===== From Revera@concentric.net: From one Newbe to another... I like your interpretation of the theme. I was hoping a few would have the courage to do a Kinght scene. You need some more smoothing on the dragon and on the horse. Also try the s-patch tutorial on doing human faces, it will help you make the child better..... G H REVERA ===== From agage@mines.edu: Okay, the knight->night idea was going to show up somewhere, but at least it was put into a dream scene so you weren't just being clever. There are a few things I'd suggest, since you claim to be new to raytracing. First, the lighting is decent, but it is difficult to tell where (or what) the lights are. An effective way to do lighting is to use only one main light for a scene like this (since it is supposed to be at night, the light could be coming through a door from a hallway, from a night-light, etc.) and use shadowless lights for the other areas that need illumination (since using too many lights with shadows is very obvious). The biggest trouble here is keeping things from looking too flat, since lighting really helps you distinguish depth. Your lighting is actually pretty well done, though the shadows being cast by the dragon (downward) into the room blurs the separation between the two worlds. Not sure if this was intended. Your modeling is good. The only real weakness that I see is the model of the child's head on the pillow -- it looks like a solid piece of rock, but this may be more an issue of texturing. Your texturing is in general pretty good, though having the cushion of the chair and the blanket being the same shade of green stands out. Since you are using POVray, I'd strongly suggest playing around with normals. For instance, a good crackle normal on the dragon would have kept it from looking so smooth. This would also have helped the metal on the knight from looking too plastic. Finally, there is one more thing I would like to suggest. In the future, turn on antialiasing for your final image. If it was turned on, make the threshold about ten times smaller. This will smooth the edges of your objects. Take a look at the open book on the desk at the bottom of the picture -- there are "jaggies" or stair-steps the the edge where it goes from one color to a different one. If you turn on antialiasing, those will go away. I usually use a threshold of 0.01 for my final renders, which makes it take a lot longer, but it is worth it -- I can blow up the image 3 times and it still looks okay. When you are rendering, just give it the command line option +A0.01 or find a window somewhere that will do the same thing. Very good for an early image! ===== From Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se: The armour texture would look more metallic if you used a smaller roughness value, something like finish {specular .4 roughness .001} maybe. ===== From jjanger@mail.cspp.edu: I was wondering when someone was going to do the knight pun. ===== From tlyons@gnn.com: nice dragon! ===== From mischa@rainbow.studorg.tuwien.ac.at: That picture is cool. I love the cute dragon, I wish my dragon looked like yours (just a little bit more evil perhaps ;-) P.S.: Next time you should try Antialiasing (0.3) that would improve the image-quality (and the rendering- time ;-) ===== From dormammu@erols.com: Interesting picture.. very cartoony. Good job. ===== From ethelm@bigfoot.com: This image certainly portrays the idea that you wished to convey. Image is a bit chunky but practice will improve this. Keep up the good work. ===== From gmccarter@hotmail.com: Clever combination of "knight" and "night". Very good job. Obviously lots of hard work went into this image. I wish there was a greater distinction between the "real" and the "fantasy". Perhaps greater realism on the "solid" parts, and translucency/blurring on the "dream" parts? ===== From djconnel@flash.net: Excellent pun on the theme!!! I am not sure where the algebra enters into the ... err.... equation, but the (k)night idea is nicely done. The mahor room for improvement might be in texturing (it's pretty good, but not quite winning-entry level), and the lighting is a bit flat. Also, the books look too alike, and they are an important part of the scene. However, I like this one a lot!!! ===== From cfusner@enter.net: Very nicely done. The foreground right shows classic symptoms of needing antialiasing (both the jaggies, and the low quality rendition of the images on the page). The symbol for pi, and maybe some math and geometry symbols like the angle sign, "=", "<", ">" would have enchanced your point with the existing numerals-floating-in-the-clouds a bit. But I really like the idea you've created here. ===== From r@dial-up30.webbernet.net: I'm surprised that the dream theme and the "night"-"Knight" pun weren't used more this round. A nice cartoony style rendition of the idea. The modelling is decent. I like the cloud. The wood textures on the bed need a bit of work. The big problem with this image is the lack of antialiasing. This comment by clem@dhol.com.