===== From bobfranke@halcyon.com: In composition you have acheived you goal. The is very reninisicent of the movies from the 1950's. Especially the design of the space ship. I like the Martian looking on from his position in the tree. I would prefer to see more variety in the poses of the Martians. Maybe they tend to stand that way, just as the Aliens tend to stand with their arms down. Also the ship seems to have landed in the tree without burning it down. The is also a contunity problem, similar to these early movies. Yes, it is true that we put value on original objects and this should only be reflected in the technical score. I find it ironic that we often spend weeks trying to acheive photorealism that can be done in 1/100th of a second with a camera. But, there in is the challenge with ray tracing and the composition aspect is there in both cases. ===== From Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se: How about making the terrain a heightfield instead of a plane? ===== From gregj56590@aol.com: Interesting concept but not very well carried out. If this is a Martian movie set, it should look quite different. ===== From dick@buckosoft.com: Great trees. ===== From gmccarter@hotmail.com: Bold b&w color scheme. Needs a bit more variety on the aliens. They seem to be randomly placed. How about grouping them together, conferring? ===== From MMandl@aol.com: It is hard to give high tec merit when you have let others do the work for you. Some artists spend weeks just creating one original object or texture. ===== From djconnel@flash.net: I like the concept! And the image isn't bad. Technical content, though, is a bit lacking. The trees could use a lot of work, clearly. The aliens and humans are all in the same pose. And the most striking feature, the swirl, isn't raytraced. But with a little more attention, it would be a nice image. I especially like the use of B&W. ===== From east103@dialaccess.com: The choice of 'grays' is interesting ===== From ethelm@bigfoot.com: A difficult and interesting approach but looks more like a preliminary sketch than the finished picture. ===== From 101741.541@compuserve.com: Trees are graphically interesting. I won't say too much about technical limitations, working with Pov on a 386 being difficult enough... ===== From blaineholmes@hotmail.com: Nice job. Interesting tree things. ===== From wozzeck@club-internet.fr: B&W really brings something here. Nice background and idea. Trees really look flat (which is the case according to your text. The martians do not look very well imho. You could certainly have done better by yourself ;-) ===== From martial@biosys.net: Well! Chapeau! Good works whith a 386Dx33. ===== From jaime@ctav.es: There is nothing wrong on using stock objects. But I always appreciate good modelling skills on entrants, not only the composition. I must reward entrants who make their own objects, bcos this is not photography and it involves also modelling, lighting, texturing, finding good ideas, etc, etc... Well, appart from this little and innocent reply to your thoughts, I liked the idea for the scene. Original and strange, as a counterpoint to the lot of "serious" sci-fi images we have this round (well, not seen them yet, but I'm sure there are many of them:). ===== From r@digital140.ism.com.br: Notable for lighting