The Rubric

Would you fear meeting this in an arena?

• 1-3: harmless. A civilian, a scholar, an ornament.
• 4-6: armed and able, but nothing about it frightens you.
• 7-8: a genuine threat you would prepare for.
• 9-10: you would not take this fight.

Coherence, detail, anatomy/design holds up under scrutiny

• Competent is a 5. Every image you are shown was made by a capable model; clean rendering is the floor, not an achievement.
• Judge execution against what the design attempts. A simple design executed cleanly is not better crafted than an ambitious one executed cleanly; never reward a fighter for having fewer parts that could go wrong.
• Deduct for what fails under scrutiny: hands and joints, how armour attaches, how a weapon is actually held, material that changes its rules mid-object, detail that dissolves at the edges.
• 9-10: every part of the design could be explained by someone who built it.

Penalize the generic; reward a specific, ownable design

• 1-3: a familiar archetype and nothing more — knight, warrior, mage, rogue, samurai, barbarian — however well it is rendered.
• 4-6: a familiar archetype carrying one idea of its own.
• 9-10: you could describe it in one sentence and be recognised again.

Reads as a fighter, not a portrait, pin-up, or landscape

• This is a FLOOR, not a target. Anything that plainly reads as a combatant has met it and scores exactly 8.
• Do not award more for being conventional or familiar. A stock knight and a design you have never seen before, both plainly fighters, both score 8.
• Below 8 only for a real failure: a portrait bust, a pin-up pose, a landscape, an object, a figure that could not act.
• 9-10 only when the image alone makes clear HOW it fights.