Hi all,

I am much humbled by the praise on the latest version of the image. I am happy
to hear that the changes are indeed considered improvements and that the
resulting image is to your liking. :-)

I won't have much time over the next couple of weeks to work on the image, but
when I have the time, I will apply the necessary finishing touches. In
particular, I need to refactor it to cut down the rendering time.

Meanwhile, please find below my responses to specific comments and suggestions.

Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:
>
> For your fog, are you using a media? Use a simple fog instead. fog is
> much faster than media, and in this case, should be a very good alternative.
>

Unfortunately, simple fog does not work here because of the way I achieved the
illusion. Not all objects are at the distance they seem to be. However, I
started faking the fog by putting up a transparent screen with varying
transparancy and that seems to work. It achieves the desired fade out and
renders faster.

Thomas de Groot <tenDOTlnDOTretniATtoorgedDOTt> wrote:
> One comment though (forgive me!).

No problem, comments are always welcome.

> If you move the sun a tiny bit so that
> the shadow of the leftmost column falls behind the central column, the
> illusion will be even better I believe.

I see what you mean, however, I am not sure if shifting the light is the best
way. I would like to leave sufficient room between the shadows of the pillars.
Also, I quite like how the front wall does not fully cast a shadow on the base
of the frontmost pillar. Nevertheless, I will see what I can do to improve the
illusion.

Christian Froeschlin <chr### [at] chrfrde> wrote:
> As Alain mentioned, using media may be overkill for this kind of fog.
> Apart from that, it might be possible to cut up the grass object into
> one part that interacts with the rest of the scene (monument shadow)
> and another part that doesn't, and use light_group's to restrict
> the use of the area light to the part that needs it.

Ah, I did not know about the light group feature, but that should do the job
perfectly. I will definitely try this. Thanks for the suggestion.

"Mike the Elder" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Now you're entering the
> phase I often have the most trouble with myself - deciding when to stop tweaking
> and just declare it DONE. ;-)

Well, the main tweaking I cannot avoid is refactor the scene to get bearable
render times. It currently takes nearly 8 minutes on my machine to render a
single line of the anti-aliased 640x800 image, which is way too much, especially
given the fact that I want to render it at 2400x3200.

"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> I think the coolest improvement is the shadow inside the structure; it removes
> focus from what I thought was the biggest flaw: the way the round part abruptly
> changes from the straight about mid-height.

This transition from round to straight is actually not as abrupt as it seems.
The transition starts pretty much at the bottom of the pillars and continues all
the way up to the top. However, I fully agree, that's not how it appears.

Cheers,
Erwin
..

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