This is one I worked on for a while, dropped due to studies, and just recently picked up again. It's based on the verse "For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul" ANY critiques are more than welcome!

Ahh! . . .from abstraction to realism! . . .and creative with both! I like the image. Are the coins lattice objects? One thought. . . . what about placing the lower left coin directly beneath the skeletal thumb. It would lead the eye through the arm and into the coin grouping. . .more of a visual connection. Just my thought! :)

Awesome texturing, and love the concept. One thing that isn't clear is what's in the hand, it looks like a big diamond but it also looks sunk into the cobblestone. Your second wip is better than my 100th wip, LOL. BTW I loved your abstract too, just haven't had a chance to comment.

just dirty up the hand a bit and it's perfect.

Nice message... This is a piece of scripture I treasure. Your image conveys its message very well. Nice textureing, and lighting is good too. Nice job on this image Melansian_Mentat. 8)

Excellent pic.

Ok this is a prime example of why I don't usually make constructive crits. I'm on a different monitor from earlier and damn I can see everything clearly now! The gems look so much better on this monitor and the diamond no longer looks like its down into the stone. Sorry, I didn't realize how bad the other monitor was, lol, its brand new. But then so is this one. So my apologies, this is excellent.

Thanks to you all! Aldaron made the suggestion of "dirtying up the hand" But I'm not sure how to do that. I got the texture from a downloaded skeleton that wasn't detailed enough for close-up purposes and I'm not very confident about my knowledge of the Dreaded DTE.

This is looking great. Love the coins, gems and the message. One thing that crosses my mind is to perhaps "cheat" a little more light into the gems and make sure you have TIR enabled. This would add a little sparkle to the gems to make them more immediately apparent, and TIR doesn't seem to raise render times very much. Just my two cents worth.

Actually, I had TIR enabled for this render, but it didn't seem to do much. And I don't know a great deal about lighting just yet. Any tuts in that direction would be heartily appreciated! And again, does anyone know what I can to to the hand to make it look a bit more realistic?

Ok, here's the image again with a few alterations.... Aldaron, I did the best I could with the hand. Danamo, I spent hours trying to get the diamond to sparkle, but I don't seem to be making much headway. Anything else I can do with this? I'm thinking of submitting this as an art project, so more comments/critiques would be great!

try putting a teensy weensie lil radial light inside the diamond, and set it's brightness to like 1, or 2 if you use the slider to the right to adjust the color of the light to match the stones better then a plain white one would... Looks great!