I've avoided commenting in this thread because I didn't feel I should have to
justify the reasons for my voting or have to defend my integrity as a judge (and
therefore as a person in this community).  However, there have been many
comments in this thread that have concerned me, so I'm going to respond just
this once (since these are the facts and there's no point restating them over
and over) to try to help clear up these misunderstandings.

The single biggest problem I see is this notion of "process versus product" and
"meshes versus other objects".  The statements by the judges regarding meshes
were primarily aimed at meshes that weren't created by the author of the image,
or which were poorly created.  For example, using meshes excessively from, say,


To say that *any* mesh use was viewed as a bad thing is simply incorrect.  Take
a look at how "Twin Girls With A Pearl Earring" ranked for proof of that:  the
image is basically 100% mesh with texturing, however the meshes and the textures
were created by the author, and more importantly, the end result was extremely
good.  Had that model been a Poser model then things probably would have been
very different - if the author expended little effort in creating the scene
because they simply took an existing model that someone else created, then it's
hardly fair to rank that higher than someone who went to the effort of creating
the model themselves (regardless of the method used, mesh, CSG, etc), especially
if the end result wasn't as good as an image where the author had created more
highly detailed models themselves.  However, using many mesh models that someone
else created doesn't instantly make an image "bad" either, for example,
"Victoria's World" ranked very well despite it containing many meshes created by
other people.  The reason it ranked so well was probably due to the end
result/overall visual appeal of the image and also due to the clever use of
POV-Ray's features in order to place the objects and create the scene (it also
showcases POV-Ray's ability to handle huge amounts of instanced mesh data).

To contrast this, take a look at "Evie Evolves".  The image, despite being very
good from a visual perspective, didn't rank as well.  There are a number of
reasons for this (these reasons are *my* reasons and don't represent the voting
of the other judges): the image primarily uses a Poser model (but this isn't the
sole reason as I'll explain).  Had the author created the model, rather than
using one from Poser, it probably would have ranked a lot higher.  However,
that's not the only reason - the use of a Poser model or a mesh model doesn't
necessarily make an image bad, there were other issues that made it (in my
opinion) not as good as other images.  For example, the hand of the model cuts
through the sofa.  This is something that would have been very easy to fix
(simply translate the entire model a small amount through the y axis), and
similarly the ring cuts through the finger.  These are details that the average
non-technically-minded person can look at and see, and think "that doesn't look
right, it looks like the hand is in the sofa", so that had a big negative impact
on the image for me.  The faceting of the model also didn't help.  I can also
say that other judges had differing opinions - that's the point of having
several judges, to ensure that there are different views of each image being
considered.  Many of these small image details and the overall ranking were
discussed at length by the judges before a final decision was made - not one
part of the process was taken lightly by anyone involved in the judging; we
wanted to be as fair and unbiased as possible, and I think we achieved that.

So I hope that clears up a few misunderstandings.  A basic summary is that using
mesh models didn't instantly make an image bad (an opinion that was incorrectly
stated as fact by some people), however using a mesh model (or any other type of
model, e.g. CSG) for the primary part of an image, which the *author didn't
create*, would usually have a negative impact, particularly if the *final result
wasn't visually as good* as it should have been because of it.  Ultimately, it
came down to how good the image looked and how well it represented what POV-Ray
was capable of.  This is clearly evident when you look at the top 5-6 entries:
these images are visually superior to the rest of the images (and what do you
know, several of them made extensive use of meshes).

Cheers,

Lance.

thezone - thezone.firewave.com.au