The BRAWL Tournament - Brief and Specs

This thread will serve as a reference for the BRAWL Tournament's brief and the contest specs for both the character artist entries, FIGHTERS, and environment artist entries, STAGES.

For FULL information the contets's outline, rules, character & environment specs, and submission guidelines, and judging information head on over to the contest page.



The Contest

The BRAWL Tournament contest is pretty straight forward:

• This contest is for both character and environment artists.
• Participants will choose either a FIGHTER (character artists) or STAGE (environment artists) from any fighting game ever and do a reinterpretation or re-imagination of their chosen FIGHTER or STAGE.
• Entries for this contest will either be a 3D videogame character or a 3D videogame environment.
• Participants will create a thread in our Contest & Challenges forum for the duration of the contest. When the contest is over they will submit their entry to the appropriate submission threads and the first round of voting will begin. This voting process – a PUBLIC voting process by the Polycount Community will determine who the combatants are for the BRAWL TOURNAMENT.
  • First round of voting will be from the Polycount Community via a poll to determine the Top 4 FIGHTERS and Top 3 STAGES.
    • NOTE: If we have a large amount of submissions in both categories, we will do the Top 8 FIGHTERS and Top 6 STAGES.
  • After the first round of public voting is finished, those FIGHTERS and STAGES will enter in a tournament: The BRAWL Tournament. In this tournament, those who have entered will have their FIGHTERS and STAGES judged by industry veterans where points are given to each FIGHTER or ENVIRONMENT for Technical Achievement, Brief Met., and Artistic approach.
• Each day after the tournaments start date the winners of each round will progress on to the next stage of the tournament until a single Champion FIGHTER is announced.
• This contest ends on May 6th, 2011!

FIGHTER Technical & Guideline Specs

• No teams. Single artist entry only.
• This is a reimagination of a FIGHTER. You are not to recreate your chosen fighter identically.
• ~12,000 triangles for everything combined. If you go over/under by a couple hundred triangles thats acceptable.
  • Your character, their effects, weapons/items, and so on. Your entire character pack must weigh in around 12,000 triangles.
  • You may use double sided geometry, just remember they're considered towards your final triangle count.
• 2048x2048 resolution for your textures, combined, maximum.
  • Each texture pass gets this resolution. So your diffuse map(s), combined (if applicable), cannot exceed 2048x2048 resolution.
  • Diffuse, Specular/Specular Colour, Reflection, Gloss, Normal, Bump, Opacity, Emissive/Glow
  • Each of these passes are optional.
• All real-time or render solutions are allowed. However, the more your submission can look 'real-time' ready, the better. That is, the more it is presented in a real-time solution the better. This is a videogame art challenge, after all.
  • Keep in mind the SUBMISSION requirements below. Some solution may make your submission more difficult to achieve.
  • Unreal Tech (UDK, UT3), idTech, Crysis engine, Max, Maya, XSI, and so on.
• Lighting your character for your beauty shots (see 'Submitting your Entry' below for more information): Light your character however you'd like. Enhanced or Standard solutions. In-game or baked.
• Lighting your character for your 'comp shots' (see 'Submitting your Entry' below for more information): No 'enhanced' lighting solutions. This means software like Brazil or Mental Ray cannot be used. STANDARD LIGHTING & SHADOWS ONLY.
• Post-processes must be achieved within your desired method or rendering. What this means: NO PHOTOSHOP for post-process solutions.
• Your character will need to be posed. T-poses are boring! (See 'Submission' information below for further details.)

Stage Technical & Guideline Specs

• Teams are allowed. Up to TWO artists maximum.
• You are creating an environment for a fighting game. Perspective and an open lane for character movement is crucial to successful fighting game environments (See the image below for an example of this). Your final shots must show the environment as you would normally see a fighting game environment. (Read: No three-quarter angles, birds-eye views, and so on).
• This is a reimagination of a fighting game STAGE. You are not to recreate it exactly.
• ~250,000 triangles. Over or a couple thousand triangles is acceptable. 250,000 is the guideline we're offering but you do not need to use all 250,000 triangles if your scene does not require it.
• 4096x4096 of total texture space for each material pass.
  • For instance, that could mean 16 1024x1024 maps. Or 32 512x512 maps. Or a combination of many different resolutions just so long that when they are combined they do not exceed 4096x4096 pixels.
• Lighting/rendering must be done to as close as a real-time solution as possible. Absolutely no enhanced lighting techniques (VRay, Mental ray, and so on).
  • Unreal, idTech, Crysis, Source and so on are acceptable. Max, Maya, XSI are also acceptable so long as you are using Standard lighting solutions.
• Lightmaps may be used but are optional.
  • They do not count towards your texture budget.
• Post-processing is allowed so long as it is done in your presentation package (UDK, Max, etc.) and NOT in Photoshop.
  • hue/saturation
  • brightness/contrast
  • DoF, blur, motion blur
  • screen effects (vignette, etc) are acceptable but MUST be done within your package
• DX 11 features for existing engines are allowed.
• Consider this: If it can be done in todays videogame engines, you can do it yourself.