20 Brush Challenge Voting: VISUALS

it was a hard choice between a few different themes, but i think campaignjunkie won it out with his vibrancy and color palette.

I think everyone deserves some feedback for their effort so I'm gonna try and go through all of the levels and share my thoughts for each voting category. I think it'd be great to get more discussion going on about the entries, so share your thoughts people!

Siteless265 by callguinness

I love the screenshots of this one, but I think that the charm it has from a distance doesn't hold up as well in-game. The optical illusion from the black-faced brushes certainly works as intended, which can occasionally give a nice surprise, but from most angles while playing it just means you can't see the form or structure of the level and instead see...well, black It DOES look great from far out angles though, and it's certainly bold up close, so on the whole it's a good entry visually.

20b_Barragan by CampaignJunkie

MY VOTE

I love how this looks. I just *want* to be there, which is always a lovely feeling to have about a level. The ambience is right on the money; it feels warm, inviting, intoxicatingly colourful. The textures look gorgeous, the alpha'd tree brings in probably the only truly soft edged visual in the entire contest, the lighting works beautifully... Suffice to say, this got my vote for visuals, despite some tough competition!

Unnamed by Dmx6

Needed a bit more subtlety I'd say. Some odd texture combinations (e.g. the corner blocks are badly worn concrete on top, metal grating on the ramp edge, and intricate panelling on the sides, which just looks incoherent and implausible), and the lighting (specifically the red spots at the corners) was a bit too garish. Oddly, a touch that I think looked really nice was one that most people would never see - the underside! When viewed from underneath with the starry space sky in the background, the sharp form of the level, the dark texture used, the white stripe outlining the silhouette, the little highlight near the "peak"...all of that makes it look a really bold and imposing sight.

Shard by JamesKing3D

I think there was something wrong with version uploaded (or it clashes with the January build of UDK?), as I was getting a "lighting needs to be rebuilt" error, had missing textures, and in places had faces that just didn't seem to be getting rendered at all. On that rear path behind the main structure itself I could just run along a totally invisible brush, for example. So it's hard to judge based on what was in-game alone, but between it and the screenshots I liked it a lot. Everything about it feels "sharp". The textures with the streaks through them are definitely not pleasant to look at, being so noisy and flickering reflections at you as you move around, but it *shouldn't be* pleasant; it's harsh and unwelcoming and that fits the design of the level. It's eye-catching, bold, and different. I like it.

VR20 by killertomato

I don't have CSS installed at the moment so couldn't check it out in-game, but I did take a look at the VMTs and was pleased to see you'd given a scrolling material proxy to the "sky" for authenticity It looks pretty faithful to the MGS VR missions, though it does lack the inner glow around the edges of walkable areas, which is understandable given the contest restrictions but would have been nice to see (particularly if it pulsed using material proxies) and probably could have been done using a single brush as a func_illusionary covering the entire floorplan with a bespoke texture stretched across it.

Don't Mess With Hexas by KungFuSquirrel

Well it's very simplistic, but it's still nice to look at. Good lighting that suits the well-chosen sky. Nice textures that look believable as the material in which some sort of monolith structure like this could be sculpted. The hex's are well place to give a nice, full screenshot. So...yeah, simple, but nice.

DM_20B by Leon Kilean

There's some really cool stuff going on here that the screenshots really can't do justice to. At first when I saw the latest screens I thought the weird smiley graphic and things had spoiled it, but the animation on it and on the fish tank panels indoors are really awesome. The colour changing glows add a lot of interest too, and even the music - which again, I was sceptical about - adds to its charm. I was less keen on the movement of some of the brushes, which I thought was going to be more limited than it turned out to be and ultimately seemed a bit OTT for my liking. Sometimes the movement seemed to occur at odd or clashing times (particularly involving the sliding ramp) which looked unnatural and messy. On the whole though a very unique level, good work!

Ludonarrative Dissonance by Lunaran

I wish I could see it in-game, as from the screenshot you can see little hints of how cool the hand drawn textures are but I feel you could appreciate them so much more in engine. It genuinely does look like papercraft though, which gives it a neat and distinctive theme. The forms of the brushes look good, lending it an almost terrain-esque look as if it were carved into a cliff face or something. In short - it looks really nice. Low-impact and subtle rather than "whoa", but definitely nice.

