I also like the suggestion from AnArdvark.

So that you know, the story ended well. Today, my account  "magically" appeared credited of the amount I had spent and the shopping cart had again the items I had purchased. I just repeated the procedure and everything went well. Phew!...

I do like this: I subscribed this thread and so I receive an ebot anytime someone posts something here. If this post is a request to be part of the group, I immediately add this person to my favourite, even before Karen adds the person to the 1st post  (I assume that Karen won't reject anyone...). I found this to be the most practical way to do it.

Initially, to fill up the list, I did have to open two browsers and painfully compare the 1st post with my homepage with favourites... 

I just wanted to share this thought with you:

Do you know how to tell if the "critique spirit" is starting to get to you? 
Yesterday, I was driving home from office and there was a beautiful sunset. A real life sunset... And, unconsciously, I found myself thinking: "Hmmm, this is a nice render, good light settings but a bit exagerated on the tone and the clouds don't seem to have enough volume." 

Then I thought that maybe I should take some days off from this 3D stuff... LOL

One tree doesn't make a forest. Please don't give up. By doing it, you would be making the person behind the sarcasm a "winner".

I don't like sarcasm, specially when it comes to sensitive topics like a person's artistic preferences. But remember when you read the words of someone that you do not "read" her/his emotions, so maybe you should give the benefit of the doubt that maybe there was some missinterpretation.

I agree with JOELGLAINE that the app is not important. Like I once read "you don't need to be a chicken to know if an egg is good". LOL

Of course, if the one writing the critique doesn't know a tool, he won't be able to make concrete suggestions on which dial to tweak or which setting to change. But the artist will know what to do, if the critique is specific enough.

By the way, I would like to thank all that had the time to check out my last pic. That was VERY useful, specially because that specific pic was of a new "style" for me. I learned a lot today! Much more than I would by just reading the usual "excellent!", "awesome!", "very good!"...

I have a sugestion but I'm not sure if it's possible to do. When we get an ebot that a picture from a favourite artist has been posted, the ideal would be that the mail text it would contain the comment that we make when we add an artist as a favourite. I say this because I see that most people here already put a comment like "critique group" in this ocasion. When we receive an ebot it would help to know if that artist is from this group or not, in order not to take the risk to critique someone that doesn't belong to the group. I, at least, have several other favourite artists than the ones in this group and it's getting hard to know when to critique or not.

I would like to sign in. A constructive criticism is the way to learn.

This is a great tool! But I'm having difficulties in doing an exact match between the exported ivy and the original obj back in Vue. I mean, Ivygenerator exports only the ivy itself, and in Vue I have the original obj on which I have to apply the ivy. How to match the two exactly? Just by trial & error or is there some "magic trick"? Thanks!

I (more or less) found the problem. I discovered that using a render area it didn't crash. Then I just moved the render area around the picture until it crashed. Ok, I had found the problematic area. There were 3 objects in that area. I deleted all and the problem disapeared. Then, put the objects back again, one by one and found it crashed with any of 2 of them. I replaced the materials in these (which were just mixed material for water in one and mixed material sand in the other) and found that these two materials had been corrupted somehow. Both of them! They were used in other previous pictures without any problem at all. Weird! I built the materials again and it worked fine.
What a weird thing!!

Thanks for the hint but there's no materials with displacement.

I just did: it still crashes.

Yes, it seems similar. Mine renders a few lines and... crash. Frustrating!...
I forgot to say that I'm running this in a Windows XP, dual core, 4GB of RAM, no other things running in background except anti-virus and firewall.