Contest Overview (in case you're wondering, "why are these guidelines so crazy?" I mean, sorry for the long read and all, but it's all part of the challenge to get your creativity flowing)
You're working in a video game company as a vehicle artist. They've just taken on a project in which there is a huge emphasis on realistic traffic within a city. As many as 100 or even 140 vehicles may be on screen at once. They physics calculations for this amount of vehicles is astronomical, and the only way this is possible is if every other aspect of the vehicles posed very little stress on the machines. Your manager has just come to you with the specifications sheet listed below. The engine coders and testers have generated these statistics for the vehicles based off of extensive testing of the engine and their test machines. Remember : These are maximum statistics. The smaller the actual load from the vehicles is, the better. Plus, the more realistic the vehicles, the better as well.
This is a contest in which your modeling skills are put to the test, and your creativity is stretched to the limits. The traditional methods you are used to modeling with may or may not apply with this contest. Furthermore, you may have to learn and apply new techniques you've never used before. Are you ready to take the gaming industry by the horns?
General contest rules:
Entry sumbissions due Sunday, May 7th - Saturday, May 20th.
Must post WIP renders in the WIP section, with "Extra-Low Poly Vehicle Challenge" in the title.
Enter any time, no matter how close to the contest's end. If you feel you can get it done, more power to you. The guidelines should be relatively solid now... so you shouldn't have to wait until the first listed start date, Sunday, March 26th to get your stuff going...
Must start model from scratch. No use of existing models or textures allowed.
Model must be from the following categories:
- Commercial trucks (Semi truck, school bus, ambulance, fire truck, Cement Mixer, etc.)
- Construction vehicle (Front Loader, Dump Truck, Crane Truck, Cherry Picker, etc.)
- Commercial vehicles (police car, taxi, utility truck, swat vans, etc.)
- civilian trucks (pickups, suv's, vans, etc.)
- civilian cars (sedans, coupes, wagons, sports cars, exotics, etc)
The following do not count:
-flying vehicles (helicopters, planes, etc)
-combat-specific vehicles (tanks, SAM Trucks, etc)
-vehicles that don't have a driver's seat and cabin (remote-controlled commercial vehicles, etc)
-vehicles must be in "normal" condition. No car 'wrecks' or other state of existance which would result in missing parts, such as bumpers or tires. - remember, the "goal" of the challenge is to have vehicles which would make for good AI-only vehicles. Think Midnight club 2 or 3, or need for speed 3 or 4.
Contest entries must be submitted with at least 3 gray renders, and 3 color renders. Background not necessary. Texture maps must be posted, along with corresponding alpha channels, so creativity and techniques can be judged. Please refrain from posting textures until contest ends. Wouldn't want to give your technique away would you? Reflection map doesn't need to be posted, but it will definitely help with the realism of your vehicle.
Forum members will be judging final entries via Poll on this forum
And remember, this is a challenge... so challenge yourself to stay away from boxy vehicles like a delivery truck.
Vehicle model specifications:
Vehicle is limited to 1 uvw map channel total. This means if you look at the uvw unwrap, all information will be on channel 1.
Vehicle modeling must contain either triangles or quadrilaterals. No nore than 4 vertices may make up any face on the vehicle.
Open, or floating geometry is acceptable
2-sided geometry is not acceptable
Face count is limited to 1,750 faces. (triangles)
Complete car body required.
Interior optional
Chassis detail optional
Hood, trunk, and doors should not be modeled to open.
Light glows optional
Intersecting geometry is acceptable, but coplanar faces are not. (two or more faces who's vertices all share the exact same location in space, within .01 threshold)
Multiple smoothing groups are allowed. The mesh needn't be broken up where "creases" are.
Texture specifications:
864 ื 864 = 746,496
512 ื 512 = 262,144
You have 842 pixelsฒ for your set of textures (746,496 pixels).
-For example, a 512x512 texture would be 262,144 pixels. you'll have 484,352 pixels left after using one 512x512 image.
-I had a whole thing here about non-square image dimensions, but jeez... if you want to know if your texture allotment will fit the requirements, just find the area of each texture, and add up all the values, and make sure it isn't more than 746,496. ... my apologies for my horrid math (lack of) skills there...
You can have as many textures as you want, as long their total size is less than 842pxฒ. You don't have to utilize the whole texture space allotment either.
Texture dimensions must be in squares of two. (8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512)
Textures may be square, or oblong, as long as the dimensions are squares of two. (8x16, 512x256)
Oblong textures may not have any greater than a 1:4 ratio of larger dimension to smaller dimension. a 512x128 texture would work, but a 512x64 texture wouldn't.
Textures must be saved as either
PNG 8-bit (256-color or less)
GIF (256-color or less)
DDS (DXT5 compression for alpha'd images, DXT1 compression for non-alpha'd images)
Textures with opacity maps can have the opacity map either within the image, as an alpha channel, or saved as a separate image. In this case, opacity map images don't count towards your total texture size.
Opacity maps saved as seperate images from the correlating diffuse map MUST be the same dimensions as the diffuse map.
Materials may have as many subobjects as necessary. Materials may reference the exact same images as other subobjects, or they may reference different images.
Reflection map does not count towards the total texture size.
The maps you can use are:
ท Diffuse color (256 color) - Defines the base color of the model
ท Opacity Map (grayscale - 256 color) - Defines which areas of the model are rendered (white shows up, black dissappears)
ท Reflection Map (256-color) - a Spherical Environment map applied over the surface of the model.
Textures must be bitmaps. No procedural or special map types (such as raytrace) are allowed.
Material shader must be Blinn, or Phong.
Multiple car colors, wheel styles, or interior colors do not count towards total texture size, but MUST all be the same dimensions as the other textures. No silver car being 512x512 and your yellow car being 2048x2048
This competition is more of a personal challenge for anyone here to give to themselves. Have fun, and most of all, I encourage you to experiment with new and unusual techniques you might not have used otherwise.