OXYGEN'S SYMPHONY

http://www.deviantart.com/view/30612326/

My first wallpaper. I started and I finished.
Size 1024x768

Four Hours
C4D and Photoshop

+FAVORITE if you like or use.

Couple things: Its a good try, nice start. Good to see some larger stuff ;) I think its too busy to be a wallpaper though. People need at least some clean area to put their icons or else they're hard to find. As a piece, the model is just too sloppy and random as well. The problem I have with 99.9% of c4d renders is that they look way too unintentional. The thing is there are lots of areas where the model intersects itself when it doesnt look like its supposed to and makes it look like a big poly error. Like I said, I like seeing the bigger stuff, you can only improve from here :D

Its randomish. Also I'm seeing the ugly and almost always over done blur thing in just about every abstract piece I see now. That or someone over sharpening the piece until its low quality and total crap. I swear in the last month or month in a half 90% of the abstract artists lost their ****ing mind and forgot how to use the most basic of filters, blur and sharpen.

How you have this piece blurred clashes with just about everything else you have going on. Its busy on both sides which is one thing you have working against you. Also though it has way to much going on its dull in feel and look which just ends up slitting the throat of anything that came close to "neat looking".

The part you have blurred is first off brighter and sadly more interesting, though ugly, then what you intended to be the focus so that draws my eyes to that spot first, then as I follow down the render that splits the piece into two sections I don't find myself at the spot you intended. I find myself at the bottom of the piece looking at a poor typo then going back to find the focus of the piece, which is kind of a let down. It just doesn't stand out as the thing I should be looking at. Its just a basic, almost unbrushed, average looking render, there isn't anything to make me think "wow" or even to really interest me...just a render.....and nothing else.

The section that is blurred takes up way to much of the piece, its the first thing I see, its the last thing I see, and it makes me cringe both times. You need to find a better way to work that area into the piece or you need to crop about half of it off, because its just useless space that isn't doing anything but screwing with peoples eyes and taking almost all of the attention from the focal point. (Though I understand its a wallpaper the fact still stands, probably even more so due to the fact a person would be looking at it even more)

The bubbles seem flat. Redo them or just take out and rename the thing. Even underwater or where ever it is they would have a 3d feel, since they are a 3d object, in this piece they seem, like I said, flat and really almost annoyingly fake.

The lighting in the background is also really bad man. You have a 3d render, you have bigger and smaller bubbles, you even tried to add more depth with the ugly ass blur effect but yet your background is flat and the lighting is just laying there on top of it doing nothing. The lighting doesn't have a sense of area, its not brighter here or lighter there in a way that helps the piece...its just there and if you fixed that in itself it would help the piece 100 times over.

The colors are weak aswell. They are dull, I keep using that word =/, you don't really have alot of different shades of blue beyond the few connected to the render so once you mix this very average darker blue color with a muddy yellow and orange it just kills the piece.

I'm not trying to be a dick here, as I'm sure you know but in truth thats about what I see wrong with the piece. =/ Which I'm aware doesn't really leave much left. Sorry. =/

Hah CK, looks like one of my old posts when I first came here. As for your critique, you can't really say all of those things are wrong with the piece, because all of those things you mentioned are personal preference. You might not like the glow, maybe Spider does.

Your critique there is pretty detailed. I could understand you denoting so many points that you think need correcting if you were looking at a piece by an artist at depthcore, but tearing apart his first wallpaper to the extent that you have seems like its beyond the point of being helpful. The thing is, looking at the piece, my guess is that spider is pretty new to Cinema4D. I would also bet that if he wasn't new, many of the things you pointed out wouldn't be an issue.

I know you're just telling him what's wrong so that he can fix those things and get the most out of the piece. But, at his level of experience with the program, I don't think its supportive or useful to him to tell him every single thing he did 'wrong.' Instead, it would be much more beneficial to him if you told him general areas he could improve and gave him suggestions on what would look better.

For example, with the lighting issue instead of telling him how the lighting doesn't work, you might suggest that he use multiple lights. Use a flood light, a back light, a source of natural light, and a main light. The main light is where the majority of the light comes from, it has the strongest light and the sharpest/darkest shadows. The back light is a light opposite the camera. A flood light is a light off to the side that, like the back light and natural light, have a low intensity with either soft to no shadows. The natural light should be a light that covers the whole scene with soft light that you may want to give a slight tint of light blue or light yellow. Make sure it has very soft shadows. Something like that would benefit him much more than telling him that his lighting isn't doing anything and is just looking ugly.

As for that blur, its not a bad idea, it just needs to be used better. Its meant to look like depth of field. What you should do instead, spider, is duplicate the layer that you have your render on, give it a nice guassian blur over the whole thing. Then, put a layer mask on it, and use a gradient (black and white obviously) to fade the blur out wherever it needs to. That way the blur is gradual and the juxtaposition isn't so sudden.

CK, your comment wasn't bad, you had good intentions. Its just that I'm sure it would help more if you told him less of whats wrong and more of what can he do to make it right ;)

gj man i mean its miles better than my first but i recon u need some blank space for icons and stuff and it is 2 busy... but gj all the same.

Thanks for the long critisizm guys. I'll watch out for those next time.

Really, thanks.