Winners announced!

[Jeremie Noguer]

The winners of the Meet MAT 3D Painting contest are finally here! Overwhelmed by the number and quality of entries, we have slightly changed the rules: 20 winners instead of 3 in the general category, and 10 winners instead of 1 in the student category.

Head over to our blog for the full winners and prize list!

[adrian.wulfrath]

Wow!.. in the students version there are best works than professionals. Lol. But great ideas. Probably for me, the 4th place was a wrong selection, because im from México and the Skull Candy is not like that, and there are a lot of gaps in the texture without color or design, just the Mat Solid Standard Material. I dont like the 4th place selection. But is my personal idea.

And i like a lot the "This suit is too tight" work, and "Substance Sherif" really cool work. For the "Mayan Mat" is not maya LOL, is Azteca and its based in the calendar. There are a big difference between Maya culture than Aztecas.

[xrunesx]

Congrats to all the winners. Was quite the competition.

[ninsix]

Well that was disappointing, congrats to the winners all the same.

[justaviking]

Wow, wow, and WOW!!!

Congrats to all the winners.

There were some surprises, but several of my favorites made it to the winner category.  It was also great to see some "new" entries that hadn't been posted in the forum.

Thanks again to Allegorithmic for hosting this.
Thanks to the sponsors for the prizes, both large and small.
Thanks to ALL THE PARTICIPANTS for sharing your artwork with the world.  We have all been enriched by it.

A final comment... I believe having a "simple" and somewhat abstract model helped attract a lot of participation because it was not too intimidating to beginners and novices, yet still allowed the masters to showcase their talent.

[erikjohnsson4]

Huge congrats to all the winners!

Bit sad to see that many of the winning entries hadn't made a thread here on the forum though, would have been nice to follow their progress 

[ostapblender2020]

Amazing winners! Congrats to every participant!

[StubbornFunkyDonkey]

It's an honor for me to be among the top ones. Thank you! It was one hell of a ride for sure.
My congartulations to the other winners. The first place is especially well-deserved. I've been considering Gabriel's work as one of the best through all the competition.

Also I'm sorry but I must say that some entries of top 20 is nowhere near overall top entries. With some MATs criterias of choosing those particular ones are not clear at all. I won't point to any special model but come on! There are several which are so uninspired. No idea, no story, and in some cases no time put into (I'm sure that everyone understands which ones I am talking about).

It's a pity that two of my absolute favorites Peter Sanderman with “This suits too tight!” and Rafal Brozyniak with “Urban Mat” are not higher on the list. I think they both could've made it into top 5. As well as this amazing but somehow overlooked "Cakeman".

There are so much more entries which deserve to be in the list. I hope that people will spend an hour or two during this weekend to look through all of great MATs and to appreciate them. There are many which are far superior to some of the chosen ones... It's objective.

[TheoClarke]

Cograts, amazing work from everyone involved. My favourites are "Urban Mat" and "Juicy Orange" - these were really great ideas and made good use of the capabilities of the software.

[IceBear]

Beautiful works, but I have a little criticism because I think that the sixth classified in the student category is an insult to all those people who participated in the contest seriously.

Anyway GJ all.

[garretthoyos]

Congrats to the winners

Definitely have to agree with the judges, those top picks are dope.

[StubbornFunkyDonkey]

Although there are several very strange choices in the list I clearly understand that tastes may vary among judjes. Maybe they didn't have enough time to closely look at every model provided considering there are more than 1200 and they (judjes) are humans too with their jobs and families. Maybe it is misunderstanding of criterias by some of them. It doesn't matter after all. It is still a great competition with some great entries among winners. Just accept the fact that there were better MATs out there than some of examples in top 20. I don't like the fact that in many cases (I've spend several minutes to look through their Artstation pages) participants (some of them being well-known professionals) openly wrote that they've spent "a couple of hours" to create MAT. So they did it just for fun. I can imagine their reactions when they have found out that they are among winners)))) I know that sometimes being minimalistic is the key, but for sure there were better minimalistic entries also with much more care and love put into. Anyway...
In the end I want to thank Allegorithmic for one thing I've personally never seen before in any competition. The fact that you've decided to expand the list up to 20 entries because of quantity and quality of submissions is beyond everything. It was such an unexpected and welcomed surprise that everything else is a minor thing compared to it. Thank you once again! It was an incredible decision.

[litote]

Some remarkable entries. I learnt a lot about SP through this competition and my eyes have been opened to the possibilities of SP.

