Team Seattle Replica Competition: Top 10 Finalists Announced!
By: Landin Williams
First of all on behalf of Team Seattle, MSN Autos and the team here at Turn 10, I wanted to congratulate everyone who has submitted a design to the Team Seattle Replica Livery Competition. You all made my job extremely hard (seriously) as judging all of the entries was a challenge to say the least. We were all very impressed with how accurate all of these designs were, and as a result I spent hours examining comparison pictures from all of the contestants. So without further ado here are the top 10 finalists in the Team Seattle Replica Livery Contest! Congratulations!
Team Seattle Replica Competition Finalists:
- EvoBobber and Brad O Shizno
- DamnMe2006
- Seven7h_cOlumn
- J0QUE
- General FRANKZ
- mrSlush50
- n248
- TDR Mattystang and TDR Davinci
- xrulicr
- SPDN Timbo1977 and SPDN AintRite69
Congratulations to everyone who has made it to the finals! From here we will be judging not only the design but also the cars tuning and set-up. We will be checking out the cars up close and personal on our own consoles and sending some copies over to MSN Autos for further inspection (including a test drive from theTeam Seattle driver Chris Pennington!)
To view the top 10 liveries in detail check out the official discussion thread HERE.
This shot demonstrates how spacing and sizing is important in any replica. Livery By: Seven7h_cOlumn
So many of you may be wondering how we judged all of the submissions, considering how close they all are to the original, so here is a brief description of the methods used to judge all of the entires.
The first thing that I started doing was a simple side by side comparison of the real car and the submission. I checked for obvious things like the overall look of the car when compared to the original. This is where the quality and detail shown in the pictures was crucial. The first criteria used to help eliminate candidates were the inclusion of all the logos. If a major logo (sponsorship logo) was not included then essentially that entry was seen as an incomplete replica and lost major points. This does not include all of the smaller detail work that will be described later, but the major logos that when not included, made the car look very inaccurate.
Once I checked for all of the logo’s I then went into more detail. Are the logos in the correct spot? Are they sized properly and is the spacing between then accurate? Do the little squares next to the “Jackson Dead” logo match up to the real car? Did the user simply use in game fonts for certain logos or did they take the time to actually create the font used on the real car? These are the kinds of details that I was paying attention to upon my initial inspection.
This shot demonstrates the effort and precision required to make a replica.
Notice the curvature of the checkered flag! Livery by: EvoBobber
But of course this was not enough to fully determine who deserved a spot in the finals (you all did to be honest), so I had to go even further and look for more details. One of the major things I was looking for was the attention to detail shown. I noticed some contestants went as far as designing the small antennas and tow hooks that are present on the real car. These details did not determine if a car was selected or not, however seeing this level of detail was definitely something that was considered. Another major thing that I was paying attention to was the effort to curve the squares that make up the checkered flag on the side. Some users went as far as to actually curve the flag logo around the fender, much like the car in real life. The people that simply put squares on the side lost detail points. I also counted the number of squares in relation to the real car. Was there effort to replicate the spacing, sizing and curvature of the squares? This is where I was really impressed with some of the designs, where the checkered flag was really close to the original.
Attention to detail and creative interpretation.
Replica by: SPDN Timbo1977
So after analyzing all of these cars based on these criteria I began looking for any mistakes or errors in the overall look of the car. Did they choose rims that looked close to the ones on the real car? Did they paint the brake calipers red? Is the color of the car somewhat accurate when compared to the real thing? Now I know this can be a touchy subject, as some TV’s and monitors will display the same color differently. Some people may have thought they had the coloring right, but when shown on a different monitor it may look slightly off. This is why the color of the car was only taken into consideration if it was extremely different. Also I made sure to judge the cars on the other criteria first before make a color comparison.
So this is how I ended up with 10 finalists, which are the ones that you can view in the official thread HERE. Once again congratulations to everyone who entered as well as the finalists. We are very excited to get our hands on these designs and will be putting them under the microscope throughout the next few weeks!