Hmm, awesome ideas Captain.  Thanks for the input.   I'll definitely try to get some shading in there.  I was having a bit of trouble with the pen I was using (bic) it seemed all or nothing in that aspect. 

There was supposed to be a division line running from the lower left to upper right. where the image splits from a metaphorical entanglement of ideas into more individual symbolism.

But the central theme, was originally going to be "Man vs his Demon", and the internal compass which guides us through life (setting root), being the source of our creation and destruction.  This compass sees eye to eye with the demon (in a stare down of sorts), who's always obscured and misunderstood.   In the image you can see his teeth forming a wave about to crash upon the shore.  We've seen this wave before, and an 'elephant' never forgets, though snakes oft talk in his ear and lead his thoughts astray.  The pattern of this wave was intended to be made clear by the mathamatical gesture to 'sine'.  Simultaneously, the demon can be seen pulling the world apart, and introducing destructive ideas: flowing from the horn(/shark), a scimitar (violence) , gambling, etc..

The man looking at the stone, and the eye of the snake below form a yin yang pattern; hopefully, furthering the idea of creation and destruction.  Above to the right, a yin yang symbol is divided, along with coal - diamond, paths of black, and white, death and life, and even death turning to love as the bones morph into hearts.  Believing "I can fly" seemingly attracts lightning to strike it down, which is the source of your coal you hope to turn into diamonds... etc..

The central 'floating block / cloud' area was supposed to represent the circular flow of thoughts (borrowing artistic elements from mario =P).. etc etc...

Here's a bit better copy

Awesome, can't wait.

(can you tell I need something to do?)

About your computer.  It's definitely fast enough, I was worried you were going to say an 800 mhz celeron or something.   The 498mhz though...I'm not sure where that's coming from.  Unless...

Are you using a laptop?  Because when its unplugged it mostl ikely runs at around 500 mhz.  So when you render ALWAYS make sure you're plugged in, and always check to see if it reverted.   It's always a good idea to reboot after plugging a laptop into a wall and before rendering.  It A) clears V-ram, Clears regular ram, only uses startup processes, and makes sure you're running at full speed.

I think the biggest issue is that the image looks as though it were scaled up from the original render size.

My guess is that you rendered it at 800x600 and changed the image size to 1024x768 in photoshop.

The image might gain more continuity by making the portal more of a focal point.  I'm not sure if I'm being clear, so I did a quick 2 minute jumble in photoshop to show you what I mean.

You can see it here

Hope that helps.

-Rob

Chohole, no offense, but your avatar freaks me out!

Oh wow, I'll definitely have to check out this program... it looks like it could be amazing.

Yeah, I agree that plop rendering can definitely save some time.  Just make sure you save before you plop render incase something goes wrong.

By specialized materials for soft shadows and such I meant making every material a light ambiant color and removing things like the glass window, lowering polygons then rending a shadow pass.  And then making everything a dark material with high specular content and rendering to get a 'specular' pass.   It takes a lot of playing around, but that's generally how I do my images now.  it allows you to play around with the layers in photoshop to add more shadow definition, smooth just the shadows out... add some more specular value, or add a light specular glow by bluring that layer and using it as a "soft" light.   if you check out my renders you'll notice that they all have a certain kind of look that's most likely achieved through this method of layered rendering.  Best of all the extra passes are usually extremely fast as the materials are simple.

If you check out my glass render in the other thread you'll probably notice this technique, my initial render actually didn't have any shadows (I goofed up) so I added them by rendering a shadow only pass, and then enhanced the dull speculars with a spec pass.   Looks unnatural in this case though.

Here's a little zoomed view. I got the UV all wrong on the wooden section, so the texture was stretched a lot on the corners.  The shingles are all individual cubes.

I'm using 1.5.0.4 as well and it works fine for me.  (SP2 here) (also works in 64 bit)

What extensions do you have installed?  I've found that "flashblock" can cause firefox to hang at strange moments, so I had to uninstall that one.  Try running it without any extensions and see if you have the same problems.

Hmm, what's the speed of your computer.  You can cut corners by doing specialized material passes for shadows, soft shadows with glass materials can be deadly. 

You also may want to increase the refraction on the bottles a bit.

I have the advantage of a small render farm with a 3.0 ghz Opteron head hauncho; so sometimes I forget what a 26 hour render translates to.

Oh yeah, the sky is MUCH better with post work.  I'm not sure about the white fade-out frame though.  Seems to take away from the image.  Perhaps adding a gradiant linear or radial fade to the sky/background area only would have a better effect.

Grats to the winners!  Let's get an awesome challenge going for june!