SETTING
The theme this time is set in an extra-terrestrial, unknown, advanced civilization with mysterious power source, inhabited by symbiotic beings. This civilization should have evolved under other circumstances than Earth. Although this is a sci-fi setting, the design should not be industrial or hyper-modern, but rather ancient and organic.
You are to design, model and texture a vehicle which fits in this world. The concept has to include a description of how this vehicle works, and this should be visible in the final submission. You may include (a) simple character(s), environments or something else to illustrate the functionality and/or the size of the vehicle, as long as you don’t break the technical constraints (see below). But keep in mind, the comparison-models are only to support the main motif, the vehicle. So be careful using them, as they shouldn’t be taken into account in rating the vehicle but could potentially break the image.
The visual style has to be stylized semi-realism. This should give some artistic freedom without making the artworks uncomparable.
All work must be your own, and started from scratch for this contest. You are not permitted to use models that you created or began work on before this contest.
CONSTRAINTS
The polygon limit is 3500 triangles.
Now here come some mean, real-world (PS2-)constraints for the textures: texture pages.
I guess some of you never heard of this, so let me explain a bit (pros please bear with me):
Before a triangle can be drawed on the screen, its corresponding texture has to be loaded from the texture RAM into the much faster texture cache, which is 8KB small on the PS2. The following table shows which dimensions you can have in this 8KB:
4Bit: 128128
8Bit: 12864 (NOT 64128)
16Bit: 6464
32Bit: 6432 (NOT 6432)
Any textures bigger than these would practically have invisible borders in them - technically seen - sliced up by the dimensions above.
The constraint is to use a maximum of 64 texture pages (= 512KB). They correspond to 1 texture at 102410244bit (16 colors) or 2 textures at 25625632bit (true color + alpha).
In other words: you have to trade off between resolution and color-depth.
These are only two extreme examples (resolution vs. color depth), feel free to make your own mixture, just make sure you don’t go beyond the 512kb. The textures don’t have to be square (see texture pages), but the dimensions have to be power of 2 numbers, as usual.
Also, it’s true that ‘bad’ UV placements across page borders can potentially cost a lot performance, but for this challenge you don’t have to get every single triangle within the pages. Would be nice if you pay attention to it though 
You may use alpha channels for transparency, but no bump-maps, please.
SUBMISSIONS
As this is a Work In Progress competition, you should post your progress as you go along. All posts should be entered in a thread titled:
Game Art Comp 2: (Your Name) : (Name of the vehicle, optionally)
Use that thread for all of your updates, and comments about your work. Others should feel free to post in said threads with comments, crits, questions, and advice. Any questions regarding the contest in general should be posted in THIS thread.
As the contest deadline approaches, I will create a thread titled “Game Art Comp 2 Submissions.” It is here that you should submit all of your final work for judging, IN 1 POST. This will give everyone a chance to see all participant’s work side-by-side. No comments or crits should be made in that thread, save that for people’s individual threads.
At the contest deadline, you should submit the following:
- Concept drawings and not too brief descriptions of the ideas behind it. This thing should WORK.
- Three orthogonal views of the flat-shaded model without textures but wireframe.
The orthogonal views should be any three of: front, back, top, bottom, right, left. These images should use default lighting on a one-color background. The OpenGL views from within your modeling program should do fine.
- Three perspective views of the grouraud-shaded model with textures applied.
- The individual texture sheets used layed out seperately, including UV views. If alpha channels are used, lay them out seperately as well.
- One beauty render. This may include fancy lighting, simple atmospheric like explosions etc.
The functionality of the vehicle should be visible.
Please make all images no larger than 800x600.
DEADLINE
The contest begins as soon as you read this post. The deadline is January 31st 2003, 12 midnight CET. That means 11 PM, GMT or February 1st 2003 at 4 AM, CET (I hope this “calculation” is right… better check out your time yourself :rolleyes: Feel free to correct me)
JUDGING
We need a few volunteers (5-8) who would not enter the contest, but would like to participate as judges. Once the deadline is reached, each judge will have 48 hours to cast a vote for the 2 entries they like the most based on visual appeal, technical execution, and adherence to the competition guidelines. They will also give brief comments as to what they liked about the entries they chose and why they voted as they did. The entry with the most votes will be declared the winner. Those interested in being judges should post here in this thread.
PRIZE
The winner of this competition will get to choose the subject and terms of the next competition.
Future competitions may include stricter or looser restrictions on polycount and textures. The competitions may not have to focus on character modeling either. Later comps may involve animation, creating vehicles or buildings, designing interfaces, creating logos or box art, or any other game-related art task.
LET THE PARTY BEGIN! 
P.S. I borrowed some of your text, Sanhueza. Thanks
)
And good luck.
And I’d like to have 3x 256² textures for my characters too 