Tom Melly wrote:

> In the first place, quite a high degree of intimacy with each prog is
> required to give accurate technical scores. For example, it is not
> necesserily enough to know what poser can do, it would also be nice to be
> able to recognise "stock" figures from those specifically created by the
> artist.

Looking at the POV and 3DS renders (75% of the entries in this round), it looks
like in both cases the artists covered the whole range of the prog's
possibilities, from the newbie to the seasoned artist, so that one can have a
quick idea of the relative difficulties involved in doing the picture. For the
lesser used programmes, I'll probably have to look at user galleries.

Generally speaking, I tend to think, however, that one should do the best with
the tools he/she has and simply not use them if they don't live up their
expectations. For instance, if you want to do a human figure without Poser, this
is all right if it is as good as a Poser output, or if it different in a way
that is artistically significant (like some of the blobman pictures posted in
p.b.i) : if the artist does a bad Poser wannabe with primitives then I think
he/she should not have tried it in the first place (of course you can make a
very impressive human figure with primitives). In the case of Poser, if the
Poser model looks bad then I think he/she shouldn't have used Poser that way :
for instance, I never used close-ups of Poser models until version 4 because I
found them ugly. In that way, the technical judgement may be disconnected from
your knowledge of a tool's abilities.

> P.P.S. How should pictures be scored for technical where renderer, tools and
> source are not given? 0?

Perhaps write to the author and post the author's answers here... I guess that
some participants don't mention the tools used because they must be obvious
context-wise, particularly for professional tools like 3DS. It is also difficult
sometimes to keep track of all the external help (I begin to have trouble
crediting the authors of the poser morphs targets I've used, for instance).
Posting sources may be a problem for many acceptable reasons. Not mentioning the
renderer is a problem though, but it happened only in 3 cases.

G.

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