s2-speedy: Thank you for the support, much appreciated coming from you as you had one of the best pieces in this challenge We're working a lot at the moment on trying to add the community aspects of the sites and hopefully we can get SimplyMax up and running over the next few months as well. I like the community here because people are friendly and fair with one another that's why I get a bit sad when you get nonsense comments attacking peoples work. Never stay sad for long though, thank god for beer!

Daveido: I also think there will always be some bitterness it reminds me of the endless arguments about the gallery on CGTalk. Glad the criteria made things a bit clearer for this next challenge and thank you for the positive comments. As well, if you send me a PM with where you'd like me to send your prize I'll get that sorted. Very suitable that buzz gets a toy story 3 book

iv01: I got the sarcasm just fine but chose to ignore it as I found your initial post quite offensive. My advice to you would be to think before you address people on the internet in that way, because it might come back and bite you later in life. You wouldn't have to create a photorealistic render, but it said textured and lit which means it has to look good, it could be a cartoon render instead or something stylized. Most people in this challenge simply went with photoreal.

tweety: wow, 24 challenges that's a lot you should get a veteran medal The freedom these challenges have is good in the sense that it allows people with different Maya skills to enter which is quite important on
a beginner site, and it might be a bad thing when it comes to who should win as it brings in widely different things that are difficult to compare side by side. Maybe we could get Mike to create a challenge when he's not so busy with work, I looked at some of the old ones and they looked great he put a lot of time in. Great idea with the gallery, we integrated it with the forum for things like this more than anything it just got a bit forgotten. I'll add a post to the final's thread on this.

sandman300: I wasn't ignoring your post, I just quoted Daveido's as it was and the end of the thread on page 2 rather than going back. My apologies for that, didn't mean to make you feel bad. I also saw your challenge entry, in fact I went through your whole thread and if there was a best challenge thread award you would have won it I love how you got a hold of the original toy for reference and it was such a cool model. For me the texturing let it down a bit, some areas of the car are heavily scratched whereas other look perfectly new I find this unrealistic as you would have some minor scratches as well on something with wear and tare. Also the scratched patches on the bonnet are perfectly white and uniform, adding some different noise to break it up would make it more realistic. Some bump could improve this further as the whole car looks perfectly smooth to me and scratches and imperfections are not. The shader for the car paint doesn't scream metal and could be mistaken for plastic. Another thing is the environment which doesn't have nearly as much detail as the car itself so they don't fit together and I find it distracts from the model a lot more than it adds. The brown shader on the track doesn't have any specularity and all materials even rough ones like rubber would have some so it's impossible to say what kind of material it is. Unless the part of the track where the car is is many meters above the floor the length of each individual tile would be similar to that of the car so very small. This is of course possible in the real world but in most cases standard tiles are about 30x30 centimeters and it's about perception and what we expect to see so for this reason I would increase the size of the tile if I was aiming for realism. The final thing is the depth of field which is too high and completely blurs out the background while the rest of the image is in perfect focus I think a subtle dof would have worked much better in this case. These are small things but they make a huge difference, in the render of David Mitchells toy car which we posted as a reference the dof is what makes the render photoreal and it's ever so slight you have to look for it and really compliments the model. This is a question of personal taste but for me your car model posed in the same way with the same amount of dof and some slight tweaks to the shader and textures would have been much closer to photoreal. I do like the way you placed it on the track though because it's sort of jumping out at you and makes it look like a racing little devil but the color scheme and lack of realism in the environment lets it down a bit. I really wanted to post in your thread on SL I simply forgot. I think you did great as I remember reading it was your first attempt at photoreal and I just wanted to tell you what I thought in case you went back to it at some point, because these are minor details and the model is so funny. Shame you won't be in the next challenge.

Nilla