===== From digitalburn@totalise.co.uk: very nice water + trees. your own tools? impressive. ===== From darwallace@earthlink.net: The scene is incomplete. Where a is our castaway going to sleep? A hammock or treehouse and coconuts are needed, too. ===== From pbourke@swin.edu.au: Very good attention to detail, wet sand, reef. Nice palms and other vegetation. Not too sure of the choice of rock colour, I would have enjoyed it more without the chair. ===== From luisvaloyes@malditasea.zzn.com: who could have more technical merit than the one who has written his own raytracer? for this image I guess it's a powerful tool, and the palms are very good... ===== From wagner-michael@web.de: Hi Tom! This image is the best! An you've done it with a Raytracer you've written yourself? WOW! Now that's a 20 for Technical Merit! There's nothing to improve in your picture (except those 256 colors. Why did you convert it to 256 colors before converting it to JPG? But the 1024*1024 version IS perfect!!!)! And thanks for the detailed description how you've done this image. Greetings, Michael ===== From panthus@xtra.co.nz: I don't really know how to rate this. I wouldn't hang it on my wall but technically, to scratch-build your own tools, is amazing. ===== From dvnss@mega.ist.utl.pt: That Island is doomed (haven't you heard about the glaciar meltdown?) I would love to stop by too Great job, man!! ===== From marlo.steed@uleth.ca: Nice image. Great attention to detail like the waves on the beach. The grainness of the image takes away from the nice details provided. ===== From douge@nls.net: There seems to be some artifacting throughout the image (might be from compression, I don't really know). It looks like there are two "horizons"... a spot where the water changes color. Very impressive! Wrote the engine yourself, huh? Wow! ===== From tony@j4tb.com: Wow! Your ray tracer makes very nice images. Most Impressive! ===== From bbowen@cswnet.com: The art came out very well for such an overtly technical approach. I'm impressed. ===== From Alain.Culos@bigfoot.com: Yeah ! That's pretty cool and impressive for your own modeler and tracer ;-) Did you ever consider making them available on the net, even though you may consider them as not in publishable form ? ===== From StephenF@whoever.com: Very pretty... the sky and trees in particular stand out for me. My only criticism is that the wings of the birds look somewhat triangular. Nice work. ===== From sjlen@ndirect.co.uk: This is great image, it reminded me of the screen saver "Jonny Castaway". I love the water and the way you got the variation in colour which looks so realistic, but I'm not so sure about the way the ripples go outwards all the way round the islnad (well on the left anyway). I think that the sky could do with some more colour in it or just some more colours within the clouds. Also both the sky and water seem to get brighter as they get further away from the camera, this may be something that you want to look into a bit further it looks asthough the ambient component of the texture increases with distance from the camera. Though interesting the text file was far too long, I havn't had time to read it all, and for future rounds it might be worth having a website that describes your raytracer and the methods it uses (giving different capabilites names etc), and refer to the terms used on the website in your text file. I don't know if you've ever been over to the POV news server, I'm sure you'd feel quite at home there, and no doubt you'd get a warm welcome from the regulars. ===== From delfeld@mailcity.com: Nice thought you have given to creation of the scene. I like the waves on the shore and the long-period wave contacting the island. The water and island look great! There is a lot of dead space - space that neither adds to nor subtracts from the visual meaning. Some of it is intended, and even needed for the effect, but there is no point in leaving other areas in the picture.