Renderdog wrote:
>Some great work here, especially the background. The pier, waves and sand
>are all perfect, and anyone who's been to Daytona would recognize the tire
>tracks in the sand as very accurate, a nice touch.
>
>The aged photo look is very well done, and important to stress the old
>technology aspect of the image, as many people wouldn't recognize just
>how old the Bluebird is. It was a lot of work to create the sepia colors
>within the rules of the IRTC, and it was nice to read the description of
>the process and see the color images. Personally I think the rule is
>very limiting and would be glad to see it go, but I think I'm probably
>in the minority there.

I for one wasn't convinced by the sepia tint.  To me it looked like a
full-colour world where everything happened to be coloured in shades of
brown.  I appreciate the effort that went into the effect, but it just
doesn't work for me.  Specifically what I find stands out is the greys in
the shadows.  In a real sepia tone photo these areas would receive a brown
wash.  I would have preferred leaving it in colour, or in greyscale if I
really wanted to achieve an antique photo look.  The grain and black
smudges look good however, like an old print that was improperly stored in
a stack of old photos.

>I feel the Bluebird itself could have used a few more details, or some
>additional textures that might make it look more real, to place it in
>the setting more solidly. One comment complained that the vehicle wasn't
>to scale, but it looks good to me.

I was the one who thought the car was out of scale and on second thought I'm
going to have to take that comment back.  The car seemed far too big to me
compared to the size of the driver but after reading the text file again I
see that the car was indeed that huge, I missed that bit of information the
first time, not to mention that I'm more familiar with the metric system
and the artist gave the dimensions in feet.  This brings up another point
though, the readme file is too long.  It is easily double the length of the
next longest text file and most of the techniques explained were pretty
standard fare.  The artist should have edited it down to focus on the
special features of the image, such as the sepia tint and perhaps the
heightfield waves, and if he felt that further explanations were in order
then he should have created a "making of" web page and included a link to
that.  There were 84 other images to look at, after all.

Not to sound too negative and end on a positive note, I must say I like the
use of a heightfield to model the surf.  That was quite clever and the
results are good.  I also like the reflective surface on the sand at the
shoreline.  I bet the tide had just gone out, perfect for skimboarding!

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