Mandible said:
I wouldn't mind knowing a bit more about how you make your calculations for the scoring categories so that I can act accordingly next time.
I guess I assumed that performance, although important, would not receive equal weight as visuals when the items are specifically supposed to be one-offs for rulers that won't ever flood the battlefield. Did you assign any points for making custom lods instead of just automatically assigning them in openbrf (or not including them at all)?
And how do you calculate originality?
I don't mean to sound bitter or anything, and all of the winning entries are great, but I just don't quite understand how the decisions are arrived at and wouldn't really want to put the time into another entry without knowing how they are graded.
Congrats to all the winners! All three really do look wonderful.
It doesn't come up as bitter or complaining at all, I think it's good we have a discussion because the format is new and definetly will need a few runs to be established properly. We're bound to make some errors now and I hope we can fix it all before/if ever BL is out and we may have some bigger prize pools.
About the performance - SSH gave his idea of how he did it, but it's also a pretty good summation. Things he mentioned, but mostly stuff like texture sheet size for that particular model, geometry count(was that much necessary? could better technique could have saved some?) etc. I don't think I remember seeing LODs for your submission in the contest module, but I may be wrong. We'll see what jacob says on that one.
I'm not in the judging commitee, the judges were given their individual score sheets to fill - they could do so according to their own ratings from 1-10, following the category descriptions from the OP of this thread.
Most of the scores(without the judges being able to see each other's sheets) were strongly overlapping, if not in absolute values then it was in relative. To demonstrate what I mean(gonna make up figures):
If SSH gave submission A 9 points in performance, and submission B 7, usually looking at Artizan/Jacob's sheet the figures may have been submission A 7 points and B 5 points which in relative terms is the same. So in the end once all the judge points were added up there was a realistic picture of who was the overall winner. With that said, the more competitions the same judging comittee rates the better they'll get at accurately scoring stuff and I can provide more info on roughly what deserves what scores and precisely determine some criteria.
There were of course some differences mostly in the originality area based on how original people found an idea. Now to your originality rating question - there is no quantitative criteria used for this - it was just so that the submission was visually and erm 'in its idea' distinct. E.g. the scepter, the dagger with horse head, but even just basic swords received high ratings if they had exceptional ornaments and pommel guards like yours and Silen's. So once again, every judge had his own idea of original, but I assure you the scores overlapped largely like I mentioned above.
Wow, this post is an absolute mess. That's what a few days of little sleep gives you, though. Hope I answered most of the dillemas.