===== From chris@bluelectrode.com: Great detail. I love the brick work and flower arrangments. The trees look a little stiff and photocopied. Overall, a beautiful image. One of my top ten. ===== From clintona@ibm.net: Excellent work. The flowers in the foreground are a treat. I envy your memory use...mine took 230 megs! (but then again I didn't pre-render anything.) ===== From bill@apocalypse.org: wow, wonderful detail - a fine piece of work! ===== From soulmates@gci.net: Hmm.. suggestions for improvement? Hard to come up with any. :{) About the only thing I can think of is that the light is a bit too bright given the cloud cover. It should be softer and somewhat greyer/dimmer. ===== From YaelParis@operamail.com: Too bad, I can't reach your homepage... Anyway, I feel there's a lot of work behind this picture. the modelling is quite good but I don't like the lightning, I found it too dark and the shadows are too perfect. Maybe you should use area or ambient lights to create smoother lightning. ===== From rbyman@rockies.net: Very well done ===== From whhale@nvl.army.mil: This is a garden. Great Job. ===== From ianshumsky@hotmail.com: You have a good technique for having many objects in a scene, though you may want to investigate using PNG format instead of GIF. Both formats support transparancy, but GIF format only supports up to 256 colours while PNG has many more. ===== From tom@tomandlu.force9.co.uk: A wonderfully elaborate image, but lack of textures on the paths and stonework and too much regularity in the vegation (particularily the trees) lost it the high points. It somehow seems too clean. ===== From ameede@madmac.com: Well Robert, I make it a habit of reading the artist comments on their work while waiting for their image to upload onto my screen, with this in mind and your suggestion of visiting your website, I did as you requested and went there. After reading some of the material you provided on your site and reviewing your submission I can understand your predication for numbers and prejudices towards the 2D arts ("...Drawing pictures never was as good as making POVRAY pictures._ When your mind views things in a 3-D way, and your paper is 2-D, nothing ever looks right after you put pen to paper. With POVRAY, it looks better than what your mind can imagine..."_ me. ). This is not to offend you where none is intended, but understanding this part of you helps me appreciate the efforts you went through to create your artwork :-} I can easily argue with you on this point since I spent a couple of decades providing 3D interpretation on a 2D surface. Nevertheless and more importantly, I decided to give you high marks simply because your mind set was coherent with the methodolgy you used and the example of it in the form your artwork I just looked. Your aesthetic fits your art. The image in-and-of-itself was composed extremely well, you suggest symmetry yet it is broken up with different imagery that compels the viewers interest to look more into it. It reads very well from foreground to background and back out again. I also very happy to see that you did not add any blurring effects in the foreground. Well, my connection was terminated because of lack of network activity, but I believe that since you went into so much work to provide the viewers with such a fantastic piece, I thought that I would spend some time replying in kind. I have bookmarked your page, and keep in mind that the context of what you want to say should dictate the method, and style your use to create the work, this is just my opinion, but it is aesthetically, and historically connected. ameede@madmac.com ===== From Alain.Culos@bigfoot.com: The sky looks a bit too dark IMHO. It is very nice to give us a pointer to a web page, but it would be nicer to tell us a bit more about it here so we can judge without having to go connected, then out again just for you. It looks like a technical challenge alright. It is a pity the trees look like they are cut half way up and the branches are so straight. The flowers look more natural although one can see repeated patches (in the medium distance on the right hand side). One trick that helps disguising the repetition in patches is to rotate (90 degrees, ...) and offset the centres so they are not perfectly aligned, this usualy gives a great effect, a bit like you did with the trees. Although the borders of the pavement are very good, the pavement itself looks too smooth, some irregularities would be welcome. Oh well, you may think I did not like the picture, not so, it is a very good entry. Not overly artistic. A nicely chosen viewpoint ... but a picture lacking that little something that makes it really great. ===== From jaime@ctav.es: Very hard work! I really love the pots on the foreground, the best in my opinion. But they are even nicest due to the prespective contrast. ===== From albiaprime@aol.com: Technically - Nice Wheelbarrow! Shovel needs a lip on the top and silvering on the edges from wear and tear. Otherwise, technically very nice. Artistically - flowers in mid distance need a touch brighter colour as they are in direct sunlight (based on tree shadows on footpath). Theme - Very impressed with garden, and very much "on theme". ===== From mar@physics.usyd.edu.au: A very impressive image, and the work put into it is evident from the web site explaining the techniques as well as from the image itself. The objects are all excellent, with the exception of the rather flat shovel, and the trees whose leaves seem to float in mid-air not attached to any twigs. Compositionally this is very busy, because of all the details, but there are unbalanced areas such as the sky at upper left. If this was a photograph I'd say it needed a slightly different framing to be really good. It's a shame that it suffers from this, because the techniques and modelling are top class. ===== From file: Nice plants, the objekt in the foreground look very nice, too Notable for composition, modelling