Here is my entry for Blender Artists Weekend Challenge 210 (“war machine” theme):
Contrast was tweaked in post. This project made use of part of my skeleton from my Faustus project. Particle effects were used for smoke from some of the turrets.
Thank you for viewing my work,
RobertT
That is really really cool!!! The level of detail is killing me! How long did it take you to make thaT?
No crits from me… just awsome! 
That’s quite an interpretation of the theme. Interesting and well executed as always…and done in record time, again!
My only crit is that there is too much, composition wise, on the skeleton in the center. It doesn’t stand out from the bright white area behind it. We should see the skull a bit better too because the bright center area draws the eye away from it.
Thumbs up!
Edeehem
Hmm… I sorta agree with Edeehem, the skeleton is a bit too crowded by other things. I think the level of detail is awesome, and the materials seem just right for the objects. Well Done!
Wow, what detail, what execution. This is quite a good image no argument there.
Okay, WTF? How long does it take you to make these things? Great work
great use of shapes.
you need to be carefull how you use your composition, the bullets seem too static, perhaps you should try giving them more movent by hiligting them more and leave a light trail with repetition. my most favorite part is the smoking muzzels, they project a lot of attitude. with that there seems to be a heavy contrast with the upper region that draws in and creates too strong of a clash, i bet if you bring the bullets out more it could bring it all together more.
-my 2 cents,
George.
Thank you for the nice responses 
As I promised someone when PM’d concerning the smoke for this project, I am posting the particle settings below as an attached image.
RobertT
What kind of comp do you have?
As ive got a 2.8 proccessor 1024 megs of ram and a 256 mb vid card and my comp slows crazily over about 50000 faces and gets too glitchy and slow to do anything over 75 000. Yet you can do things with 1.6 milion faces 
Nice picture, I like the way it looks, I just want to know why the skeleton has a skull in his crotch…
Hc00: My PC is a non-HT Pentium IV, 2.4ghz, with 1GB RAM . I recently upgraded to an NVIDIA 5200 card with 256MB and that made a massive difference in terms of 3D view redrawing speed. Before that I was using an old NVIDIA card (420) with 64MB RAM, which was way overtaxed by all the high-poly projects I’ve worked on these past few years (including my “Great Sea Race” for the F1 competition). By using layers and deactivating subsurf for the 3D view (but leaving it active for render) I am able to minimize lag as a project progresses. Sometimes I push too hard though and my computer freezes up. My laptop, which has 2GB, suffers less from VM-swapping, but even where that has a Go-6800/256MB card, my busier projects often bring that to a near halt. Maybe in the next year or two I will move to a more capable system, preferably 4 or 8 cores just for the potential multithreaded rendertime gains there, and a better GPU for improved realtime response. There are many other ways of handling potential gigapoly projects though, including rendering out individual items or layers and then compositing in Blender or in post. In my experience, I’ve found that, while there are easily reached technical limits for the computer, there are usually workarounds to be found and different modeling/texturing strategies (such as normal mapping) to be tried to enable us to make far more complex works while maintaining a workable workspace and optimal geometry. About the skulls (there’s more than one in the lower half of the picture): they are actually out a bit in front of the larger skeleton, caught in the teeth of the machine, which has consumed countless ones before. There were more yet, but for compositional purpose I went with this final arrangement.
RobertT
Oh how I wish I could believe or understand that!
Again one point if you can say what show that quotes from.
Nah thanks will be copying this to a .txt so when I understand what it means I can implement it lol.
