So, here it is. I know the lighting doesn’t exactly fit the background, but I was tweaking the thing for hours and couldn’t get it right, yet I was afraid how long it would take to render, so I pretty much gave up. However I’m quite alright with the results.
The background is a photograph I found on the net.
The fountain with the water and the bird are cg.
/me claps hands at the pretty thing.
The water looks really gorgeous. The bottom of the fountain looks like porcelain or some other slippery stuff, whereas the top part is more rough, but maybe that was what you were after. 
(And that bird’s obviousely been living of McDonald’s garbage bins… 
)
Hey, it was supposed to be porcelain 
Actually the whole fountain is one mesh with one material
Looks gorgeous! I think it will get my vote! Maybe you could use a background picture with a higher resolution? It looks kinda blocky…
Noooo! No way, I’m rerendering this!
Erufailon that is such a cool design. Excellent realization of an imaginative concept. The background may be a little pixellated but it’s the main model that counts 
Good luck in the weekend challenge
RobertT
wow :o
can u show me how u did the water in the fountain??? please…u can send it to my e-mail if u like [email protected]
thats really good, and i like the bird…looks very thirsty, the background fits the fountain well…looks almost realistic.
PS: i have only just noticed it…or didn’t to be precise…does the bird have a tail??? cus i can’t see it, its looks its tailess…poor thing some cat must of bitten it off
Looking good, man. I still need to do the metaball thing, or make another attempt at the particle method. Maybe I can use your pic for refference when doing my metaballs, hehehe! :Z
wow i love the fountain model…looks great…though i had to look twice to figure out that the bird was a bird 
you got my vote dude
I reckon the background spoils the overall picture to be honest. I think it would look better without a background.
bird:
well, it’s a young bird, so it’s feathers are not fully developed yet (thus has no tail) or a bird which just got out of the water, so the feather’s don’t follow it’s body
Anyway it was a request from my gf, and I thought it was a nice touch to the fountain as well.
Background:
Originaly I was going to map a panoramic picture around the fountain. It looked sooo coool, but couldn’t render it with raytracing or even shadows, because after 9 hours of rendering it hasn’t even started yet, so I had to give up on that idea. The present background is unfortunately just a substitute, which is needed, because even though the model does look better without one, the water doesn’t have anything to reflect or refract and doesn’t look nearly as good.
The water:
simple meshes, only the surface is done form a simple plane, subdivided and shaped by hand (even the turbulence and the waves). I added simply spheres as bubbles and splashing water, placed by hand. THe flowing water are meshes as well. The one flowing from the dragon’s mouth is a CurveCircle extruded along a path, the other one is a subsurfed plane extruded by hand. The material has a little reflection, 1.33 ior refraction, with lot’s of fresnel, and completely see through. It has a bit of stucci bumpmap mapped so it follows the direction of the flow. Done by experimental tweaking.
Thanx for the replys.
I blurred the background. Hope it’s better this way.
what an pretty fountain on a front of a extremely ugly background. If I’d be you I’d go and change the whole thing in something more higer resolution.
Oh, and the lights on the fountain do not fit on the lights of the background.
No time left, and read the first post :-?
Here is the original one, do you think this was better?
Actually I do like the original better: the fountains light scheme fits better on that nonblurred background.
On the blurred scene fountain jumps out far too dark.
Ok, I go with the original then
It’s so hard to decide which is better after looking at it for a long time and tweaking small things, but I guess you’re right.
O, and it takes more then 2 hours to render on this resolution with this kind of antialiasing, so I can’t just test different settings unfortunately all that easily 
Find someone with a fast computer who will render it for you…
Woah! The fountain rocks! The water is so… well… watery! You need a higher resolution background for that high rez render. It’s amazing! /me votes for you
sigh… I’m dissapointed in myself. I can’t find enough to critisize.
Yafray render with global photonlights straight from blender, no editing of the xml whatsoever.
All the lightsources are outside.
I know the columns shouldn’t be the same material as the fountain, but I only realised that after it was done, and I’m not planning on going back