The awards are a false flag! Don't even worry about them! They're not even worth reading! The awards are a prop - a central focus to pull everybody together and get those memes pouring out! KEEP GOING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's an excuse to get the memes out!!!!!!!!! We will never have an audience like this again! Get out there!!!
A little history of this thing, in case anybody is considering creating something on this scale.
The NATO 7.62 rounds: had to download a pic of an actual round to get the proportions right. Then had to look up official color values for copper and brass to use on the casing and the round itself.
Keychain: forgetting that there's no way to get the ring into the plaque … hee hee … had to watch a tutorial on YT to make a spring, then adjust it to be a 2-wind key ring. The text was laid out, the font set, moved to the desired thickness, made "outline only," set to chrome material, duplicate in place, clear the bevel, set to "filled" text, and set the material. Then a long time in the post-render compositor to set a noise texture, stretch it out via vector coordinate mapping, and apply it as a displacement modifier to give the brushed metal look.
The Q map is simply the Q map image, textured over a flat plane.
The red pills were created with a UV sphere, cut in half, duplicated and flipped, filled with connector faces to give length, then the ends had to be scaled (distorted) along various axes one at a time to approximate the shape of a capsule as best I could.
The cell phone was brute force - traced out over a downloaded image of an iPhone X. The curves are really funky so it took forever. There are no buttons on the phone so it's hardly complete but it's passable. The screen is a mixed shader; glass and black diffuse 50/50.
The seal was downloaded, converted to black and white to use for a bump map (raised lettering) but it hasn't yet worked and I'm still fighting it.
The key took the longest of all. Just a lot of brute force work combining various shapes, stretching, pulling, etc. On this one the keying looks really bad because of the angle and the lighting but it's really very detailed. A glossy material at full white gives the reflective look of metal.
An HDRI image was used to provide lighting and to give the glass and metal something to reflect.
The flag: OMG what that took. Found a site with official, exact dimensions for the flag. Specifies EVERYTHING down to spacing between the stars. Created a circle of 5 points to get a pentagon; connected, split lines and filled as required to create the stars. Duplicate and space to get the final layout. Very meticulous. Build the rest of the flag from stretching basic rectangles to prescribed dimensions. Render the flag image; paste that image over a single plane that is then set up to be a cloth object. Blender has allowance for creating wind and cloth which makes for a waving flag. VERY realistic but very labor intensive. Created 250 frames; found one that I liked and rendered that as a still. Loaded THAT rendering in as a background image, traced around it and created an object from that tracing. Extruded to make a 3D object, set brass material, and pasted flag image over it. Pin is done.
Overall, about 16 hours went into this. It could and should have been much worse. I was lucky!
Thank you …. I just wanted to give people an idea of what has to go into something like this, so they don't waste a lot of time if they're not prepared to see it through.