Thanks, I appreciate the honesty. Looking at it now it looks a bit flat. Perhaps external headlights weren’t the best idea either, the front quarter-panels look very plain!
Congrats to all the finalists, there were some really well executed and creative entries!
I like your car.
Could we have some videos about the cars that didn’t make the finals after the “main” videos?
Knowing why didn’t you like specific designs and what to improve on for future challenges would be nice.
We spent one full work month per person on this, unfortunately, commenting on “the others” would likely take as much time again and as such is not a viable thing for us to do. My best suggestion for this is that you watch the roundtable videos and see what we criticise in the finalists. There’s a ton of things to learn from that for your own designs. 
Cheers
i got two zero scores, did I cock up something when submitting, or were the cars that bad :D?
Thanks! That is good to know. So we’ll know all the results around the end of Christmas Holidays if I’m correct
Wow, -9! I’m so proud! Honestly, I thought that I did alright in this one with my late 50’s British-inspired ‘Checker GT’. If you have the time, please could you let me know what I did wrong?
So this was the car that got the +2:
And these two got the zeros:
Just speaking from personal preferences, the +2 entry just didn’t feel upscale enough - essentially, you created an Alfa Romeo Spider when we were looking for Ferrari Daytonas; the category was Luxury GT cars, after all. Also, some of the styling elements feel a bit out of proportion, or just out of place entirely; the hood vents are not to my taste at least. It’s well-photographed though, which must be said definitely helped.
The two zero entries again felt a little bit too down-market for the challenge, though I would say that personally I prefer the red one to the blue one as a package overall. The blue car is perhaps styled most appropriately of all of your entries, it has a really unfortunate choice of interior colour, plus the size of the seats really makes the car feel like a small sports car, rather than a GT car. I think also, the choice to leave the chrome strip running around the side windows with the roof removed was a bit odd; I get that it wasn’t particularly uncommon at the time, but a lot of the cars you do see that have that, you often see them photographed with the windows completely rolled down, so as to hide that detail.
Again, your entries are well-photographed here too, so credit where credit is due, though the way the shadows play over the blue cars is not particularly helpful.
Again, similar criticisms to OME’s entries; your car just doesn’t really feel upscale enough overall, and the inclusion of what appears to be full seating in the back (at least aesthetically) isn’t really in keeping with a GT car of the era, which were either pure two-seaters, or 2+2s; four full seats would have been exceptionally rare in a car like this.
The photo isn’t particularly well-composed; while the choice of the colour you’re presenting the car in is a good one (silver is always a safe and inoffensive choice for presenting a design), it just blends in too much with the road and doesn’t help the car “pop” very well. Also, with the implication of motion in the photograph, you want the car to be set more to the side where the motion originates; in this case, the car is moving down and to the right of the photo, so the car should be more to the left of the shot.
Thanks for taking the time for the detailed feedback, it’s appreciated. I guess my choice for restraint was a bad one, you live and you learn 
If I may make a suggestion for future competitions, a way to set a bit of context for your design when submitting might help everyone understand why some design choices were made.
Again, thanks for the reply!
Thanks for the detailed feedback, I appreciate that the competition has taken a lot of time and effort to organise. As the designer it can be hard to see the flaws, I feel kind of attached to this design!
I have to agree that it definitely doesn’t look luxury, and now you mention the rear seats they really stand out! I’m happy with the car, besides the seating, but accept that it doesn’t meet the breif - which I suppose is pretty important! Thanks again and I look forward to any future ODC’s that there may be!
I’m quite painfully aware that I’ve asked in every category so far but I really thought that my design for this one was quite good. As I said before, though, it can be difficult to see shortcomings as the creator of the design! If you have the time, please could you give me your feedback on the ‘Rochester Galaxy’?
