===== From gregj56590@aol.com: Stars already millions of light years away at the instant of creation?? ===== From newkirk@snip.net: Why are there stars in the background? The elements seem haphazard, and incomplete, both as to construction and texturing. ===== From caleb@chemeng.uct.ac.za: Good concept of theme, but i think it could have been done with more style. For galaxy scenes, try experimenting with Chris Colefax's galaxy.inc file. Also, try to avoid using blatant primitives, like torii, cones, cubes and spheres. Also, remember that you are allowed to submit a JPG file 250k or less. Your picture is too compressed (faint blurriness on edges of objects) and this is especially clear around the hand. You can vary the amount of compression in Paint Shop Pro (all versions), and prob whatever prog you used to convert to JPG. ===== From gmccarter@hotmail.com: I have to ask: if this is the Big Bang, then where did those stars come from? Certainly a more on-topic concept than your other images. ===== From tina@tezcat.com: This is bizarre but I liked it a lot anyhow. ===== From djconnel@flash.net: Recommendation : use antialiasing.... This is an interesting abstraction of the big bang. But I must say I don't really see it.... It's a very nice concept, though. The tech score has the greatest room for improvement, though. ===== From east103@dialaccess.com: Scene composition is somewhat lacking. How the objects relate to one another is not clear. ===== From ethelm@bigfoot.com: The use of symbols requires the viewer to know what the symbols represent. Ideally a picture should communicate something without the need of a text explanation. ===== From blaineholmes@hotmail.com: Good job, keep at it. ===== From clem@dhol.com: The Pandora's box was a good idea, although it isn't recognizable without the text file. A symbolic version of the big bang has promise too. For symbolism to work, however, it has to be recognizable in some way. All there is to see here, even with the explanation in the text, is random shapes with random textures. Whether an image is symbolic or representational, it has to speak for itself. Another thing to work on is creating your own textures. Even random textures you did yourself would have been better than random textures from the standard includes. You should also pay more attention to normals and finishes in order to add variety and realism. A final problem is the lack of antialiasing. You really should use it. I know it causes trouble with the standard starfield, but you can fix that either by modifying the starfield color map distributions slightly or by just using colors brighter than 1 in the color map.