Sorry it took so long to post this update. Been bloody busy working on a number of projects and this one alone required me to produce a large series of product illustrations for three separate products.

Wish I had time to post something more captivating and imaginative, but I did wanted to thank again those of you who kindly volunteered suggestions on how to improve the image I first posted here.

The final image above suffers a lot from size reduction and jpg compression, but I think it looks much better then the original. The final render size for the image was 3,600 x 3,000 pixels and I'm reducing it to 512x712 pixels.

Changes made...

-- I added the water caustics and the water does look much more believable now. However, the caustics reflected from the water on the inside of the storm drainpipe didn't turn out as I would have liked. No more time to fix it though. There also wasn't time to see if a similar faint reflection might have worked on the red curb above the water flowing there.

-- I re-applied the dirt to the pavement a little differently and hopefully improved it.

-- The water flowing down the curb has been sunk a little into the curb to help eliminate the levitating look it seemed to have before. Also changed how much it is soaking into the cement for the same reason. (That's water mixed with mud and anti-freeze.)

-- I also played with the shadow cast by the storm drain grill, but decided to leave it alone in the end. It looks OK in the large image but gets lost in the small jpg here.

Thanks again! Comments and crits are still welcome.