"rben" <ray### [at] comcastnet> wrote in message 
news:web.417a72b78851153d497bbfc0@news.povray.org...
> "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
>> In article <417975df@news.povray.org> , "Phlip" <phl### [at] yahoocom> 
>> wrote:
>>
>> >> No, that is not it.  We are currently discussing the images that have 
>> >> been
>> >> submitted.  There will be news soon.
>> >
>> > Mine was a pessimistic software engineering estimate. ;-)
>>
>> Well, as it turns out we may well have underestimated the time needed to
>> create as impressive images as we had imagined...
>>
>>     Thorsten
>
> It sounds like you have just seriously insulted every artist who
> participated in this contest.  I hope that I am misinterpreting your
> comment.  I'll be the first to admit that I doubt my image was good enough
> to win the competition, but I did put in quite a lot of work.
>
> If you didn't get the quality and/or number of images you expected, you
> might also attribute that to several other possible problems.  Perhaps 
> word
> didn't spread about the contest as far and as quickly as you wanted.  I
> don't know exactly when the contest started, I think I only discovered it
> about halfway through the allotted time.  There also hasn't been a lot of
> activity on the home page for the contest.  Finally, this is the first 
> time
> I've heard of this contest, and the first time out, you almost never get
> the turnout you'd expect.  I'm sure that next year's contest will get a 
> lot
> more entries, especially if you offer similar prizes.
>
> I hope that you will clarify the remark you made above quickly so people
> won't jump to the wrong conclusions.
>

In Thorsten's defense, I certainly could have used more time, and from 
reading many of the comments that other participants made (especially those 
who dropped-out), it sounds like most of them simply couldn't produce the 
image that they wanted in the time they had available.  Sure, personal 
issues get in the way, but that's why we're all amateurs.  To produce 
something really cool, I would like to have had the freedom to render for a 
couple weeks or more (with high-radiosity, etc.), while still having 
modelled most of the items from scratch.  But to produce another poster-size 
image from that, it could be expected to render for a couple months or more.

In the IRTC, I didn't feel as much pressure to use newly-made models. 
Gilles' "The Wet Bird" uses a ton of third-party models, which would have 
counted against him in this competition (or at least, it wouldn't have been 
in his favor).  However, we've certainly seem some impressive things come 
from Gilles and others where most (or all) of the models were created from 
scratch.  I guess the thing that we don't always know is WHEN those models 
were created.  For me, the modelling took a lot of time, since I was also 
learning as I went along, in many cases.

-- 
Jeremy
www.beantoad.com