When we launched the first iteration of the Meet MAT texturing contest almost 3 years ago, the results far exceeded what we originally expected. The contest itself was a blast, not only in quality, but also in quantity: it rapidly became our most successful contest ever, ultimately reaching 1200 entries. But things didn’t stop there: MAT was so loved by the community that artists have been continuing to use it to showcase their work ever since then. MAT is just way cooler than a simple shader ball!

And so organizing Meet MAT 2 had a special flavor for the Substance team, and we couldn’t wait to see what the community would come up with. More importantly, Substance Painter has evolved a lot over the past 3 years! With new features like subsurface scattering, clear coating, a new brush system, and – of course – displacement, our expectations were high. And you didn’t disappoint: the quality of the entries was absolutely stunning, and the jury had a really hard time choosing the winners!

The first piece of good news is that we received even more entries than for Meet MAT 1, going over 1200! Another great point is that we had almost as many entries in the student category and in the general category; for the first Meet MAT contest, students only comprised a third of the total entries. Furthermore, the overall level of quality on display in the two categories was very close, which is an excellent indication of the great work that schools do teaching Substance.

But enough talking: let’s discover the winners!

General Category

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General Category – winner: Polar CliMATe Scientist, by William Ruhlig

General Category – second place: Sea Monkey, by Adam Scott

General Category – third place: Sea Sadness, by Ayagaure Sanchez

Student Category

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Student Category – winner: Meet KukerMat, by Nikolay Marinov

“Angel Kanchev” University of Ruse

Student Category – second place: Ancient Mat Armor, by Francesc Loyo Valls

LISAA Paris

Student Category – third place: SubMecha, by Florian Bobe

E-artsup

Special mention: best storytelling

A Tale to Illuminate the Backlands – Guilherme Marconi

When we saw what Guilherme came with to present his entry, we simply couldn’t believe it! He basically a full short movie! We had to do something. And we did: Guilherme, we are glad to award you with an Oculus Rift S VR headset!

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A huge congrats to the winners, to all the participants and our sponsors. We will be in touch with the winners to arrange the delivery of the prizes.

But wait, there’s more! We will announce the runners-up and the winners of the Schools category very soon, so stay tuned.

Once again, we would like to thank our partners for making this contest so awesome: