in the general wip post forum?

[heavyness]

One quick thought is that might it be something to do with the competition not having its
own dedicated sub forum (low poly competition?)
The wip posts just getting lost in the general wip post forum?

you give it it's own sub-forum, and no one will see it. we have a sub-forum were we tried that...

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=127

...besides the people who enter the challenge, other people don't stop in to comment. we should go back to using a sub-forum when we see way to many people posting challenge threads [when it becomes popular enough].

i've always had trouble getting a lot of entries for any game art challenge here on CGSociety. i've tried mixing things up, changing the rules, not having rules...


i think once Game-Artist.net takes over for all the "game art" on CGSociety, the challenges will get a lot of attention and just keep building in popularity.

[Pookytheloon]

Ah ok, didnt know the sub forum thing had already been tried.
Its a bit of a mystery really then unless it just needed advertising more within the main forum.

[blacker]

I blame the global economy and the holidays. What about a different colored sticky thread title and/or a banner? I'd enter, but I'm still hanging in the balance here.

[Pookytheloon]

Yeah I'd say the economy has a lot to do with it. Lost my job along with the whole dev team
3 months ago now, first time in 12 years. Sucks big time but we gotta keep going mate.
Hope you keep your job, and if you dont, remember a better job awaits...somewhere!

[anoon]

Hey, I don't want to come in here and sound all negative, but I thought I would offer my personal view and a little constructive criticism regarding this and other game art challenges.

First off, I think the game art challenges are a great idea and should continue. That said...

I will admit that I do not read every contest announcement, but of the ones I have, I often find myself puzzled by some of the questionable guidelines and restrictions.

For example: reasonable polycount models coupled with unrealistic texture limits. I recall one contest to the effect of: 8000polys, 1 1024x1024 diffuse, followed by unlimited alpha textures!?! I have worked on titles for a number of different platforms and I am not familiar with a system or engine that allows unlimited use of alpha textures. They all count for something. My first thought was: well, why don't I just author my entry using as many different maps as I please and just split their channels into seperate "alphas" at the end for recombination in a shader? Though my solution would have been unworkable in a real world development situation, it would have technically fit within the guidelines of the contest and a lot of game development is working within boundaries, so why not?

Another issue is that of target platform. I raised this issue in my first response to this thread. I really feel that specifying a target platform or platform(s) would go a long way towards clearing up any confusion. For example, in this Boss Monster contest, if the rules would have specified a mobile phone, Nintendo DS, or Sony PSP as the target platform, then I know I have a very small screen and final resolution to deal with. Knowing this, I would not design a monster with a 1000 little eyes covering his body; they would never show up on those tiny screens. If the target was the PS3 or 360, the 1000 eyed monster becomes more of a likely choice, as all of those little blinking eyes are going to look really cool at 1080p.

One final thing specific to the Boss Monster contest: the cover image was so well done that everything I came up with ended up looking like a rip off of that or Patapon. It really put me off. Perhaps there is a more generic exciter image that could be used for contests in the future?

I hope this did not come off as too negative. I aim only to help and foster a more active game art community here on CGTalk.

[heavyness]

anoon, that didn't come off as negative at all. all points taken loud and clear.

personally, i would like to set a universal poly limit and texture size to use in every challenge from this point on. this can be decided by committee and adjusted slightly over time. then, there wouldn't be any questions. we could also change things up by saying "no normal maps" or "go for a cel shaded look".

but, i do see people wanting to explore all game art [from handheld to home systems].

[anoon]

Cool, thanks Rick. One never knows if tone is going to be misinterpreted when posting something critical in nature.

One more thing: Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that every contest should be "Build a primary character for the next Gears of War!" I really like that the contests can span the gamut from high end, AAA style assets all the way to 8 bit pixel art.

I guess I am just looking for a little more detail in the specification. I blame my years in the Technical Art realm. :)

Maybe one day I will get around to entering one of these contests!!!

[Steyn]

I believe I would have been the only one here to submit an entry if I just read the competition's announcement one day earlier. I think that's my problem, I kept checking in here for a competition, and got tired of checking, and stopped checking, and blam, when I got the urge to see what people are doing in game art, there it was, and only had two days to work on it.

[doylle]

Thanks for the input guys. Like heavyness said, a dedicated subforum isn't really an option for now, to few people would visit it, which would make it even worse. We realize that posting the competition in the wip section isn't great either, but i truly believe that's the best way for now.

As for the specs and guidelines, that's definitely something that we can finetune in the future.

@ anoon: Did you really mean what you said about the competition banner? Cause, it'll take forever before our designer forgets that and stops bragging with it... :cool:

[glynnsmith]

Thanks for the input guys. Like heavyness said, a dedicated subforum isn't really an option for now, to few people would visit it, which would make it even worse. We realize that posting the competition in the wip section isn't great either, but i truly believe that's the best way for now.

As for the specs and guidelines, that's definitely something that we can finetune in the future.

@ anoon: Did you really mean what you said about the competition banner? Cause, it'll take forever before our designer forgets that and stops bragging with it... :cool:

:D




Meanwhile...ontopic - CGTalk is such a massive, massive forum that adding another subforum is just going to make the game art competitions more vague. Once the game art forum has been intergrated properly with GA.net, we'll definitely have more room to make such important posts more conveiniently noticable. We are aware of these problems but, because we're in a state of flux with both forums kind of sharing the load, it's the best we can do in the current circumstances :)

We try and run between 2 - 3 bigger competitions a year. With this being a smaller inbetweener, it's not so important. But all these points are being taken on board for the next big one.

[anoon]

Did you really mean what you said about the competition banner? Cause, it'll take forever before our designer forgets that and stops bragging with it...

Absolutely. Looking at the guidelines, then seeing the exciter image made me think. "Well duh. There it is." 3000 polys and a mobile device screen isn't a lot to work with. A 2D style monster made up of layered planes for a Patapon type game is the best answer.

[khendar]

There are some very good entries over at Game-Artist.net (http://www.game-artist.net/forums/low-poly-competition/). Yes the requirements were quite restrictive for this one, but that's what makes it a challenge :)