Sorry, it was me who indirectly suggested they lacked artistry. To be very clear about it I know from experience just how much artistry goes into these renders and I know you show a great amount of artistry.

My point was simply that the artistry and art of photorealistic and interprative rendering are different.

Two suggestions I would like to make to you are this: 1) that you set your floor to be a shallow parabola rather than a plane and 2) that you add a small amount of variation in the reflection of the floor (maybe through a bump map). Each should help achieve an even greater effect of realism.

Tim

To Rohan, yes, you are correct and quite attentive, there is no reflection of the hoses on the floor. That is because after I’ve almost completed rendering the tank without the hoses I decided to add them and instead of re-rendering the whole image from the beginning, I’ve rendered each hose seperately and added them in an image editor by forgetting about the reflection. But at the moment I’m re-rendering the whole image, as Peter said, with the correction of wing plates and maybe some of the unneeded black spots. It has already taken me 23 hours and if anyone is still curious about my PC specs, here they are:
AMD 64 X2 5000
2GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 8600GT

By the way, I agree with that some mentioned that my renders lack artistry. I will probably take that into account with my future renders.

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Sorry for my english.

…but I noticed that the hosepipe connecting the rocket packs to the main turret doesn’t seem to be mirrored in the glossy reflection underneath! :)

I just wish I had enough specialised parts to build something like that!

RB

pe668, here’s the link to the train station that I built, when it was blogged here. I’m sorta in the same school as gambort when it comes to virtual lego (and not just because somehow he liked one of my renders) in that there’s more to the art than just how realistic it looks. Take a look at Tim’s (Gambort’s) flickr and check out some of his renders. Some have a bright and smooth look that works great and appeals to the eye, and others have varying effects that add to the presentation. A wide variety of great renders. But I’m not sure any are as realistic to fool anyone that they are not real LEGO bricks. And that’s my point, it doesn’t have to be realistic to be great, unless that’s what you’re going for.

I like to separate it like Ldraw.com does in their “scene of the month” and “model of the month” contests. MOTM uses a program with preset rendering options to produce a quick, standardized method of comparing models on the same playing field, which places the emphasis more on the building and less on the rendering. SOTM is a no-rules open contest in which you can add any rendering special effects and any post-processing you want, not because the most realistic render will necessarily win, but because the best scene, meaning how well it pleased the eye in its total presentation, would win. hope that makes sense.