This image evoked the strongest emotional reaction from me this round, with
a wonderful concept, communicated well by the excellent pose of the main
character.

I like the lighting, with the sun shining in our face, and the distant city
looks great. One comment complained about the shadows not being parallel,
but perspective can do that. For instance, you often see rays of sunlight
coming down through clouds at (apparently) different angles.

The textures are a bit flat, maybe because we're looking at the shadowed
side of the objects. The flat ground, combined with well-lit individual
blades of grass in the shadows, looks a bit artificial. The reflective
nature of the buggy's body looks odd as well, making it difficult to
understand its shape, though it is realistic. The full buggy is well
modeled.

I notice a lot of people place their name and a copyright notice in their
images. Not to pick on this image, but I'd prefer more subtle colors, as
they detract from the image. Also, while it offers some additional legal
protection, a copyright notice is not required to protect a work.

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With its saturated atmosphere, strong use of silhouette, and dramatic 
backlighting, this is a very emotive image.  It is more dreamscape than 
realistic with flat terrain, and deep perspective, though the especially 
believable sky gives pause. The dreamscape effect is reinforced with 
sparse, but carefully rendered, background elements such as railway 
tracks, telegraph poles, and a station house.  Again we have a marriage 
of American scene with the fantastical to evoke nostalgia towards 
technology.  Once again we have a sense of progress marked by the 
obsolescence of the very technology that contributes to it.



centerpiece of the composition, is placed on the left where it is 
backlit by the low sun and an enveloping haze.  The delicacy and spatial 
accuracy of the model is accented with just a few highlights, which 
occur around the edges. The intricate patterns of its silhouette are 
echoed in its shadow, which stretches into the foreground.  A horse in a 
very natural pose, with a compelling arch to its neck, and a 
historically clothed figure are also silhouetted in the strong light and 
fill out the context for the scene.

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Thanks for the good comments! Personally, on one hand, I see many flaws in
it, on the other I think it's one of my best images :-/

Looks like general agreement, the terrain is flat, the shadows radiate, and
the whole image has more of a dreamlike feel than realistic.  The first is
a flaw, the second is half flaw half choice, the third is intentional.

The terrain is just a simple plane. I'd wanted to use a heightfield but just
didn't have time to finish it. The texture is terrible, I took it only far
enough to get a pigment that provided a kind of balance to the colors in
the sky. The backlighting hides a lot of texturing flaws.

The media, to me, makes the whole picture. Had I not gotten that nice
saturated yellow sun look at the last minute I wouldn't have even submitted
the image. The groundfog really helped separate the elements, got mostly
what I was looking for there, except I couldn't figure out a way to limit
the height so the fog color ended up darkening the sky more than I wanted.
The sky should actually be bluer.

The radial shadows I was torn on... they definitely don't look realistic,
but I had so many nice lines radiating out to the edges (the cloud lines,
the telephone wires, the railroad tracks...) that they just kind of fit the
overall composition so I decided to leave them. (That, and the fact that
moving the sun back meant I'd have also had to make a separate light_group
for the cityscape and time was an issue...)

And realistic wasn't my priority. I generally try to make individual objects
as realistic as I can, but when putting those objects into a scene I
usually have a "look & feel" in mind, and whatever achieves that is where I
go.  The dreamscape look was what I wanted here, and the media was what got
me there.

And that leads me to a big thanks to the Pov-Ray team and all who put
together the documentation, and all the experts in these forums, because
without the help I doubt if I would have gotten near as good a results out
of the scattering media in only three days of dinking around! THANKS ALL!

RG

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