Hi , here is my first finished project ,I’m new to Blender (I started using blender 4 weeks ago) , so I used only Blender Internal for rendering
I gave you a 4 on this one. I really like the fish and the bowl, done very well, not really feeling the ground and background image. Also, I actually liked some of your earlier versions of the greenery inside the tank. Overall very nice peice though, and I love the fishes scales!!! Keep the projects coming. B)
I liked it but I’m sure you could have done better with the fish,
(i know i can’t)
I also gave you a 4. I like your fish but I think the glass material needs some more work on it, the bottom is far too transparent, add a fresnel effect or more reflection on this part.
Also the texture behind this are maybe too low-res, make them repeat maybe.
But the fish is well done.
I think the fish looks very good. Nice modeling there, and the bowl to.
I’m not to sure about the transparency of the bowl and reflections. It just doesnt look right.
I give it 3/4 more a 3 but nearly a 4 in my opinion. 
Love to see more of them
Perhaps a nicer environment? The low res wall textures really dull out the picture - 4.
The bowl looks better, better glass material. Background needs bump mapping or maybe displacment maping of rock. Wood needs some bumping.
Maybe try model with hdri useing yafray?
Why not try yafray? a good model, would look really good with caustics and GI.
Roy : there is only one problem , I’m a noooob , I started cg a month ago. I still don’t know how to use yafray , yable , and other advanced tools 
charding : the background and the wood have bump , but its with a noise , not with uv , hdri would be interesting , but I don’t know how %|
I’ll try to make a new stage … something more complicated 
do a search here in the forum for yafray, you’ll find a lot of useful info. The HDRI render is a little more work, you need to get ahold of a HDR Image to use. They can be downloaded though. I really like the new image with the multipule fish, looks much better, so do the rocks at the bottom. For a bump map for the wood, try using your same image as a nor map and turn up the settings, see what you get. Same for the wood flooring. Almost a 5!!!
I gave you a 4. The second render is much better. That’s a 4.2.
Refering to the 2nd image:
You got the renderg and the meshing perfect. I think some work on a better background and foreground is much needed. Those can ruin a picture if not applied correctly.
The lighting needs to be tweaked. I’d aim for less light sources and work with AO or Yafray to get the ambient light to make this thing stand out.
Fishies are nice, but corner of wall look too perfectly.
I know what you mean! I am still learning a bit about yafray! I have attached a file with a basic caustic setup, you dont need to use yable, Blender now exports direcly to yafray-great work guys!-
This was done very quickly, the main thing to tweak for your goldfish bowl would be the value of ior (index of refraction) I havent used global illumination in this, just concentrated on the caustics.
Oh- you will need to install yafray!
Roy
Very nice rendering for a start. I can’t help you with the yafray part, since i’m a blender newbie too. The second rendering looks much better. Bravo. Maybe you need some better environnement to make it look realistic (who puts a Goldfish bowl into a corner?)
4 for you, keep up the good work
Pretty nice, and very similar, to the one i saw on CGTalk.com, but the one on cgtalk was made in some cad program like Autocad, or something.
Roy : I tried to render the .blend file you gave me , but blender crashed , probably because my computer is not very powerfull (1,3ghz duron , 512 mb sd-ram , 64 mb gforce2) , using Blender Internal for rendering the attached image took me 2 hours %| , anyway thx
MassTA: I didn’t knew that someone else had a similar idea 
, I wanted to be original 
here is what I think will be the final render for this project :
Attachments
Hmmm, your pc is more powerfull than my laptop- renders in 20 seconds!
xp home 1gig processor 376M Ram.
Do you have yafray installed?- and what does it say in the blender console window.
Has anybody else had a problem using my caustic_bowl blend file?
I really think you should try to render in yafray, it gives very good results.
Roy : I found the problem , it had something to do with my blender , when I said that that the render took me 2 hours was talking about my image , I’ll try to render with yafray , but I don’t know how much it will take me