Satmush by quazilin1

It looks pretty cool for the tech; solid texture choices that look good together, and overall it has a nice sense of place against that space background. I don't much like the 90 degree corners on the ramps - it looks at odds with the rest of the level and having them just hovering unsupported like that looks a bit awkward. Otherwise no real grips though.

dm_reflex_contest3 by ReFlex

Simple, but quite nice looking. I like the texture use - they all sit well together and look good in your lighting setup, though I feel it might have looked a bit more varied if you'd used a different texture on the "side" walls to the corner columns. I also think it might have been nice if the side walls were shorter than the full height of the corner columns, and once those superceded the height of the walls they were shown as full octagons rising higher. Maybe have the side walls curve or lean outward after a certain height... Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud the direction I'd probably have gone with it I like what's there, but I feel you could have pushed it a bit further.

InCubed by sarge mat

I wasn't keen on the visuals of this one. It's too blocky, which I suppose most 20 brush maps are to some extent or another, but here the brushes are mostly simple boxes which doesn't lead to a visually impressive end product. The texture set wasn't particularly to my liking either, and the mostly flat lighting didn't bring out the best atmosphere from them. For some reason it's the ceiling that particularly turned me off visually. The brown texture tiling a dozen times off into the distance without anything breaking it up didn't look great, and because it so often makes up a big portion of the screen in a map like this, I feel you'd have been better opening up the top of the level to the skybox instead.

Miniature Sun Observatory by sentura

First of all I should point out that on running this one in-game it was missing the skybox and "mini sun" materials, so that kinda limits what I can make of the overall visual appeal. Despite that, I think that seeing it in-game made me like it more than in the screenshots. The texture choices looked pretty good and felt right for the theme, and the way some of the ramps and platforms were angled gave it a bit more visual interest than I had anticipated.

VCTF-Glitch by skysilcox

I was sure this was gonna be my favourite visually when it was in the WIP thread, but in the end it was *just* nudged out by Barragan. It is lovely though. I love the limited yet potent use of colour. The little dots on the white flooring I hadn't really noticed in screenshots, but in-game they look great and are a nice way of indicating the base you're in without taking away from that fresh white scheme you've got going on. The towering columns going into the sky are so simple yet so effective, and though the arch things that the flags are on are a bit confusingly glitchy looking and hard to really get your head around, the way it segments the colour and introduces that little splash of green really looks great. All round good job with very little to criticise visually.

Dolphin by SNDXR

It's a nice idea this one, but doesn't really feel like it's finished yet. I know you were prohibited from using a 3D skybox, for instance, but a good way to improve the scene would have been to use a cylindrical skybox extending much further out than this one, and then using a fog controller to fade the edges of the water into the skybox. That alone would have made a big difference to the appearance. Secondly, the boat itself looks awkwardly shaped, with too much mass in the rear compared to the front. The white section with windows also feels underused. If that section had been much taller and more developed it probably would have made it feel a lot more believable as a ship. Finally, I'm not sure what the texture is on that vertical brush right at the back of the boat - kinda looks like a starry sky or something? Hard to interpret what that is from the screenshots alone.

Unnamed by Term!nator525

Unfortunately I couldn't get this to run - it kept crashed HL2DM to desktop when I tried to run it. I have the texture pack you mentioned but maybe not in exactly the same folder structure? You should probably include any custom textures used in your zip (or embedded in the BSP) to ensure people don't have issues. Not that I'm 100% sure that is what is causing the problem. Aaaanyway, judging from the screenshots alone this one looks like a really neat idea that is really pushing it to be done justice in just 20 brushes. It's hugely ambitious, so you deserve credit, but from the screenshots it appears a bit messy, curiously textured, and lit with the bare minimum effort. Still makes for an impressive first impression on glimpsing the screenshots though, and even without any brushwork changes, a bit more care on the texturing and lighting could really perk this up.

DM-Crystal by Vilham

I really like the look of this. The simple texture works really nicely with your varied lighting, and it looks very otherworldly yet somehow pleasant at the same time.

ctf_20cubes by WhiteDevil

Everything looks really nice, and the huge boxes jutting in at unorthodox angles works a treat. Nitpicking: I'd say the red and blue giant box textures are perhaps a bit too saturated and dark, to the point they look like a totally different and inconsistent marble type texture until you really get up close and realise it's just a colour variant of the normal one. Oh and I think the bloom is too high, as everything was a bit overly glowy. But as I said; nitpicking On the whole it looks lovely!

Outline by Zyndrome

Not too much to say when a map is made out of 2 colours and a single shape, but it achieves what it sets out to

well i used cs:s as game, so it only crashes cause of the lack of the right entities (I guess)

Hies!

Congrats on the contest. No one told me about this place (evil glaring looks at Lunaran and KungFuSquirrel).

Quote from Obsidian

Hies!Congrats on the contest. No one told me about this place (evil glaring looks at Lunaran and KungFuSquirrel).

everyone knows about mapcore!

almost didn't recognize you without black robert downey jr under your name