Huge congratulations this time around to the 2nd Place winners for the Brawl Contest. Lot’s of hard work and creativity went in to them and its paid off quite well! Congratulations you two!

As you may remember, the judges were sent the Top 5 FIGHTERS and Top 5 STAGES as voted on by the Polycount Community. From there, they rated the entries in 3 areas: Artistic Achievement, Technical Achievement, and Brief Criteria. The points were tallied and our winners were decided. In the event of a tie, we referenced the public vote and the Fighter or Stage with the most amount of votes was given the win.

Up first:

The 2nd place winners!

 

2nd place FIGHTER: JFletcher’s Mario!!

 

The judges comments:

Chris George:

Artistic Achievement
Awesome character! He is full of personality from head to toe. Great texture work, clean bake, and I dig his face. For me, a great face is what really makes a character. The little details like the stitching and rips in his clothing are spot on too. Great job.

 

Vitaliy Naymushin:

Technical Achievement
Technically this model is excellent, everything is very well done and built in a very smart way. Everything is very clean and it definitely shows that the creator knows what he’s doing. This model can be thrown into any AAA game and it would animate well and work great.

Artistic Achievement
Artistically this character is really fun and interesting. Its saturated, but not overly so, it looks very pleasing and whimsical and its definitely a memorable character that stands out from the crowd.

Brief Criteria
Out of all the entries I think this one did the best job of re-envisioning a character in a whole new interesting and unique way. I definitely want to play a Mario game done in this style!

Hanno Hagedorn:

Technical Achievement
The poly distribution is pretty clean in general, but a bit rough when it comes to the outer shapes. The stylisation of the textures is good looking but not overdone and well balanced

Artistic Achievement
It is a badass gnarly Mario! Brilliant stylization and design. Lovin’ it!

Brief Criteria
It is just a gnarly Mario and not too creative in concern of the challenges topic.

 

2nd Place STAGE: Mert’s Old Temple!

 

The judges comments:

Ryan Monday:

Technical Achievement
This is an extremely impressive looking set for the amount of texture sheets the artist(s) used in this environment. Because the artist(s) used many of the other systems in the game engine the artist(s) were able to take the environment to the next level with FX and lighting giving the atmosphere an amazing amount of depth.

Artistic Achievement
The mood in this scene is surreal. He has left open so many opportunities to allow for ambient movement which always makes a fighting stage that much more interesting. The stage itself is very complex looking with the broken up and uneven stones while he is able to still have very interesting background with simple elements.

Brief Criteria
This is an extremely nice rendition on Old Temple. You were able to take key elements and translate them to your new scene while giving it much more depth and room for ambient movement. 

 

Josh Cook:

Technical Achievement
Good lighting and FX, nice sense of depth , good material quality.

Artistic Achievement
Great attention to detail, colour pallet and composition

Brief Criteria
Great idea to expose previously hidden areas of environment while maintaining a visual anchor to the original.

 

Bram Eulers

Technical Achievement
Overall the scene is pretty well constructed, with most of it being tiling textures. Some texture layouts could have been more efficient, but overall the use of technical specs is good.
It seems open enough though I have a problem reading the scale, but I trust it will work in a fighting game.

Artistic Achievement
It’s Not very daring with the color palette and a there’s a bit overreliance on post effects. I think a lot of post stuff is overkill I feel the textures and shaders could have use a bit more work, and the post effects and contrasty lighting were used to hide them. The overall composition is cool though!

Brief Criteria
Feels very similar to the original, but I think there are enough added elements like the fallen statue and nighttime lighting to consider it a nice reinterpretation!

 

Very nicely done you two! Loved both of these entries quite a bit!

Be sure to check out Mert’s thread as he has posted VIDEO of his entry and JFletcher’s thread for a rundown on how he created his rendition of Mario.