Real-time Design Challenge: Medieval Fantasy

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a tiny kingdom hidden away in the mountains. And while its people were happy and led good lives, in the back of their minds there was always the worry about what might be at the other side of the mountains…

Update: the winners have been announced!

Welcome to our new community contest! We’ll be going back to medieval times to explore castles, medieval towns, knights, and perhaps… dragons? Anything is possible in this Medieval Fantasy!

This is a contest with a twist: we’ve teamed up with the amazing people of Mozilla, who are working hard on their A-Frame WebVR platform – a web framework for building interactive virtual reality experiences.

We’re combining the power of our two communities to create amazing WebVR scenes. In this contest, you, the Sketchfab community will create gorgeous real-time assets. The Mozilla A-Frame community can then use them in their projects and showcases.

Your task

Create a set of real-time assets in a medieval theme that can be combined with assets from other participants. You’re free to choose your focus, for example you could build modular assets for a castle environment, props to be used in your world, characters, weapons, animals etc. Display your own building assets in a final presentation piece.

Thanks to Mozilla, we’re able to offer the biggest prize pot you’ve seen on Sketchfab to date! You can win a VR-ready laptop (a real powerhouse: 32GB, GTX1070 card – you’ll love it!), VR headsets, a Wacom tablet and much more. The first 100 participants to open a ‘Work in Progress’ topic on our contest forum will also receive an exclusive Mozilla/Sketchfab Medieval Fantasy Cardboard viewer!

So we’re throwing down the gauntlet: do you have what it takes to create a Medieval Fantasy?

Visual style

As the goal of this contest is to create assets for the Mozilla A-Frame community, we want to make sure all building blocks will have the same visual style that ‘works together’. So we’ve put together a visual style guide that should to stick to. When in doubt ask us for guidance on the contest forum (see under ‘How to participate’).

Elements you should pay special attention to are the character and style of the assets and the color palette.

Prizes

Now that we’ve partnered up with Mozilla, our prize pot is better than ever (thanks guys!):

Grand prize: Complete VR Set – VR-Ready Laptop + Oculus Rift (value of over $3000!)

Our first prize includes everything you need to get started with VR: an MSI GE63VR Raider-001 VR-Ready laptop, and an Oculus Rift VR Headset with 2 Touch controllers and 2 Sensors. With an i7-7700HQ processor, a GTX 1070 video card and 32GB of RAM this beast will also be an excellent workstation for all your 3D modeling and rendering! You’ll also receive a super cute Firefox plush toy, and your choice of a Sketchfab or Mozilla hoodie + T-shirt.

Finally, we’ll add 12 months of Sketchfab PRO to your account!

2nd prize: Oculus Rift VR Headset (total value of over $700)

Our second prize winner will receive a complete Oculus Rift VR set, consisting of a headset, 2 Touch controllers and 2 Sensors. Just plug it in to your workstation and you’re ready to enter VR! You’ll also receive a super cute Firefox plush toy, and your choice of a Sketchfab or Mozilla hoodie + T-shirt.

We’ll also add 6 months of Sketchfab PRO to your account.

3rd prize: Wacom Intuos Pro Tablet (total value of over $250)

Our third prize winner gets a fabulous medium-sized Wacom Intuos PRO tablet that will surely make your 3D design work more comfortable. You’ll also receive a super cute Firefox plush toy, and your choice of a Sketchfab or Mozilla T-shirt. We’re adding 3 months of Sketchfab PRO to your account.

Runners up

10 runners will receive a collection of Sketchfab and Mozilla swag – like T-shirts, hoodies, and stickers.

Free Medieval Fantasies Cardboards!

On top of this, the first 100 participants will receive a Medieval Fantasies Cardboard. To qualify, start a ‘Work in Progress’ topic in the Medieval Fantasy contest forum (see below). Once you’ve posted your first substantial update we’ll contact you for your details.

Judges

		Liz Edwards is a VR artist and Tilt Brush Artist in Residence.
		Elliott Mitchell, Co-Founder of Vermont Digital Arts, is a VR / AR artist and developer based in Vermont and Boston, MA. Besides just launching a top 10 ranking word game, Waggle Words AR, on the App Store, Elliott has worked on groundbreaking VR projects such as Bjork Digital (River Studio), Styles and Customs of the 2020’s (Scatter) and the Leviathan Project (WONDROS).
		Joshua Marinacci – O’Reilly author, UX wonk, and recovering engineer; Josh is a senior developer evangelist at Mozilla, working on Mixed Reality for the Web.
		Christopher Van Wiemeersch got his start in making sites for film companies and indie startups. At Mozilla, he now designs for developers making web apps, browser extensions, and Virtual Reality.

How to participate

To enter this contest, create a scene in the described visual style of Kevin Pauly’s work and theme. Build as many reusable components for it as you can. (For example: if you create a castle scene, provide blocks for walls, floors, doors etc.).

Start your own topic in the Medieval Fantasy contest forum to document your work in progress. When in doubt about the visual style etc, feel free to ask us for feedback on your entry. We’ll also be posting contest updates on this forum.

Publish the fully composed scene that leverages all your assets and tag it with #MedievalFantasyScene.

Publish each asset as a downloadable file (remember, the Mozilla people are going to pick and choose from our contest’s results for their own contest later this year). Make them available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution license (“CC-BY”), and tag with #MedievalFantasyAssets.

The submission deadline is Wednesday, November 1 (23:59 New York time – EST)

Example of publishing the individual assets

Technical requirements

We want to ensure that the assets of this contest can be combined into scenes that perform well for mobile WebVR. For this reason, you need to be mindful of the following requirements:

Performance considerations

• For individual assets, aim for a 2k polygon budget and 512×512 texture maps (if you really need larger texture maps, be sure to always use ‘power of two’ sizes like 1024×1024 etc).
• The total polygon budget for the assembled scene is 50k.
• Try to keep the number of objects small as possible. You could merge static meshes and use a unique texture for all of them. For example if modelling a house, you will have a whole mesh and a texture for the structure itself and then independent meshes for movable objects like chairs, tables and so on.
• Use static lighting and bake ambient occlusion and lightmaps if needed for your scene.

Other requirements

• Use a PBR metalness workflow to set up your materials.
• For scale, assume 1 unit = 1 meter in VR.
• Sound and animation are optional. If you use sound, please include all .mp3 files in your original upload as it will not be in the GLTF download.
• Make sure your assembled scene is easy to navigate using teleportation.

Terms and Conditions

• No purchase necessary.
• By entering this competition, entrants will be deemed to have accepted and agreed to the conditions.
• This is a contest for individuals, no teams.
• No alternative prizes available. The prize draw is not open to Sketchfab and Mozilla employees or their families.
• No ripping of models from anywhere on the Internet, all entries must be original works.
• The judges’ decision are final – in case of dispute, no correspondence will be entered into.
• Winning entries will be documented and may be used for promotional purposes.
• Contestants models must be uploaded to Sketchfab and tagged #MedievalFantasyScene and #MedievalFantasyAssets to be considered.
• Winners retain all Intellectual Property as per Sketchfab standard Terms and Conditions.
• Winners and winning entries may be required to take part in any publicity resulting from this competition.
• The winners will be contacted by Friday, November 10.
• Promoter: Sketchfab Inc, 1123 Broadway, Suite 501, New York, NY 10010, USA.