Okay, here is what I think.  You have correctly identified a tendency, on my
part also, to be impressed in some unmitigated way, with the fact that the
artist created the ray tracer he is using and to therefore honour that
accomplishment when marking the image.  And like you, according to some
unconscious sense of fairness, I was moved to award a kind of first-time bonus
with a blowout technical score.  But I found my visceral response easy to
rationalize because I was equally impressed with some discussion he had there
about how he was able to base the interference patterns in the waters surface on
the physical attributes of the scene and he mentioned as I recall some research
into the behavior of  water, waves and so on.  I remember looking back at the
scene and not really being able to verify if it made much difference to the
picture but I took him at his word.  So it seemed to me that it wasn't
impressive merely because he could program a ray tracer, but because his
handwritten tool allowed him to explore a quite difficult subject ( behavior of
water ) with a degree of penetration and verity that other tools may not
afford.  Not to mention that merely trying to model the appearance of  water
based on some underlying physical description just boggles my mind whatever the
tool or technique.  ( Jaime's winning entry "Running" still leaves me shaking my
head in amazement ).

With this round's entry, I did find I was less inclined to award a kind of
technical 'bonus' just because the ray tracer was self-written.  But what again
seemed present was the use of the tool to get at a particular level of modeling
verity which requires that the subject be modeled through a high degree of
simulation within the scene and which attempts to make underlying physical laws
manifest. And again I couldn't discount that the accomplishment of the
self-written tool may facilitate that end and therefore be factored into the
technical score.

So I guess that while I recognize a tendency to be simply impressed with the
fact that the guy wrote a ray tracer, so far I have found each image, as a
modeling effort, to rank pretty high as a technical  accomplishment.  In concept
I also find them of some interest just because of the extreme paradigm they
embody from a modelling/simulation perspective.  A paradigm that I suspect is
quite highly valued among ray tracing enthusiasts and overlaps with muchsome of
my own interest in the enterprise. As of yet, I haven't found I have had to
trade off the knowledge that he wrote his own raytracer against my concept of
what is technically impressive, but I do look for how the particular strengths
of the tool may play into a unique result before awarding extra.

(From an artistic consideration btw, both entries left me luke warm.)



Tom Melly wrote:

> "J Charter" <jrc### [at] aolcom> wrote in message
> news:3A65C43A.7933F141@aol.com...
> >
> > Can you elaborate?
>
> Tom Dahl wrote his own raytracer - therefore rightly scored very high in the
> Oceans round  for his entry.
>
> However, to keep on giving him v. high technical scores seems to me
> counter-intuitive.

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