I’m pretty pleased with ranking 6th in category C. I thought the “427” badge would hopefully justify the use of quad exhaust tips, but the judges did not agree lol. I agree with most of the critique. I took a lot of inspiration from the 1970’s era Lincoln Continentals and Cadillac Fleetwoods, which is why this leans toward being a ‘luxury’ car. I always take a lot away from hearing the judges’ opinions, and I’m excited to be a finalist. One day I’ll win one of these competitions!
From my perspective, there are a few things; first and foremost, it’s not photographed in a particularly flattering way. The choice of photo sphere is not great, with all the yellow in it reflecting into the chrome. Also, the pure front and pure rear doesn’t really give a great sense of what the car is all about; having two angles of the same car is a good idea, but you really want to go for quartering views whenever possible.
As for the design itself, I’m personally not a big fan of the front end design; too much chrome, not enough grille, and the proportions are a bit off. The rear suffers from the same issues as well, though not to the extent as the front. Also, the tail lights and lower bumper treatment are a bit odd. Finally, i’m not a big fan of the lettering on the car as it’s presented; it’s all far too large - a common complaint I see in countless Automation builds.
That said, the exterior colour palette you chose was quite nice.
I’m quite pleased to be in the finals of Category C, I guess 2.5 hours of placing small patches for that pseudo wood panelling did paid of. Sort of 
Also I wanted to address some of the criticisms or rather explain my way of thinking when I designed certain features:
That’s actually brings a question: will there ever be an actual wood material for us, faux-wood-panelling connoisseurs? xDAnd congratulations to debonair0806 as he dared to do what I didn’t - make a 50’s US barge and pulled it off exquisitely. Same goes for thecarlover’s entry. Always appreciate someone who can make a believable impression of 50’s American excess.
I also have a question about my Category A entry. Or rather a request to give me some heads up on how to improve my design. It is meant to be this weird… thing. I’m not sure whether it’s supposed French origin is obvious.
“Will there ever be an actual wood material for us, faux-wood-panelling connoisseurs?” I second that question. I would like to see an update where almost the entire focus is on broadening the design possibilities in Automation. Although the possibilities in the current game are already quite good, and it’s absolutely stunning to see what the community has done with it, I would love to see a massive expansion of bodies, fixtures, wheels, materials, etc. etc. And I would especially like to see an expansion on interior resources with more fixtures and more interior materials (wood, alcantara, various stitch cloth patterns. etc) Of course I realize all of this takes development time and resources, and may not be the focus of the developers in the near-term.
And this may be a bit ‘extra’ but it would be cool to see some of the interior elements like steering wheels, gauges, and warning lights working (at least in a rudimentary way) in BeamNG. I’ve already seen some impressive mods on that front from the workshop!
There are already mods that simulate wood, Alcantara and specialized metal textures - but it would be even better if they became vanilla options.
With regard to your Cat A entry, my first impression is that the lighting in this photograph really isn’t very good; everything looks kind of muddy and brown, with all the potentially bright colours (specifically the red and green of two of your cars) very muted. The bollard thing in the middle of the image is a bit weird too, and doesn’t help your composition much. And finally, you committed one of the cardinal sins of car photography, in that in the red car you turned the wheels in the opposite direction they should be! Always have the wheel face the viewer, not the tire.
Design-wise, it’s very plain, which works well in the front, but less so in the rear. Assuming this is rear-engined (based on the vents being concentrated in the rear), it should be a little bit busier back there.
Unfortunately, wood texturing is probably not going to make it into vanilla Automation, for the simple matter of it’s extremely difficult to work with - especially if you’re resizing parts (and thus having the texture expand or shink with the part - and there are intractable issues regarding scaling with wood. If you had a long, flat, rectangular shape then yes sure we could have a usable wood texture in-game. But since cars are none of those things, it’s always going to look really janky, what with texture size/shape/orientation mismatches.
Regarding wood materials I have a mod on the workshop that tries to simulate wood now with scaling and rotation, the only thing is you should always enable the “World Space Textures” option when using it.
Right now it doesn’t export to BeamNG and there’s probably a lot more I can do with making it look better but it’s there now. (Sorry wasn’t there before ODC)
