In the spirit of helping people improve and what @CharlesWatson was bringing up, I’m going to critique everyone’s work and encourage others to do the same if they desire. All of you put hard work into these images and I think you deserve some feedback to help you along. My comments are by no means “correct”, they are just what I think of course. I used to participate in the IRTC (http://www.irtc.org) and one thing that was nice about that is that most of the images would get at least some feedback.
@brado: I think your image is excellent, definitely one of the best this round. I like how as you look into your image you see more things that you didn’t notice like the motion blur indicating knife juggling. The setting is correct, except maybe the curtain should have been red like it is in show biz, but that might have made the caterpillar disappear into the background.
@CharlesWatson: Great job on the scene. I know you took models from other places, but the idea your setup of the scene is good and I like the camera angle. I assume that you actually made the fluid simulation yourself, which is notable. Maybe giving the table or walls a more interesting texture would have helped.
@Cymoth: Its obvious that you put a lot of work into this one. The bridge itself looks very good for just a weekend. I’m not sure what a baby’s cradle is doing next to a chasm (is that what that is?). You probably could have left that and the birds out of the scene. I guess you’re trying to show more of a story here, like the person in the rocking chair was trying to get to the baby? Its good that you’re thinking about the why of the scene (too many people don’t, I didn’t have time for it in mine), but I think just crossing the bridge is enough.
@HELIX: Nice, I love Pink Floyd. I think it would have been more effective to make the hole in the wall just black though. I’m a bit confused about what is going on inside of it.
@Henryj: This one made me laugh, not because of the ring falling in, but I thought that the toilet seat looks huge and I think more than the ring runs the risk of falling in there. That aside, your textures, modeling and scene are good, although the toilet is probably too reflective, you could have probably put still water in the toilet to add more realism. Plus, there is a good porcelain texture on the http://www.blender-materials.org/ site that I’ve used several times.
@incomplete: Decent job done on shattering glass. You probably should have put it on a table or something, a simple background can make all the difference in adding realism and what looks like an attempt at making glass shatter becomes more like a picture of glass actually shattering. Too much detail is lost to the gray background.
@Levisarts: The house model is great. Maybe just putting it on flat land and show a black crack in the earth opening up underneath it would have been more effective. The textures you used and the seed like objects make it all look out of scale I think. I guess you didn’t have time to get back to it after you posted it initially.
@linuus: Good idea. You’re the romantic. 
The first thing I’d suggest is that your image seems to have lost quality in uploading. And this is good info for anyone. you should convert your image to JPEG first before uploading. Its obvious that the forum’s image conversion uses lower quality JPEG settings than you otherwise would. I think the limit for the board is 250K image size, so you should play with the JPEG quality settings on saving your image in your favorite image editor (I use Gimp) to get a good balance between looks and size. On small images like people usually post, I think most people could turn their quality up to 90 even to avoid artifacts almost entirely. I definitely wouldn’t go below 75.
@MatthiasSchmitz: Funny and appropriate for the subject. This is another image that could have benefited from having a floor texture, but be careful not to choose one that clashes with the card textures. Something other than gray. To me, a gray background implies that you didn’t set your scene anywhere and its just out in space, which doesn’t make sense. One the fan blades, did you make the blades and motion blur them or is that something else? I recently learned how to do motion blur in Blender. Its not hard and it adds a lot of realism on stuff like prop blades.
@Quandtum: Technically great, but I guess you really have to strech the imagination to understand why a robot would be carrying nuclear waste on a high wire. Some post-apocalyptic circus act? You did an excellent job on the scene though for just a weekend. One problem I have though is that you didn’t convert your image to JPEG or reduce the size in some way, an 800x800 image shouldn’t be 2.7MB, even in PNG format. I resaved it with PNG compression set to 9 and lost no quality, but the image is only 561K, so you can save a considerable amount of space, make your image load much faster, etc. I would recommend converting to JPEG though and setting the quality between 80 and 90. It looks like your image was saved with 16-bit color channels instead of 8-bit color channels. I can’t see the difference. Maybe your settings are just setup that way, something to consider.
@rarebit: Great image. The texture of the row boat looks a bit off. The ridges make it look less like wood I think. The texture of the sails maybe is a bit papery, but its not bad. I’m impressed that you could get so much done in a weekend as far as the modeling goes.
@Sam M: Good idea and the rendering quality looks nice. It looks like you used DOF instead of motion blur. I think it could look better if the ball looked more like it was moving towards the blocks.
@TWS Admin: Good, but what is this edge? A building? An elevator shaft? The hand is not quite finished and looks strange, perhaps just make a closed fist or something and call it a weekend. Every time I think about trying to make a person for my scene for one of these, I chicken out thinking I won’t have enough time. Good you have the courage to try.
@Wefyb: Heh, I don’t have a Playstation, but I hear about this whole debacle from my coworkers. I think you could have included some other element in your scene to bring up the current events, otherwise its just a recreation of the Playstation logo. Maybe just a backdrop image with question marks on it or something.
@xavvo: Excelente Amigo! I love images that imply more to them than is what is really there, like using the sombrero to indicate someone lying in the hammock without showing any part of a person model. The hammock itself is a bit blocky at the bottom, but is fine. I’m wondering how you bunched up the texture like that at the near end. Pretty cool. It looks like its not bunched up on the other end, but that’s hardly noticeable. The cactus is great and you make it all work by fraying the cable to indicate inevitability. The house could use more texture, but is fine for a weekend. I see that it does have some texture, but when shrinking the image to fit in my browser window it gets lost. I think this is the best one this round.
@RobertT: I’m not qualified to critique you. I guess the only thing I can say is that mostly your work is quite abstract and sometimes I can’t make the connection with how it relates. I’m kinda as puzzled about your scene as those question marks are.
Everyone is to be commended for their work here, don’t let voting results get you down, since everyone only has one vote, the results get lopsided. :spin:
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Just wanted to clarify. I cant take credit for the work i didnt do.
Again, thanks!
