===== From bobfranke@halcyon.com: My first thought is that this looks like a cat just out of the hair dryer, but then thought it looks like a cat that has just scared itself and is trying to look big. The pattern in the fur works well and the eyes give the perfect expression. Also your method for creating the wool is very good, I will have to keep this in mind. The only modeling flaw is the paw print on the mirror. It is too small, but I am getting pretty picky here. I dont't have Poser3, but maybe it can allow scaling or changing the pose of the paw. Great image P.S. Cats have been known to understand they are resonsible for the movements in a mirror. It is beleived the reflection is eventually dismissed because there is no smell. Whether the cat understands that it is seeing itself is anybody guess. ===== From ande8545@blue.unco.edu: Nice job! I like how you threw the 13 in for fun! ===== From gregj56590@aol.com: Nice theme, nice simple picture. Cat's fur shows good technical merit, although the animal looks a bit more like something made out of pipe cleaners. Cat's eyes could be a bit better. ===== From newkirk@snip.net: Some details need tuning, but a very nice image. Eyes are lacking something, perhaps due to the reflection problem you mentioned. BTW, if you remove ball of string and mirror, and render with camera settings identical but located in 'mirror' position, it would give you the reflection you sought. orient scene with center of mirror as origin, and reverse the 'Z' component of the camera position would get fairly close - the close the 'look_at' point is to the center of the mirror the more accurate the reflection geometry would be. Black showing through the (wonderful!) fur looks wrong. The fur either needs to be thicker, or a pink skin color should show through in thinner places. If the fur stands 'outward' from the mesh basis, you could use the same mesh with a simple pink pigment to simulate skin under the fur. ===== From johnson@pharmacy.arizona.edu: Well done fur. ===== From grimmg@hotmail.com: beautiful ===== From Sean_Hamilton@amrcorp.com: Great job on the fur! ===== From caleb@chemeng.uct.ac.za: Very nice shot at fur - i am very interested in the method. The picture by N.B. and G.M. of Pearl Harbour shows really good smoke - I wonder if it could be modified into fur as well ? Anyway, nice picture. My girlfriend said "CUTE"! ===== From gmccarter@hotmail.com: Wow, fantastic. You hit the nail on the head with the fur this time! Low camera and tight lighting adds to the intimacy of the scene. Most tasteful integration of "13" I've seen yet. Mini reflections at the edges of the mirror are a nice touch. ===== From tina@tezcat.com: I should have known someone else would do this. It surprises me less that someone else did a much better cat than I did. I was also highly impressed by the eyes. ===== From karl@pemail.net: One of the best "furry" textures I have seen in computer graphics ===== From djconnel@flash.net: Wow! The hair is an amazing piece of work.... but I think the Cat just touched a live wire.... :) One artistic point -- there is too much black in the image. It thus appears unfinished. The rope is excellent! ===== From east103@dialaccess.com: Here kitty kitty. Amazing fur, very hard to do. ===== From dnash@umich.edu: I think this is the best of the 3 "kittens and mirrors" images in this round. The fur is quite good. The only thing I might change would be to add some waviness to it -- right now it looks a little bristly and rigid. --Dave Nash (dnash@umich.edu) ===== From ethelm@bigfoot.com: Cute image. Very interesting job with the fur, better than most. Does look slightly electrified. Very good work though. Well Done. ===== From 101741.541@compuserve.com: Impressive ! How cute ! The attitude is very lifelike. One down, if any, : in a dark room, I think the cat's eyes must look brighter. ===== From blaineholmes@hotmail.com: Loved the fur, great job, I think your there. Also nice job on the twine and floor. I like the way you worked in your usual 13. I'm a 13 lover too, been a tremendously lucky number for me. Technically speaking, it's a toss up between you and Strike as far as I'm concerned. ===== From wozzeck@club-internet.fr: A great attempt. I wonder if the blur comes from jpeg conversion or undersampling, but there is a real problem with the floor texture. And lighting is strange, too. Well, a 4th try soon might be perfect. ===== From jaime@ctav.es: That's fur! Definitely, the first really real fur I've never seen. Perhaps this is the first CG "fur" which must be called "fur"... ===== From arcana@sinbad.net: "A" for effort. The attempt at fur is a great one, although it might have looked better if the underlying skin matched the color(s) of the fur. May have made the fur look less gappy. ===== From r@digital140.ism.com.br: Notable for composition ===== From r@haka.saunalahti.fi: As someone who'd planned for a very similar scene, I have to applaud your work. The kitten looks real and the fur - well, furry. But.. for some reason the first though I had was "stuffed squirrel". Even with that many cones, they're still larger than real cat hairs, giving a shaggy impression as if the hair had clumped together. I'd myself rejected this technique as being more suited for modelling a hedgehog than a cat - alas, I ran out of time so we shan't know if my trick with heavily scattering media would've worked any better. Also, the pose, while anatomically correct, fails to account for the fact that real kittens are smooth and thus deform in a gravitational field (read: sag), and the tail has some painful looking kinks that together with the stiff fur make it look like a bent bottle brush. :-( Oh, and typing in long constructive comments in this web form is hell. Notable for modelling ===== From r@ppp048.worldy.com: Great modelling! Nice idea for the First Encounter topic also. Notable for originality, modelling ===== From r@ppp048.worldy.com: Great modelling! Nice idea for the First Encounter topic also. Notable for originality, modelling ===== From r@ppp43.cy-net.net: Notable for composition, textures