With the conclusion of “The Vineyard Challenge,” Ronen Bekerman’s sixth large-scale architectural visualization competition, we are thrilled to congratulate the winners who stood out amongst more than 240 entries from all over the world.
Exclusively developed in Unreal Engine 4, the winning projects were nothing short of astounding in their showcases of Unreal Engine 4’s high-end capabilities.
Over the course of three months the challenge, sponsored by Epic Games and NVIDIA, saw both individuals and teams realizing their creative vision inside of Unreal by blending the classic medium of architectural visualization with the new possibilities of real-time rendering and interactivity.
The competition drew an incredibly broad spectrum of entrants, from working visualization professionals, to game developers, armchair hobbyists, and students, and what’s exciting is to see that variety also reflected in the composition of the winners. Each entrant had their own area of focus, from design intent, to rendering fidelity, to an eye for tools, pipeline, and the exploration of what it means to be rendered in real time.
The winners beautifully demonstrated all of these skills and also created a compelling narrative with music, editing, and visual storytelling to sell the mood and atmosphere of the virtual spaces.
Alongside celebrating the winners, Epic is also excited about the deep learning resource that has been made available as an outcome of the challenge, as each of the entrants kept a work in progress forum thread throughout the contest, with members of the community at ronenbekerman.com and unrealengine.com sharing advice, learnings, and technical solutions.
Those threads are now permanently archived for future learnings:
http://forums.ronenbekerman.com/forumdisplay.php?f=39
Without further ado, our winners. Thank you to everyone who participated!
TEAM – Grand Prize / Factory Fifteen, United Kingdom
$25,000 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X
TEAM – Runner Up / Work, South Africa
$7,500 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X
SOLO – Grand Prize / Rostislav Nikolaev, Russia
$12,500 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X
SOLO – Runner Up / Alex Leiva, Australia
$3,500 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X
Honorable Mention / Sergey & Noel, Spain
$3,500 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti
Best Interactivity / 133, USA
$2,000 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti
Best use of Unreal / Victor Vazquez Gonzalez, Spain
$2,000 Cash Prize + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti
Epic funded all cash prizes, and NVIDIA graciously donated all hardware prizes.