I was puzzled by the judges' choices for some of the winners. Many demonstrate painstaking hand-painting, which might just as well have been done in Photoshop, rather than skillfully demonstrating the whole purpose of the software -- to create PBR materials for faking depth effects, faux geometry, luminance, opacity, reflectivity, metal surfaces, procedural textures, edge wear, etc.

Some of the winning entries looked liked they had been knocked out in a couple of hours using none of these techniques, slapping on just a few simple stock materials and also had uninspired concepts. Others obviousy deserved to be higher in the list of winners. I was expecting a degree of subjectivity, but these judges left me scratching my head. 

A few suggestions on organising future competitions:
(1) Make the guidelines more clear. I noticed that many people had to ask in the forum for clarification on what constituted a "default material", as was stipulated in the guidelines. Apparently this did not refer specifically to those substances that come default with SP. Perhaps that accounts for the dull simplicity of some of the winners.
(2) Base the criteria for winning entries on how they can demonstrate the clever application of SP for the purpose it was designed, rather than just picking pretty artwork based on subjectivity. At the very least, indicate that these are not criteria you are seeking to see demonstrated; this is going to be the natural assumption of entrants in any SP competition.
(3) Allow entrants to submit a main IRay render in a pose at whatever angle they choose so they can show it off best, rather than insisting it be directly face on. I notice you don't even use this pose, anyway, for many of the images you posted on the winners page. While you did permit a secondary render to be submitted, it wasn't clear why. I would guess many entrants would have just attached low quality viewport snapshots. The angle of view is critical for normal maps/faux depth effects, for example.
(4) Make a decision on the winners by the deadline you set for the announcement -- this is simply being professional. Realistically, 1,200 entries is not a number you should not have anticipated. Personally, I was surprised there were so few entries.
(5) If you can't stick to your deadline, as you expected all entrants to do, at least post an update on the main competition page, rather than bury it somewhere in the forum.

Final grades:
- Some of the winning entries: A+
- Software engineers at Allegorithmic: A+
- Judges and organisers of the competition: D- (must try harder). 

[Jeremie Noguer]

I'll just answer a few of these points.

1. I agree we should have made the guidelines more explicit, especially since this contest attracted a lot of newcomers who didn't have previous experience with Substance Painter or 3D in general.

2. This was an art contest, and in absence of specific criteria, one should expect the final result is what counts, especially since we didn't make the creation of a WIP thread or submitting the project files mandatory, we would have no way of assessing the workflow of each entry.

3. I agree that was a limitation that was likely too restrictive since a lot of entries had very cool details on the back of their characters.

4/5. Our largest contest ever before this one had "only" attracted about 400 participants, so we could hardly have anticipated 1200 entries. As soon as the contest was over and we saw the amount of entries, we changed the result date and the new date (May 20th) was displayed in full screen on our homepage.

Finally as with any art contest, the jury choices can seem strange or unjust to some, but the members of the jury, being artists themselves, all have their own different sensibility and all artists should understand and respect that.

That being said, thank you for the feedback and we definitely learned a lot form this contest and will try to improve the experience for the next one

[ninsix]

Part of the confusion, or rather misinformation includes this from the rules thread:

"You can use any texture or alpha, you just can't resculpt the whole object in ZBrush and bring that as a normal bake. The limit of what you can and cannot do is pretty blurry but the main point is: the creative process has to happen mainly in Painter." -Jeremie

"Sculpting of the mesh in an external tool is not recommended. The jury wants to see the creative process happen in Substance Painter, not in ZBrush." -Jeremie

If the creative process happens mostly in say Photoshop, how is then that any different than if it were in zbrush? Both are generating "texture maps" right? 

Part of the problem is that if the "creative process" is being done in photoshop (hand painted textures for example), its not really happening in Painter. With the same logic applied, zbrush really wouldn't be much different (from photoshop) in that its just an external application which the texture maps can be generated via "painting" topology rather than pixels.

Its hard to believe that the Jury really cares about where the creative process happens, since as long as they like it, it will win at the end of the day. Thus for future reference its probably worth it to just ignore anything that suggest the grading process involves how much the primary application is used as part of creative process. So far it doesn't seem to matter.

Some artist may limit themselves more than others based on the belief that how much an application is used for the creative process matters more in the grading process, even to the point of staying almost entirely in Painter, which in turn is actually giving them a disadvantage.

On that note, my post is hopefully read as a mixture of criticism and feedback. Nothing personal against Jeremie or those on the Jury. Its a learning process after all.