First and foremost, my vote goes to
#5
Will give feedback for all of them (including mine so it doesn't become too obvious, but I'll be honest to myself so nobody thinks I'm self-advertising). I'll have the destructive feedback thrown right at your face first, and then give you a hug with the constructive one
(or maybe not). Please don't hate me, it's for your own good
(or maybe not).
Also, I got gradually more tired as I wrote these, so the first ones may be more in-depth. My bad for that.
Also, they are just my weird oppinion from my weird point-of-view. Keep that in mind.
#1 doesn't quite get there, the render has white artifacts around it and the text doesn't match the main theme and colors. It's also a jpg, so compression artifacts everywhere. The artist seems to have a good sense of depth though, would say the next step for improvement would be learning to manipulate color levels and balance, and playing around with blending modes to tidy up the colors. Also, png please. =p
#2 exagerates too much on the colors. The blue and red flares take away all the attention, hiding all the work with the composition of the image. Speaking of composition, it has a huge care for color and blending, the lighting directs the attention to the object's face in quite an elegant way, and the use of sharpening and blurrying is just on point. I would advise the artist to check his monitor color calibration, and keep in mind that too much color takes away from a theme, instead of reinforcing it, especially when dealing with complementary colors.
#3 looks a bit wonky. The colors are all over the place, the little flares have very heavy and distracting artifacts (seems like it originally had a black background and the artist just pick-selected the black color and hit delete, instead of blending it in), and the background looks like a wallpaper. Trying not to be too harsh, but it looks like three images thrown together with nothing else to it.
#4 has too many points of interest. The bright spots on the back and belly of the character and the one on the "x" confuses you as to where to look at first, and the clouds in the middle-top area compete too much with said spots, taking away from the contrast the character and lettering would have with the trees in the background. The pallete also seems a bit off. On the other hand, the electicity effect blends in really well, and the lettering really fits the theme. Overall it's a quite nifty composition.
#5 isn't showing up. An Ctrl+F5 and a bit of waiting solved it actually. The animation doesn't seem on point, would rather get rid of the wobbling effect, especially because of the gif compression. It also looks weird how it rotates, but there is no sense of depth. Maybe next time you should rotate it in C4D and only use AE to add the post effects? It seems like quite a care for the typographic kerning of the text took place here though, and I like how it imitates the Fortnite logo with a 3D feeling to it, but without looking like a copy of the style. The chromatic aberration somehow brings a fortnite-ish feeling to it. I'm voting on this one because it's the only one that doesn't go for the "text with render" thing and looks quite original while at it.
#6 looks like a troll entry, but I'm not sure. Maybe I'm missing an in-game joke here.
#7 looks like too much. There are too many details to look at, too many colors, and too much animation. The fire takes too much away from the theme. Observing each part separately, though, it's a nice piece of work. I like how the background is clearly separated from the rest, and how the character stands out. Just a bit more of work on the colors and a bit of care with the animations, and it would be way more nifty looking.
#9 seems like could use more of care with the composition. The transparent background doesn't go very well with the amount of objects. There is also too much small detail, maybe you could try using less and bigger renders, it seems that the size of the floor plane dictated the size of everything else. Would say the next step for improvement would be trying to direct the eye of the viewer to one specific spot, instead of scattering details around the entire work plane.
#10 lacks a bit of depth. It feels like a background image with all the renders on front, taking away from the perception that they are standing on the ground of said background, maybe due to the excess of drop shadows. The size of the characters also feel a bit out of place, killing the perspective. Some color work might be in order as well. It has quite a creative touch with the text though, and seems like the overall composition got quite some care from the artist.
Also, now that everyone hates me for criticising their work, I have a suggestion and figured this would be the place with most visibility for it, since all the participants will surely be reading this:
What if each entry had a small text from the artist explaining the composition (140 characters maybe?), plus a small spoiler tag containing all the original images/renders used in the entry? (this last part could be a mandatory rule btw)
This way people could judge the entries by the artists' effort, not just the final result. I believe this would be a huge step forward for this competition, as we would have a motivation to try and work hard to improve our work every time.
Right now it's very hard (for non-gfx people, mind you =p) to tell that some entries are just a bunch of images from the internet on top of one another with no composition care whatsoever, while some entries with visibly a huge care for color, blending and composition keep getting comments with generic-ish words like "dull", "washed out", etc.
I know that the main thing about this competition is judging the final result itself, but that's exactly what I'm questioning here. We could definitely make this more artistic-oriented, if that makes sense.
There is also the problem with very recent accounts with no quality posts on record troll voting, but let's not mention that.
(I honestly had this idea quite a few years ago, but refrained from posting it because it sounds like a butthurt-ish thing to say. Figured I would post it now since it seems SOTM lost the interest from people some months ago, and could really try some different things to bring more interest this time around)
